The Saboteur
May 3rd, 2008 by Jill
We played a game once at work called “The Saboteur”. We were divided into teams. Every team would have a saboteur — someone whose job it was to secretly undermine the team’s project without being caught. One by one we were called up to the front of the room to be shown a card telling us whether we were to be saboteurs or regular players. We watched each other walk and thought about each other’s posture and facial expressions and what they could mean. Walking back, being watched this way, was odd, too. I was a normal player. But it still felt strange to be scrutinized and suspected.
The game was hard. A maze (on graph paper) had been posted out of sight, around the corner. We had to first recreate the maze by going, one at time, to look at it, and then coming back and drawing as much of it as we could remember. There were four of us, and we could only look at it so many times without losing points for our team. We were racing against a bunch of other teams, and we were told that once we had a suspected saboteur, we could kick them out of the group to go sit in a “saboteur chair” so that they wouldn’t negatively affect the group anymore. If we started to think we’d been wrong, we could let them back in and kick someone else out if we liked.
I bet you’re already guessing that there weren’t any saboteurs. Our group suspected this and made a pact at the beginning that we wouldn’t kick anybody out and that we’d trust each other. But still, whenever someone came back and drew a piece of the maze that didn’t fit with what others of us remembered, we wondered. We suspected them. Other teams were kicking people out right and left. Maybe we’d guessed wrong. Maybe we did have a saboteur. Maybe our saboteur was having a field day. The problem was, all of us came back from around the corner at one point or another with memories of the maze that didn’t fit with what the rest of the group had down. And it could have just been that what we were doing was hard and that human brains aren’t entirely foolproof. We decided to keep trusting each other.
Eventually, we got it right. I don’t remember if we won or not, but we definitely didn’t lose. And we were right about the saboteurs. There weren’t any. The point of the game had been to show us how easy it was, especially under pressure and especially with a complicated task, to suspect or be suspected. We all saw cunning or undermining — even our team with our pact — when all that was there was trying and sometimes fumbling.
boy would I like to use that story in my current 8-5 situation.
That is so true of many situations in life. It can be very hard to be the one that is suspected of trying to ruin something and very easy to be the one to undermine. Great story.
Wow, that is a great game!! I love it when you learn something about life and yourself and others - and way to go that you guys figured out the plot of the game. Very cool. Thanks for sharing!