The thing most people find hardest to believe about the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is that it isn’t a joke. It really was a top-secret document, created in 1944 by the predecessor to the CIA, and it really was distributed to agents working behind enemy lines in the second world war. (It was made public in 2008 and now gets rediscovered online every year or two.) The manual is a guide to the art of “purposeful stupidity” – easy ways in which the citizens of occupied Europe might be encouraged to lower morale and wreak havoc in their workplaces, thereby helping bring down the Axis powers. What’s amazing is that it reads like a description of every modern jobsworth you’ve ever encountered.

“Insist on doing everything through ‘channels’,” one section advises. “Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.” When possible, “refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration’. Attempt to make the committee as large as possible – never less than five.” Misfile papers. Give out wrong phone numbers. Haggle over the wording of documents. And if there’s truly critical work to be done? Hold a conference instead.

“Purposeful stupidity” is infuriating, of course, but I defy anyone to claim they’ve never used it – and probably in the service of causes less noble than defeating the Nazis. The classic tactic is the crafty use of telephone tennis, or its email equivalent: to buy yourself time on a late-running project, simply lob a question about some minor detail back to your boss’s side of the court. Then the pressure’s off until he or she gets a moment to respond, which could take days. (Be sure to call office landlines before 8am or after 10pm.)

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If the manual were rewritten today, it would surely also include the “cc: everyone” manoeuvre, as Robert Galford and his coauthors observe in their 2015 book about it, also called Simple Sabotage. Copying the whole office lets you “effortlessly spray information in many directions at once”. Sit back and relax while 100 people contribute useless insights on a topic that’s none of their business!

Yet the really telling thing about the Simple Sabotage manual, as Galford et al point out, is how many of its prescriptions for sowing chaos resemble not disobedience but extreme obedience – following procedures to the letter, obsessing about perfect accuracy, chewing over every detail. We’ve all fumed about customer service reps who refuse to be flexible. But usually the real problem is that they’re working in organisational structures that permit zero autonomy. Too often, managers assume the key to improvement must be clearer procedures and standards, more exactingly enforced. But when your management philosophy encourages the kind of behaviour that US intelligence services once sincerely believed might cause the collapse of nations, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. One way rules go wrong is when people don’t follow them. But another is what happens when they do.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com