HCOPL: Hats

HUBBARD COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex
HCO POLICY LETTER OF 22 SEPTEMBER 1970¹

Remimeo
Exec Hats
Personnel Hats
Ethics Hats

AN URGENT IMPORTANT AND STAR-RATE PL
Personnel Series 9
Org Series 4

HATS

HAT — A term used to describe the write-ups, checksheets and packs that outline the purposes, know-how and duties of a post. It exists in folders and packs and is trained in on the person on the post.

HAT TECHNOLOGY

“Hats” developed in 1950 for use in Dianetic orgs as a special technology. The term and idea of “a hat” comes from conductors or locomotive engineers, etc., each of whom wears a distinctive and different type of headgear. A “hat” therefore designates particular status and duties in an organization.

A “hat” is a specialty. It handles or controls certain particles in various actions and receives, changes and routes them.

A “hat” designates what terminal in the organization is represented andwhat the terminal handles and what flows the terminal directs.

Every hat has a product.

The product can be represented as a statistic.

Any job or position in the world could have its own hat. The reason things donot run well in a life, an org, a group, nation or the world is an absence of hats.

The reason why an org runs well when it does is hats.

Any protest of anyone against things not running right can be traced to lack
of hats.

Any slump an org goes through can be traced directly and at once to anabsence of one or more hats being worn.

HAT CONTENT

A hat must contain:

A. A purpose of the post.

B. Its relative position on the org bd.

C. A write-up of the post (done usually by people who have held it before relief and when so done it has no further authority than advice).

D. A checksheet of all the policy letters, bulletins, advices, manuals, books and drills applicable to the post. (As in a course checksheet.)

E. A full pack of the written materials or tapes of the checksheet plus any manuals of equipment or books.

F. A copy of the org bd of the portion of the org to which the post belongs.

G. A flow chart showing what particles are received by the post and what changes the post is expected to make in them and to where the post routes them.

H. The product of the post.

I. The statistic of the post, the statistic of the section, the statistic of the department and division to which the post belongs.

STAFF HAT

There is also a general staff hat.

This hat contains:

a. The overall purpose of the org, its aims, goals and products.

b. The privileges or rewards of a staff member such as auditing, trainingon post, general training availability, pay, vacations or leave, etc.

c. The penalties involved in nonproduction or abuse of post privileges or misuse of the post contracts.

d. The public relations responsibilities of a staff member.

e. The interpersonal relations amongst staff members including courtesy,cleanliness, attitudes to seniors and juniors, office etiquette, etc.

f. The mest of posts generally, its papers, despatches, files, equipment.

g. The comm and transport system of the org.

GRADIENT SCALE OF HATS

A “gradient scale” means “a gradual increasing degree of something.” A non-gradient scale would be telling someone to enter a skyscraper by a 32nd story window.

Thus there is a gradient scale of organizing.

A key to this is found in The Problems of Work‘s theory of confusion and the stable datum.

412One in actual practice has to cope while organizing.

COPE means to handle whatever comes up. In the dictionary it means “to deal successfully with a difficult situation.” We use it to mean “to handle any old way whatever comes up, to handle it successfully and somehow.”

IF YOU REMAIN IN COPE, THE DEMAND TO COPE INCREASES.

In that you have the key to “exhausted executives” or staff members. You have why the president of the US ages about 20 years in one term of office as you can see by comparing dated photographs of past presidents. He is totally on cope. His government has an org board that looks like a pile of jackstraws. He has no hat. His staff have no hats. His government departments have no hat. The technologies of economics, law, business, politics, welfare, warfare, diplomacy, have been lost or neglected (they do exist to some extent).

The guy is on total cope. And the post has been on total cope since it was created as an afterthought by the Constitutional Congress that began the post in the 18th century. Even what it says in US civics textbooks is not found in practice.

So “difficult situations” are the order of the day and are handled by special actions and appointments.

The people who should handle them haven’t got real hats.

This is all catching up with the country at this writing to such a degree that the citizen cannot benefit from a stable society or social order. The country looks more like a war of insurgency.

In other words departures from hats has led into total cope and it is steadily worsening.

Any organization put in by one political party is knocked out by the next incumbent, and who could totally organize a country in 4 years? (The term of a president.)

Yet it is hanging together some way and some way meeting increasing demands and pressures.

I have stated this in a large example so that it can be seen in a smaller unit.

To handle this one would first have to want to straighten it out and then assemble the tech of admin to straighten it out. And then one would have to begin on a gradient scale of org bd and hats.

A cope sort of hat would be tossed-off orders to some other people on staff who have some title of some sort.

Along with this would be a posted org bd that has little to do with dutiesactually performed and used by a staff that doesn’t know what it is.

One begins to move out of cope (as given in other series) by putting an org board together that labels posts and duties and getting people on them to handle the types of particles (bodies, mailings) of the org.

The next action would be brief write-ups of the posts and their duties and checking people out on them.

Actually if you only got to the middle of the last paragraph with an org the executives would remain in cope. So much know-how would be missing in the org’s staff that every rough bit would shoot up to the executive for special handling. And that is cope.

Hats only in this far is not good enough as it still takes a genius to run the place.

The next gradient scale is to get the hat to contain:

i. The post write-up itself

ii. The theory and practical necessary to run it.

This is done by a preparation of checksheets of data and a pack matching it for key posts.

Naturally the org bd now has to become more real and staff has to be checked out on it.

Then hats as post checksheets and packs are extended to the rest of the staff.

The mechanisms of training have to exist by this time.

Seniors have to be made responsible that every junior below them has a hat consisting of write-up, checksheet and pack.

Meanwhile one continues to cope.

Gradually, gradually staff begin to know (through checkouts) their hats.

New staff coming on are grooved in better.

Cope begins to diminish and the organization tends to smooth out.

Here and there competent handlings begin to show up brightly.

Now we find a new situation. With everyone throwing together checksheets and packs for staffs we find nonstandard checksheets. Some messenger has to do the full checksheet of the HCO Division pages and pages long. The HCO Sec has a checksheet with just 10 items on it.

So a central authority has to standardize post checksheets and survey and put in overlooked bits of data.

But that is way up the line. The org long since has become smooth and prosperous.

So that is the gradient scale of getting in hats.

EXPERTS

Here and there you find an area of special expertise in an org where the expertise is so expert in itself that it obscures the fact that the person does not also have a full post hat.

A lawyer would be a case in point. It takes so long to learn law in some law school that an org executive can overlook the fact that the post hat is missing. Drg policy on legal matters and staff hat remain unknown to this legal post AND JAM IT UTTERLY. This came to light when a whole series of cases was being neglected because the legal staff member, an excellent lawyer, did not know how to make out a purchase order or that one could or should. Investigation found no post or staff hat. Only a legal degree.

Orgs continually do this with auditors. They are technical experts in auditing. So they get assigned to posts in the HGC WITH NO HAT. Backlogs occur, things goof up. Tech fails. All because it is overlooked that they are PART OF AN ORG and need staff and post hats and need to be trained on them.

Worse than that, a highly classed auditor is often put on an admin post without hat or training for it.

You would not take an admin-trained person and without further training tell him to audit. So why take an auditor and tell him to handle an admin division?

Without his post write-up, checksheet and pack FOR THE POST and without training on it, the person just isn’t qualified for it no matter what other line he is expert in.

It is great to have an expert who has been specially trained in some profession. But lawyer, engineer or public relations, he must have his hat for the org post and be trained on it or he will goof! Yet one won’t suspect why that area is goofing because “he’s a Class VI isn’t he?”

UTILIZATION

Personnel can recruit madly, answering every frantic demand for personnel and yet HAVE THEM ALL WASTED for lack of full hats and full training on those hats.

An investigation of blows (desertions) from orgs shows that lack of agrooved-in hat was at the bottom of it.

People come on a job. It is at once a great mystery or an assumption of totalknow-one or the other.

Either one continued leads them into a state of liability to the org.

People who don’t know what they are doing and people who don’t but thinkthey do are both NONUTILIZED PERSONNEL.

Pay and prosperity for the rest of the staff will go down unless this is remedied.

The whole org can sag and even vanish under these conditions.

So Personnel has a vested interest in hats being complete and staff trained onthem. For Personnel people cannot possibly cope with “no pay so can’t hire anyone” and “no people so can’t produce.”

The answer is H-A-T-S.

And a hat is a write-up, a checksheet and a pack.

And the staff member trained on them.

ETHICS

When a person has no hat he lacks purpose and value.

When he has no purpose and value he not only goofs, he will commit crimes.

It is apparently easier to hit with ethics than to program and give someone a full hat and get him trained on it.

Police action is not a substitute for having purpose and value.

This is so fundamental that one can even trace the unrest of a nation to lack of purpose and value. A huge welfare program guarantees crime and revolt because it gives handouts, not hats.

Even a field Scientologist should have a hat.

By doing only this over the world we would own the planet, as in an expanding population, individual purpose and value are the most vital and wanted commodities.

If there are no real hats there will soon be no money of any value and no
bread!

SUMMARY

ANY HAT IS BETTER THAN NO HAT according to the way a thetan seems to think.

But be that as it may, the downfall of any org can be traced directly and instantly to no recruiting or no org board, no hats or unreal hats or no training on hats.

The sag of an org can be traced directly to lack of hats and lack of training on hats.

The overload of any post can be traced directly to lack of an org bd and lack of hats and no training on hats.

The way out is to organize the org board and hats while you cope.

If you do not, your cope will become an overwhelm. If you do, your burden will lighten and your prosperity increase.

It took 13 months of hard work and 20 years of org experience to learn that, given a product, lack of HATS was the WHY of departures from the ideal scene and that working toward providing full complete HATS was the way to get back toward the ideal scene.

L. RON HUBBARD
Founder

Notes