Exchange of Realities

The second style of manipulator I mentioned in Monday’s riff was the manipulator of organizations. This one is relatively easy to understand, but hard to characterize in detail, as many people have trouble figuring out how this sort of manipulation works.

Interestingly enough, there are as many ways to manipulate an organization as there are to be a manipulator.

The first way is for the manipulator to lead the organization she wants to influence, either having created it or by stepping into a leadership role. This is the most straightforward way, as it allows her to personally determine the direction in which the organization goes, but it bears the greatest risk of her efforts being traced back to her. If personal manipulation is also in her repertoire, she can utilize another person as a figurehead, decreasing her direct connection, but the risk of discovery is still present.

Other organizational manipulators divide the group into segments and then approach the segments, rather like approaching and influencing demographics in politics. This allows them to utilize herd mentality and to know the general profile of the group they’re dealing with—from there, it is generally a matter of setting rumors or dangling carrots, and the message will propagate on its own.

Still others approach the organization as a whole, envisioning it as a person and then using techniques that are essentially individual manipulation writ large. For most of these manipulators, information is the key element: they utilize the goals, alliances, feuds and requirements of the organization, feeding it information that plays to these facts in order to influence its decisions (for instance, using false reports to make a country believe that its neighbor is preparing for war, or to guide a company into a certain direction of expansion).

For the first variety of organizational manipulator, leadership (particularly the skills of a delegation leader or a communication leader) is an important element, as the group needs to be given its direction. Subtlety is also useful, though not as necessary as it is for the other two types.

The manipulator of subgroups needs to have an understanding of the subgroup being targeted, and know how to introduce information without coming across as suspicious. Appearing to belong to the group itself is a useful skill, as is knowing how to make the words memorable but the person forgettable; this allows the manipulator’s misinformation to come from within the subgroup rather than outside, further fogging up the source.

The overall organization-manipulator, on the other hand, is probably the best balance of efficiency and untraceability, but she also requires the greatest variety of skills. As detailed above, she must not only be able to visualize the organization as a large, unwieldy individual, but also to know its “personality”, as if she were an individual manipulator and it were her target. She then needs to know how to “talk” to it; this can be done by maneuvering events and making them noticeable to the target organization, but may also involve the insertion of material into its records (for which skills like lockpicking, sneaking, understanding the internal workings of the organization and forgery will be useful at the very least). She may also need to engage in manipulation of subgroups as well, or influence the leaders, requiring the skills of her smaller-picture counterparts. Needless to say, this sort of maneuvering is not for the faint of heart or the linear of mind.

But these skills are worth it, as the organizational manipulator controls the greatest balance between speed and control of the three manipulation styles, making her a very powerful opponent to most people.