Sabotaging customers.

Where does it come from?

Years ago, I came across the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It was created during the Second World War by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.

The manual showed how small actions could stop an organisation from working. Ask unnecessary questions. Leave out important information. Turn complaints into procedures involving many people and multiple meetings.

It inspired two workshop structures: sabotaging colleagues and sabotaging customers. The two exercises use a similar structure, but I use them for different questions. Sabotaging colleagues looks at what slows the organisation down, frustrates people and drains their motivation. Sabotaging customers asks the team to step into the customer’s shoes.

Instead of starting with improvements, ask how you would make the customer’s experience as frustrating as possible. Where would you make them wait, confuse them or make the next step unnecessarily difficult?

The reversal helps people explore both existing frustrations and problems a proposed journey might create. It is a creative way to uncover the crucial steps in a customer journey: the moments where friction matters most to the person going through it.

I wrote more about the manual in The CIA guide to sabotaging companies.

My customer exercise. Inspired by TRIZ (Liberating Structures) and the Office of Strategic Services’ 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual. The 1-2-4-All sequence comes from Liberating Structures; the timings are a suggested allocation for this version. Further reading: The CIA guide to sabotaging companies, my article from 2020.