December 2025 — Direction Over Disorder

And just like that, we’re in December. Speaking personally, this whole year has gone quickly: whether it was due to having a second child, MISSION+’s expansion, the non-stop assault of new technology, or a mixture of all of these - 2025 was a year with cause to celebrate. As in previous years, I’ll write a year-end review soon.

The Singapore Fintech Festival was as fun as expected - with plenty of opportunities to catch up with the network, plus loads of learning and sharing sessions. I really enjoyed my panel talking about Agentic AI in the commerce and payments space. The collaboration between the big players (VISA, HSBC, Ant Financial & Google Pay were all represented) was further along than I expected. Expect big announcements in 2026.

Reflections On The Mission

“The outcome of any given company is the vector sum of the people within it.” - Elon Musk. For the non-mathematicians, when we add vectors, we add the amplitude of the (in this case) person with the direction that it is pulling. So two equal but opposite vectors have a sum of zero. Two equal but aligned vectors have a sum that is double the original.

This simple observation explains the dysfunction of many organisations - where everyone is pulling against each other, with no clear goal. This is normally unintentional - simply due to poor management. But it is grimly amusing to compare accidental with deliberate dysfunction.

The declassified CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual from 1944 explains how to sow dissent and kill productivity within an organisation. Turns out that the default state of a company is chaotic, and not that different from deliberate sabotage. Active managerial alignment and weeding out the timewasters is required at every stage.

Let’s take a look at some of the CIA’s sabotage advice.

General Interference

Make long speeches? Refer matters to large committees? Advocate “caution” in the face of action? You don’t need the CIA for that, the natural entropy of organisations seems to pull in this direction. We must consciously fight it.

Managers and Supervisors

Item ‘10’ jumps out at me. “Be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers.” There is nothing more offensive to the human condition than an attack on our sense of fairness and equality.

Employees

“Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker”. We have all seen this play out, where fearful employees hoard knowledge. A sign of a healthy culture is when the sharing of information is commonplace.

When sabotage is laid out so clearly, the opposite constructive approach is equally clear:

• Bias For Action - just do it, get feedback, and iterate.

• Keep committee discussion to a minimum, and focus on small, accountable groups.

• Default to transparency - in the absence of light, darkness prevails. 

• Don’t confuse activity for outcomes - much of this sabotage relies on us monitoring movement, but ignoring if we’re actually hitting goals.

This is The Way.

Interesting Articles

• The Ultimate AI Agents Roadmap for 2025 - a goldmine of resources to get up to speed on agentic AI.

• Star Trek Disco: The Prime Directive is to Dance - this is as good as AI video gets. The future is getting freaky.

• Bullying is Not Innovation - Amazon has asked Perplexity not to use their AI Agents on the site. A sign of things to come, I am sure - the etiquette, guardrails and compliance for agents is super immature.

This Is The Way

Feature A Fractional

We’re On A Mission

Until next month. Together, We Build {+}

Ned & the MISSION+ team

P.S. If you would like to bring the MISSION+ team into your organisation to help, please reach out to [email protected]!