When Disorientation is the Weapon

To protect your group, see clearly and think like the adversary.

Welcome to new readers! The Shepard Scale is the home of the Grey Cell Protocols, an applied counterintelligence doctrine for building groups that can thrive in compromised or contested environments.

For the last two weeks, we’ve been talking about reading people: both whether their account is truthful and who they are underneath it. You need to understand both and be able to do both because the most effective attacks on a group go after the members’ ability to see reality.

In other words, if you miss the cues in someone’s language, you will not see the reality about that person clearly, and that will lead you to make potentially dangerous decisions about them, such as letting them into your group when you shouldn’t, or not dealing with the signs that something has changed in their orientation.

Michael Woudenberg commented something on a previous piece that’s worth mentioning here because it sets up a foundational piece of the mindset.

Yes. A thousand times yes. I’ve written about the complacency that comes with thinking you’ve handled all your threats and how that’s a gateway to groupthink. But today I want to talk about how disorientation and infiltration go hand in hand.

You must understand concepts like validation, drivers, and transactional interactions because they form the basis for how this works. A capable adversary, or even someone already in your group, leaves the arguments and the decisions alone and goes after the raw material they're built from: the people and what drives them. They poison what the group believes is true, they lean on how its people see each other, and they let the group do the rest of the damage to itself, because in most cases, it will.

This is what infiltration looks like far more often than the version in the movies. There’s usually nobody stealing documents or engaging in some kind of shady subterfuge. It often just ends up coming down to humans being humans, letting their own needs and drivers get in the way of what they’re doing.

Since we are specifically talking about malicious intent today, however, we’ll dig into how that comes into the group once the wrong person gets in.

As you read these, I want you to think about the groups you’re in, whether they’re political or not. What do you notice about these things? How many of them are present to some degree in your group? What, if anything, has your group done to stop it? CAN you stop it? Do you know how?

How to Disorient a Group

There are a few things that someone can do to disrupt the group, and each one looks harmless if you view it as a singularity; once you catch the pattern, however, it becomes much more insidious.

Narrative Distortion

This is when you are attacking the story the group believes about itself. This story is often already a combo of mythos and exaggeration, designed by people with unmet needs.

Scrambling a group rarely takes an outright lie, and coming up with the lie and its contextual backstory is often far more work than just using what’s already there. You give the group selective truth, two versions of the same event, a little ambiguity in the right place, and you let it work. Once every fact has a competing fact and every account has a counter-account, the group can't settle on what happened, which means they will spend their time arguing about that rather than making a plan of action.

Leverage

The second way a group can be disrupted is leverage, and it runs straight off what we covered last week. Everybody has drivers, and drivers are levers. If you know someone needs to feel important, or is afraid of being cut out, or carries an old grievance about being told what to do, you can hand them a version of events shaped to that exact nerve, and they'll take it as the truth. Do that to five people in a group of twenty, and now the group is five people looking at five private versions of the same situation, each version bent around what that person needed to see.

That’s not even counting the part where you can use the classic tactic of using their private behavior against them. Which, by the way, is also a form of weaponizing the validation/shame balance.

Why ‘Private’ Behavior Is Never Private in High-Trust Systems

Other forms of leverage include using action currency, which is the social capital members earn or spend through visible effort, initiative, or operational contribution. The keyword there, by the way, is visible.

The Trap of "What Have You Done for the Cause?"

As you can see, there is no One Way(tm) to use these tactics; even though you might have a leverage ‘umbrella,’ what goes under that is only limited by your creativity and the material you can find to work with.

Tempo

One more thing that gets used to disrupt a group is their tempo. You can keep them busy with a small trickle of crises and contradictions. To see this in a different arena, let me give you an example.

Let’s say that I have a counseling client who says she wants to heal from the trauma she endured throughout her childhood and young adulthood. Each week, however, she comes in with a litany of things that went wrong in her marriage that week, or the things that went wrong at work, or the ways she self-sabotaged. What ends up happening is constant management of whatever the new crisis is that week; no work ever gets done on any of the deeper issues driving all of that.

I can either keep getting stuck in that cycle, or I can stop it, step back, and ask what is really happening in our dynamic. I can reorient to the truth, namely, that we are not actually achieving the goals that we agreed to pursue. You might also recognize this if you're spending time fighting with your spouse about how you fight, rather than working through the meat of whatever issues got you there. While these examples come from a two-person “group,” it also works at scale.

Someone who is looking to disrupt your group can use any variation on these three things, because once it gets started, the process runs itself. Once a group gets disoriented and doesn’t catch it, they will start to distrust each other: structurally, because they can no longer see consistency in the system, and emotionally, because the feel-good emotions are no longer present. The distrust makes people start withholding information and concerns, and that creates more distrust. Eventually, the person who started it all can disappear because it’ll keep going without them there to fan the flames. If they’re especially devious, they can give a reason for their withdrawal that lets them appear more virtuous than others:

I just can’t be part of a group that’s so rife with infighting. I want to do real work and not deal with drama.

This is where it ties back to where we started. Trust grows out of a system that produces predictable outcomes, honest feedback, and a shared sense of what's real. Disorientation destroys all three. Outcomes stop being predictable, feedback gets polluted, and the shared picture comes apart. Attack a group's orientation, and you are attacking their ability to maintain the conditions necessary for trust. The group loses its trust as expected, and everyone will go on to their next groups, convinced it was a people problem. It was structural the whole time.

How Do You Fight It?

Reading a statement for deception and reading a person for who they are is one of your best tools in how you fight this. Those skills belong in the group and are part of your internal culture as much as they belong at the door before you let someone in.

Narrative distortion becomes clear when you can read the accounts people are giving you. Leverage can be caught and stopped when you know your people's drivers well enough to notice which one is being played. You're using the same skills as any ‘bad actor,’ but you’re doing it as a constant process on everyone, not just the new folks, as part of a gatekeeping strategy.

That’s the work Advanced GCP is built around, and it’s one of the courses opening July 15. The readings from the last two weeks are the tools; advanced application is knowing where to point them, how to tell manufactured confusion from the ordinary kind, and how to keep your group deciding and moving as one in a chaotic environment, preferably without giving in to wild paranoia.

So, of course, vet your people. It’s a big deal, and you should keep doing it. Just don’t stop the day they get offered membership or a job. The thing most worth protecting in your group is the shared picture of reality that every decision rides on, and no traditional vetting process will show that to you, nor will it teach you how to create the conditions for it.

There’s one more place this whole problem starts, and it’s the one nobody wants to look at. It starts at the top, with the person whose own orientation the entire group inherits. We’ll look at exactly how to look at your own orientation next.

Next Week: The First Person You Vet Is Yourself. Subscribe now to get it for free in your inbox.

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You can also get a copy of my book, co-written with Donald Vandergriff, Mission Command and the Grey Cell Protocols: Creating the Conditions for Decentralized Leadership, and see the arguments behind GCP.