Alright. Form of the org. Form of the org. And you'll find out first, last and always that you have this as your basic consideration. At no time are you ever really totally free of it, because an org expands and then they want to change everything and move everything. And you will find that the people at the Ad Council, or something like that if you've still got one, that can talk the loudest normally get the most space. And there's pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure to get this space, to get that space.

I had a dispatch here the other day. "I have been trying for a year and a half to get enough admin space for fa-fa-fa-faf," and so forth and so on. It's always hitting, hitting, hitting because space is scarce. Space is very valuable stuff and when you are laying out space, it is not he who talks loudest but it is that activity which is making the coffee and cakes that gets the cream space. The CO may or may not have a great office, but make sure the registrar does. These are the facts of life and they all come from this one thing, form of the org. Establish the org. Alright.

You establish it against the actual concrete of a floor or the wooden boards of the floor. If you had an enormous aircraft hangar and you actually put tennis court lines on it to represent the divisions and put, unlimited space you see, and put the desks of that, that's all the space you have, put the desks of that division inside the departmental lines that are drawn on the floor, you wouldn't go wrong. But unfortunately you can't do that. People would insist after a while, because they couldn't stand all this wide open spaces and the hurricanes of air blowing through the place, that you start putting up partitions and so forth. Your partitions will start with a little rope chain. Sometimes they use file cabinets for partitions, so forth.

One place cost us, there's one little caution here. When you're acquiring quarters and that sort of thing, be wary because you can get an awful lot of useless unusable space that looks good at the first glance, but if you don't look at it hard, woof. One of the things is is we had, we had an org one time that had a lot of space, but it was all vertical. You couldn't divide the rooms up, it would have taken about a thirty foot high partition, and the second you put an eight foot high partition around, all the noise of the place just flew over the top of the partition and it sounded like a madhouse. So there are limitations on the types of space which can be used.

There are other considerations with regard to the acquirement of space and very often you will be driven, if moving from here onto other establishment functions, you'll be driven sometimes to the acquisition of new space. If the space which you acquire is too costly, the org will not be able to survive, it will go insolvent. And therefore you always have a rough problem with regard to this.

The PAC area went insolvent on space, went insolvent on three things. Space, postulate checks that kept being reported as valid when they weren't, and over manning. And the reason they got over manned is nobody was really in there hatting them hard, hard, hard and holding that form in the org.

Now, you can get a, very easily get a very over manned area which then seems to require an enormous amount of space because you've got so many people. Well, it's all very interesting, it might or might not be true. So you sometimes can buy a pup. You see that this org has a hundred and fifty-six staff or something like this, and obviously they require an awful lot of space. For heaven's sakes, look at their stats and production. They might not be doing the production of a thirty man org. We have an org doing that right now, it's called the Los Angeles Org. Has personnel running out of both ears and both pant legs, producing nothing. There is a lot of dev-t. And action is going in on it. Their situation wasn't helped by the way by somebody originating a complement, which was unauthorized from an unauthorized post and shipped it out to them and the damn fools didn't query it. It changed practically every post in the line.

I think if somebody had come along on the street and handed them a complement, they would have taken it. And they put it in and it just scrambled and musical chaired the whole org, and we couldn't figure out why this was happening. We finally traced it down to an unauthorized personnel doing an unauthorized complement that was posing as an org board. It wasn't an org board, it was a complement. This complement is what you try to adjust an org to if you can, and it's not an org board.

There are really three forms of org boards. There is the functioning org board, the org board of functions. And then there's the org board of posts and then there's the org board of complements. And you can't do one without doing the other. And you haven't heard of these in policy and I'm telling you about them now. There's what you call a function board on which you have listed every function known to man and beast that has ever been performed by one of these divisions. I don't care if it's a three man org, those functions sooner or later will be done. That's a function board and that's the first form of a board.

Your second form of your board is a post board, that is to say the posts of the org expressed as posts. God no, they don't have any name on them. Don't make number one mistake of establishment to end all mistakes. A blank space on the org board does not mean a name gets put on it. That's the most serious error that you can make as an Establishing Officer. You can get suckered in on this time and time again. You'll find out, this is in policy, for chrissakes don't do that. The thing has got a post name so immediately somebody says, "Well, the post name's there they must be a person there, so we put the person's name on that, and got these other empty names, we got these names, and we'll just putting those people there and putting those people there and posting that, and we got a hundred and twenty-five names here so we've got a hundred and twenty-five spaces, so we'll put down a hundred and twenty-five names." Oh you'd be surprised, I think that's how they're usually posted.

Now, that's a post board and it may have holes underneath these names to label something into, but that is just the posts. Now you've got the functions, now you've got the posts. They might be two entirely different boards but they have to match. Now you've got the complement board. And that is asking this question, "Who is double hatted and how many posts are held from above and how many posts are empty?" and you do that by workload. And you for the first time are in an optimum position to be able to adjust an org by workload. Well, I'll show you an example, you've got a Success Secretary, or a Success I/C, Success Clerk, she's sitting there. Now, somebody comes by every half an hour, or every twenty minutes or something, and she writes a success story, puts them on the meter and asks questions. You're in a position to see that.

Now, you also have a Test I/C and a Test Marker. At that moment you cease to have a Test Marker, they're all marked by the Success Clerk. She gets hatted and quick. And if you're that short of personnel, she also does all the testing. Do you get it? Adjustment of load. Now, the load is proportionate to the amount of traffic coming through the organization, not proportionate to the bigness of the org board. So that's how orgs get over manned. So there's three boards; function, post, complement.

Complement means by name the list of men and officers of a ship, but it's the only word in English which says what it means, because it's the allowed number of officers and men allowed to a ship. I think the Army has borrowed it and I think maybe sometimes the army refers to them; no, the Army's got another term. It's called a order, it's got another, there's another term, it's two or three words put together. It means the same thing as complement. It means the, table of organization, he's on the table of organization, yes, and so on, but the word complement does fit. And that's how many guys you are allowed. But just because you're allowed those guys is no reason that those are the only guys you have. The word is very badly misunderstood. It is usually issued as something that we will try to adjust to. Now, if we've got an over manned area, we will say maximum allowed complement.

Now, the mistake that is made is when you see a complement board, for anybody to put any post on it. A function board doesn't have any posts on it, a post board has no names on it, and a complement doesn't have post, name or function on it. It says dissem, four; or it says department four, three. You get? So because this hasn't been split apart and differentiated clearly and because it hadn't been totally understood, a lot of mistakes were made with it. So they mix up a function board with a complement, and they mix up a post board with the complement, and they mix up this and they mix up that, and they get gorgeously scrambled. Now you say, "Well, what is that org board that's up on the wall?"

That is called a compromise. And that takes a bit of the function, it takes the principal post and uses the complement. And that is the express board. If you don't realize that an org board is three boards and they've just hobson-jobsoned together when they're put together; and hobson-jobson is what, the way the British trooper turned language into what he thought was Indian. It's how you get those three boards together and put them up there so they make some sort of sense; and that you can say, "This is our org board." Always realize when you're looking at it, you're looking at three org boards, the thing is terribly susceptible to shift and adjustment and that's very vicious, because the staff then might get the idea what their post is. If a guy is holding D of P and Tech Sec, he is posted as Tech Sec and he's posted as D of P. Do you follow? His name goes on it twice, if that is the principle posts which have to be held. So that you can have… One of the funny boards I saw in the very early days, there were only three guys in the org and they had taken a nine foot org board, and bless 'em, they had put their names in all the spots where they were holding the posts. Their names were repeated on the org board about two hundred times. But they had the idea.

Now, your adjustments of an org board, then, are the adjustments of these three boards. An org might suddenly acquire additional functions that you didn't know you had, and it might lose some. Such and such courses are now going to be shut off or closed or transferred elsewhere, and all of a sudden you lost those functions. Well, that all requires an adjustment of the org board, but remember what board it is you're adjusting, you're adjusting the function board. Now, that function board is going to make a difference in the post board.

One of the funniest things you ever want to see is one of these naval bases or a Space Opera base after the fleet has gone out and been defeated or something. Gibraltar sits up there in this condition. My god, it's got an admiral and it's got captains of the port and it's got chiefs of ordinance and it's got dock yards and it's got blahhh, and it's got an org board that would absolutely knock you silly. And at one time it serviced the British fleet, which was number one in the world, which has now shrunk to about two corvettes and a rusty gig. Oh, I think they still have an aircraft carrier or something like that. They do have some submarines, we saw one come swishing in the other day, and I think the U.S. gave them some nuclear subs. But, it's not a fleet.

You know, you see a fleet the way the British fleet was, you took a pair of binoculars as far as you could see why, you saw the funnels of battleships stretching over the wide, wide horizon on a very, very bright day was one squadron. That was what the Gibraltar dock yard was org boarded to handle. It's still org boarded. Gibraltar's dying for commercial traffic, dying for something to do to support the population which has now been shut off totally by Spain, you see it isn't an island anyhow, but thinks it's an island. It's part of Spain, directly land connected to Spain, and the Spaniards got tired of this so they dropped the hoop. They've been trying to do it ever since about seventeen something. And that whole big harbor, Gibraltar, hasn't any battleships go in there anymore and so forth, it's all reserved for the navy, and the commercial traffic is sometimes permitted into the destroyer pens which are way down at the bottom of the harbor. And there's room there for about three or four ferry boats. Reserved for the British fleet, hail Britannia. Gong. But it's sure got a hell of an org board and it's sure occupying a hell of a lot of space.

"So we just got through closing out course A, B and C, that's not going to be taught anymore." Don't ever get caught, don't ever get caught by letting that space go on and on and on and on without a re-plot of your spatial positions. "We are no longer going to have this particular line in this particular organization." So don't leave an I/C in for the line and don't leave the receptionist of the line and don't leave the secretary of that special division that was created, get them the hell off and over onto production because they will soon become one of the most avid sources of dev-t you have ever heard. They've got nothing to do. The space also will begin to suck up things. All the garbage that nobody knows where to put, they will dump it in that space. "Well, there's machines that we didn't have any more of and so we didn't use this any more," and it'll be sitting in the middle of what was once a classroom or something like that.

Now, by failing to spot that when that has happened in the org and get an adjustment to fit your traffic, you all of a sudden can keep stats from going up, because the earning portions of the org and the earning functions of the org are no longer able to function, because they haven't got enough space. Yet they're expanding, yet over here you will find out there's allocated space which hasn't been used since the War of 1812. You got it? The funny part of it is, there will also be people there defending it, that's one of the most remarkable things.

Now, as far as moving an org from one city to another, if you ever try that, don't. Trying to close out an org is one of the most expensive, arduous and upsetting situations you ever went through in your life. Now, I'm not exaggerating one bit. It takes them years. You wouldn't believe it, but it takes them years. You say, "Well, that org's finished, we're going to transfer everyone to the other side of the river, that org's finished, we're not going to do anything more with that org." Time marches on. The org you moved out of or tried to move out of, or something like that; it isn't a portion of an org I'm talking about now, I'm talking about moving a whole org, but this also could apply to vacating some buildings; it tends to hang on. Now, trying to close out a whole org it's, it's something on the order of you shoot it and you hit it over the head with an axe and you kick it and you dump it in the river and it's still alive. It's like Rasputin, the monk they couldn't kill.

What on earth then is this thing, what is this thing? Why, why would an org operate like that? Why would a section operate like that? Why would a, this set of courses that you no longer teach, why does it survive and why does it keep on going? Why does it retain it's own space and it's antiquated functions? Because there's something alive about it, and I'm not being theetie weetie, either. A lot of people remember it was there, a lot of people think of it as being there, and a lot of people sort of keep on putting it there. And whenever you radically change the form of an org board, you run into this. People are still trying to run on the old org board, they don't learn the new one, and you can't get the new one in, either. Very scramblish.

One of the things to do is to go back and find out what's the old one they were running on. But once you've established the form of the org and you've really worked to establish it, the possibility of knocking it out is very faint indeed. It doesn't disestablish easily. It might become enturbulated, it might become confused, the stats might go down, it might cease to have income, a lot of other things might happen, but the disestablishment of it is very difficult. It'll probably even keep on surviving in some lawyer's files or archives for ages and ages and ages. One of our late, unlamented enemies had a corporation up in Scotland and they moved in some hysteria from Switzerland, we started leaning a little bit, and they moved and they established in Scotland and then they moved and they've gone elsewhere in the world. But they haven't really been able to move from Switzerland, and they haven't really been able to move from Scotland. They're still leaving that, and it wasn't really well established. It was well established in Switzerland, so well established in Switzerland that no other org of that same name can be established in Switzerland now because the state still believes it's there and won't be convinced that it isn't. We've already checked it up. So you get a sort of an independent life of its own to something that is very well established, so you start monkeying with it and it sort of kicks back. And it only kicks back in people's memories, you see, it's not that any live thetan is there. It is still in people's memories, it's still in people's training pattern, it's still in people's this, it's still in people's that, and to that degree it has life.

So when you start pounding something in hard, have some idea that it is fairly correct. So a day or two of study, hard study on what you're going to do with this division is very, very properly expended time. It isn't a lick and a promise that is handled on a dispatch line that comes across your desk, it is a go and look, it's a talk to, it's a look over the functions and traffic, it's a look over the flow lines. Does it disarrange anything like a public flow line? Does it disarrange dispatch lines? Are there some other functions? Go around and see people and people and people, and talk to them and discuss it and discuss it. It is not something you take off the cuff! And that's how it all goes to hell because people say, "Oh let's, let's set this place up," and so forth, and somebody throws some desks in and so on, and then it's a hell of a mess and then it's almost impossible to establish. But then it eventually gets into that concrete mishmash, and then you come along and you try to straighten it out, and it kicks back and it won't, and oh boy.

But the custom is the dispatch comes whizzing across somebody's desk and they say, "OK, establish admin space for the auditors, under the starboard stack." and so forth, "OK, wheee. OK, wheee." It reminds me of the sign that President Truman was supposed to have had on his desk, is "The buck stops here." Passing the buck is one of the old Americanisms meaning pushing the responsibility for a decision or an action to somebody else, passing the buck; or say passing the buck, "You killed him." "No I didn't, he did." That's passing the buck. So he said this sign on his desk, the buck passed here. He wasn't a very good administrator was he? The sign on his desk should have said, "The buck stopped a long time before it got here, see your local ethics officer." This "wheee" treatment is something that will make you tired because it'll get in your hair. They will say, "Hey, you know, what that had, that was OKed by the Tech Sec." Oh, it was, was it? What was OKed by the Tech Sec?

Let me tell you a trick. Hold the space plan or the order or the personnel transfer behind your back and go over to one of those interim OKs that you see on it, and say, go you know, like to the Tech Sec and you say to him, "Well, who did you OK a transfer for yesterday?" "Well, Joe, who, what?" "You OKed a transfer yesterday, you transferred some people. Who did you OK a transfer for?" "Oh, I don't remember." You're looking at "whoeee!" Piece of paper gets in the in basket, the thing to do is go bong and wheee and wheee and wheee! I'll tell you the greatest past master wheee there ever was was Joe VonStaden. It's cost him more posts than you can count. He's an absolute suffering liability to have on a line. If you had him in an intermediate position someplace between lower echelon and higher echelon and so forth, everything he got was wheee. And you'll find them here and there, and they don't know what they're OKing. In other words, it's an abuse of authority. And that is your time to establish the hell out of that.

Now, I will study over a personnel scene, I will look it over, I will even send a messenger or look over, or call for personnel folders, and if it seems to be something vaguely possible and it doesn't seem that it's going to tear everything up, why, I will OK it. And even then, about a third of them cause a little dislocation someplace, greater or lesser. It's very risky. You don't easily do that. Now, when the people in authority in an organization are OKing space, OKing personnel, OKing POs, OKing promotion, OKing this and OKing that on a wheee basis, you're very shortly going to have no more establishment than a rabbit. And the form of the org is going to turn into a dough bread, and that org is going to start dying because nobody's taking any responsibility for it at all. It's all on a wheee. And that's how your spatial arrangements get destroyed. "May I have a private office?" Oh well, Mary Ann's a pretty good gal, "OK, it's fine, oooh wheee!"

Now all of a sudden you find out you haven't got any Class VI course space and you come up and say, "What happened to that?" And somebody tells you, "Oh well, that was all OKed by the Deputy Executive Director." You say, "Well that's good, because I'm OKing the comm-ev." But there really ought to be a charge for wheee. You work like mad, you've been working for weeks and weeks and weeks to establish this thing and to get it all straight and get your public line, and all of a sudden you find out the engineers have got an OK to store the spare propeller shaft across the passageway; and not only that, have already put it there. All morning long people have been saying in Success, "I wonder why we aren't seeing anybody?" And you go and look for the why and you'll find this horrible thing. Well, don't think immediately, "These dumb mo-wa wahwahwah." To hell with that. The why is that somebody wheee'd. Either somebody acted without any authority whatsoever or somebody incautiously OKed something. And an OK that is uncautiously OKed is no slightest defense in a comm-ev. It's neglect of duty, a failure to exert proper circumspection, while authorizing wafty wafty waff. You get it so the guy doesn't authorize anything and probably if that's the kind of a guy he's been, you're better off.

So, your form of your org goes into destruction on things like musical chairs, shifts in space. We know all about musical chairs, you've got plenty of policy, but you haven't got any policy on shifts in space, on the failure to provide supplies, on the rush PO, the rush PO, the rush PO; and all of a sudden we haven't got any allocation. Now what are we going to do? "Oh well, that's very easy, we just won't buy any food for the crew this week." That's a cheap way to solve it, isn't it? You'll find out you lie a bit back of this, is some of this wheee business. Asinine authorizations, in other words, have just gummed up the works because they're not done according to a plan.

Now, the thing that a conference should pick up and the thing a conference should do is to reconcile the differences. But a conference can also go wheee. Reconcile the differences of points of view, reconcile the difference of arguments and so on, and that's really all that ever really comes up in a conference. Now, I'm not giving you a talk about conferences right now, but that's where these things tend to hang up or get foolishly authorized or something like that. The planning on these things has got to be good and before you see any broad changes occur, it is only right that you not see an OK to do it, but that you see a situation, an investigation, a why, stat, ideal scene and handling program, which has really been subjected to observation, so that all other things are looked into. And if that thing comes a cropper, you take it into a conference at once. There's something wrong with this thing. Data Series twenty-four tells you how to, how to reprogram something that shows the why is wrong, or something that is too disarranging would come under the same head. This thing, you can't do it, that's all, you can't do the thing, it's not possible. If it has to do with the org board, if it has to do with posts, if it has to do with the complements, if it has to do with functions, if it has to do with vast expenditures on materiel, and things like that, these are not lightly OKed. And if all of a sudden these things show, there's a nonsense comes up along this line or something like that, get it right into a conference. I'll talk about conferences another time, that is say what conferences there are. But that is the proper function of a conference is arbitration and agreement on points which are already in dispute.

Conferences almost never make decisions. Do not ever expect; the people keep expecting conferences to make decisions or originate a decision, and of course then they don't. They are arbitration mechanisms in actual fact, or briefing mechanisms; briefing, hand out the duties, inform, collect information, you can do these things.

But an executive function of a conference and so on is why democracy has such a hell of a time working. Congress is an executive group, a conference, which is trying to make a collective decision. And there isn't a guy there that is sufficiently knowable on the subject he's, they're deciding on, to make a sensible decision; so the decisions they make are silly. "Every man, woman and child in the country below the age of ninety-five shall immediately receive eight thousand six hundred and forty-two dollars a month. I guess that'll get me elected." You know, wrong why, wrong solution, bankruptcy; the eight thousand six hundred and forty-two dollars now buys a half a loaf of bread. Inflation has gone out the window, the imbalance of the scene is too great for anybody to recover from. There are certain bodies of government like this, they will reach a point of no return eventually. On a national basis, they easily reach a point of no return. And it's just asinine decisions like, "Let's take all the service space and convert it into a sorting room," or, "Let's something or other, something or other." And it's these little things, these things all wind up in a ball. "Transfer Mamie Glutz, transfer Joe Blow, fill the post with John," and the next thing you know you're looking at something that's getting awful quicksand, because there's just too many unplanned actions.

So, I'll give you the point that you always use to orient all other planning against. It's the form of the org. Thank you.

OK.