In past years we have had many problems resulting in programs as follows:
The sequence of major programs at Saint Hill:
To provide a home for LRH and family in Commonwealth area so Commonwealth area could be organized and made self-supporting.
To provide admin facilities for LRH in Commonwealth area.
To make Commonwealth area self-supporting regardless of US funds or customers. (Not yet resolved.)
To train technical and admin staffs for Commonwealth orgs.
To make Commonwealth outer orgs run on their income without their using all the bills sums owed SH or Ron as part of their operating funds.
To find financial support for SH activities resulting in the SHSBC which also accomplished the next above.
To handle Commonwealth activities and organizations and also handle US activities. (Solved by telex and OIC and later the Exec Div WW.)
To establish SH general broad promotion. (Solved by The Auditor.)
To provide facilities for administering critical high-level tech such as Power Processes. (Solved by SH HGC.)
To organize SH so it could be administered (made needful by ’63-’64 collapse of multiple corporative setup). (Solved by 7 div system completed by end of 1965.)
To refine the Qual Div to prevent all “failed cases,” train staff and improve tech.
To get reports of tax, etc., off continual crash programs. (Solved by Treasurer but incomplete of any guarantee of chartered accountant compliance.)
To get field auditors to cooperate and stop conflicts with orgs. (FSM program.)
To refine the Tech Div. (Finished about August 1966.)
To get in smooth operation an ethics system.
To operate the Clearing Course and to assembly line Clears. (Still under refinement but more or less complete.)
To establish and operate OT Course. (Just now under development.)
To beat back continuous attacks by suppressives in the 3rd and 4th dynamics. (Solved by establishing Intelligence Branch.)
To train up staffs at SH and in outer orgs by Staff Status and Org Exec Course.
To improve the cash-bills ratios of orgs.
To safeguard income once earned by better financial planning.
To reform Ad Councils into representative bodies (now complete with the formation of an Executive Council).
To assemble all Scientology materials. (Flopped by reason of noncompliance but lately reinstituted.)
Dictionary Project to prevent misunderstood words. (In sporadic and jerky action to this day.)
To handle legal situations which built up by noncompliance by attorneys internal and external in org. (Under solution by forming Guardian Legal Branch.)
To improve and maintain affluences. (Just begun.)
To help Scientology dissemination and attack more broadly to prevent such quantities of legal defense. (OT activities program just begun.)
To safeguard, continue and expand all Scientology orgs. (Worked on a bit, not really concentrated on except for cash-bills and staff status.)
General improvement of finances. (OT activites.)
Buildings for Scientology orgs. (OT activities.)
To establish better audio-visio educational facilities. (Barely begun.)
These have been and are the major program steps which have been implemented or are under development at Saint Hill since 1959 and forward to the end of 1966.
Some of the years covered acquired names such as
It will be noted that each of these programs solved a self-evident problem.
It must be realized then that these problems did exist.
If the problems exist again, remember there was already a solution program and usually it has only been dropped and the problem reappeared because it had been dropped. The proper directive action is to reimplement and improve the solution which is to say, in the case of SH, the carrying out of the successful programs noted above.Ad Councils are always advancing new programs and often it is only an old program dropped out that needs reinstituting, not a new solution. Certainly an old problem has cropped up again.
There have been other programs of course. Many solutions to old problems, and of major importance, are found in policy letters. Some programs, although necessary, have never been successfully implemented. There was the motion picture program but it is dogged by technical bugs and became part of the audio-visio program now being attempted. There has been the rewrite of all books program but I’ve been too overworked to attempt it.
Other future, self-evident programs will come into being. They will only fail if earlier programs, dropped out or not given reorganization when needed, bring old problems into view by exposing them. All the problems underlying the program solutions above still potentially exist, held in abeyance only by the programs.
The best way to form programs is to isolate actual problems at any level of operation and solve them either by removing elements that make them or by instituting a program. Sensible planning tends toward both actions.
An unsuccessful program usually will be found to be solving the wrong problem or is itself an improper solution to an actual problem.
If you want to establish the validity of a new program offered by someone, ask him what problem it is seeking to solve. You can then see if you already have a solution to the problem, but most often you will see that no clarified idea of the problem existed and so the solution is poor or inadequate.
The common problem of an org is not the development of programs but failure to execute existing ones.
Another difficulty with orgs is that they often alter the existing program so that it no longer resolves the problem the program was set up to handle. A current example is magazines. Magazines exist to solve the problem of public unawareness of an org. An org has no space unless it is sending out anchor points to make it. And it is in nonexistence for its Scientology public unless it mails magazines regularly. Magazines do not develop much new public — that is another, largely unsolved, problem. Magazines exist to continue the awareness of the existing Scientology public. Now as these people are already aware of Scientology, the awareness one is trying to develop is that of the org and its services. Recently, continental magazines began to issue only Scientology data. The ads making the Scientology public aware of the org were toned down and omitted and the cash-bills ratio worsened in orgs. The orgs started toward nonexistence. Significantly, the trend was begun by a someone who did not like orgs but was in favor of Scientology. Issue Authority erred in not looking at old magazines and comparing them to the current layout. There was a vast difference. No ads in current ones. The program had been altered.
Artists are taught to be “original” and to alter. Yet successful artists painted the same picture their whole lives under different names. These just seemed new.
To change, alter or drop a program one must know what the program was there to solve. Just change for change’s sake is mere aberration (making the lines crooked).
It’s a good exercise for a senior executive to list the problems the org really does have. To know the programs of an org that are in is to see what problems an org would have if they were dropped.
It’s healthy to revert a program now and then by meticulously examining how it was originally when it was very successful and then put it back the way it was originally. This is done not by adjusting lines but by looking up old magazines, old policy, old despatches and issue pieces, even old tapes. What did it used to consist of? If it is no longer successful
a. The program was altered or dropped and
b. The org will have a problem it once had long ago, or
c. (Rare) the causes of the problem have been removed and the problem no longer exists.
There’s lots of trial and error in developing a program. That’s why any new program should only be a “special project” for a while, off the org main lines really, under special management. If a “special project” starts to show up well in finance (and only in finance), then one should include it “in” with its new staff as an org standard project.
To run new programs in on existing lines is to disturb (by distraction and staff overload) existing programs, and even if good, the new program will fail and damage as well existing programs.
Provide, then, staff and money to pioneer a new program as a “special project.” If you don’t have money or staff to do this, you would do far, far better simply looking over the problems the org faces and get in the old programs that handled them. These are known winners and don’t forget, they cost a lot to find and prove as the thing to do. And they took a long time.
Take the Central Files-Letter Reg setup in orgs. That’s a standard program. Developed in London and D.C. in the mid 50s. If you dropped it out, an org would fail. The problem is “how to achieve special individual contact with existing clientele and maintain existing already developed business.” One large firm, I was told the other day, that has put in our 7 division system was stunned to find they had never contacted their existing business clientele. They only had done business with new clientele. This cost them perhaps 200,000 sales a year! They promptly put in our CF-Letter Registrar system with a vengeance.
In their case (as in a forming or reorganized org) they weren’t even aware of the problem and so had no program for it.
It is often the case that one can develop a program that removes the need of some other program. If one removes the factors that make the problem, one can dispense with the program that solves it. But this is so rare it is nonhuman in most instances.
For instance, doctors are a public solution to the problem of human body illness. If one removed this problem, one could remove the “doctor program” safely. That’s why doctors sometimes fight us. We are thought to be working to remove the problem to which they are a program. One would have to have more than a better cure. One would have to remove in the 4th dynamic (mankind) the causes of illness. These would not be what people think they are as the problem persists and so does the “doctor program” in the society. It can’t be the right problem. Only enough is known of the causes of illness to make the problem appear to be handled. Actually the bad statistic of ill people is rising. We have entered the field in research only far enough to know that suppressives make people ill but that’s a sufficient departure to make it an ethics problem, not one in treatment! By extension of this theory, one might find this problem not caused by Pasteur’s germs but by suppressive groups. In that case one would increase ethics programs. Eventually, if this solved it, the “doctor program” would be diminished as no longer the only solution.
The above is not a statement of intention or a plan. It is an example of how an old standard program can become less important. Note that one would have to (a) state the problem better than it had been stated, (b) isolate causes of the real problem, (c) institute a “special project” to handle those causes, (d) see if the problem was now better handled, (e) abandon it if it didn’t handle the problem, or (f) make it a standard program if it did prove effective, (g) diminish the old program.
So just dropping a proven program (without going at it as above [a] to [f]) can be a catastrophe as it can let in an old problem when one already has quite enough problems already.
Abandoned programs that were successful are currently the main cause of orgs being in any difficulty.
You can always make an org run better by studying old successful programs and getting them back in.
If you were to take the above list at Saint Hill, the major SH programs since 1959, and simply revert them (make them more like the original) and reinforce them, income would probably double.
If we abandoned as few as five of these, the SH org would undoubtedly collapse.
If we added six new programs directly into the org without seeing the problem to be solved, we could distract staff to a point where the old standard programs would suffer and the org would collapse.
Sometimes, even in our orgs, we enter new arbitrages which make new problems we don’t need. Those are the sources we can do without. If we didn’t routinely abolish such org-generated problems, we would fade away in a year.
Therefore we cherish and forward the existing programs we have and study them continually to be sure they don’t “go out.”This is not a list of the problems faced at Saint Hill; it is a list of solutions. For these programs may accidentally be solving problems we cannot yet clearly state.
This is not a list of all major programs in Scientology. These are found in the policy letters of past years and particularly 1965.
This is a list of the major SH programs for use by SH executives and as an illustration to others on how to program and to show them that, as Scientologists, we use our knowledge of the mechanics of life, problems and solutions to govern programs.
If all the problems we faced were only ours, we could of course simply audit them out. But we exist in a 3rd and 4th dynamic which is not merely aberrated but quite batty. This thrusts problems on us (finance, international ignorance and intolerance, religious and psychiatric cults, suppressive governments, retarded or misused scientific technology, lack of human dignity and a host of other factors).
We exist, therefore, in a rather madly tossing sea, beset by numerous counter- currents.
As we grow, we can remove vicious causes that make our problems problems. Only then can we begin to drop certain programs as the problems will cease to exist. But at this writing those problems do exist and holding them in check are numerous solutions we call programs.
Where one of our standard programs fails through lack of recognition, we then see a problem charging in on us demanding crash programing by higher executives.
When we let uninformed or worse people put in new arbitraries or solutions that solve no problem, we disturb old programs and soon have heavy trouble through unnecessary programing. (Watching a new inexperienced Ad Council propose “programs” is a painful experience to a trained and effective executive. These proposed measures look silly because they confront no real problems of the org and are dangerous because they will distract the org from correct existing programs of which the new Ad Council seems blissfully unaware.)
When an org doesn’t know its programs, it can get pretty silly and deeply in trouble. If it also knows its problems, it is fortunate.
But any Scientology org is rich in programs already proven and tested and in exact drill. If it just keeps these going, it will win even if it doesn’t see the problems.
As it wins, the org expands, can afford more assistance, is less under duress. Then it can begin to examine the problems themselves (still keeping the solution as a program) and possibly remove some of the causes of the actual problem. Only when the problem is gone can one drop a program.
A Scientology org is best fitted to do this as its staff is going up tone by processing and is more and more able to confront and see source. Therefore it eventually can remove the causes of its problems since it can (a) see the problem and (b) see the bad sources which make the problem.
Until it can see, it is not safe to drop any of the solutions. And as orgs are a channel or a way in themselves, they always will have a bottom strata of people who cannot yet see the problems and so need explicit programs to follow. As the lower strata moves up, a new lower strata, by expansion, takes its place so there is no real end to programs until the day comes when the universe is sane.
And that’s not tomorrow or even the day after.
But we are making steady, relentless progress in that direction. Mainly because of our programs, well applied.