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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Scientology's Admin Tech

Hubbard obviously believed that he was an administrative wiz. He wrote thousands of administrative "Policy Letters" over the years, covering everything from the broad organization structure down to the minutiae of how to clean windows, handle your "in-basket" and how to write letters.

Each and every policy letter is supposed to be followed to the letter in every Scientology organization. That means all the churches and every business using Hubbard's technology.

Some of the dictates from Ron are fairly obvious and seem to work well enough. But overall the result of applying all his policy letters is to cause an organization to, at best, struggle for survival and, more commonly, fail.

There are many examples of how bad this "tech" is. For instance, the whole structure is designed for extreme micro-management. It just invites every level of management to meddle in every employee's job. However, to keep things simple, I'll just expand on one good-sounding but hugely flawed concept.

Statistics.

It sounds okay. Every job someone does has one or more statistics that count the number of products that particular job produces. All the statistics are carefully graphed and actions are taken depending on whether the "stat" went up or down, and by how much.

Sounds like a lot of busy work, but doesn't sound harmful, does it?

It is.

Statistics: a good way to destroy your organization.

Oh, it's a real good idea to know how many widgets your company sold, and how much money in and money out. In general you do need that kind of information and every business does that kind of record keeping.

But every person, every job?

Here's the key part of this "tech". As part of the "handling" of statistics, if a person's statistic is up, that's good, they get rewarded. If their statistic is down, that's bad, they get punished.

Of course. What else would you expect?

And that is not the way to intelligently run a business. Anyone with real world business experience can see what's wrong immediately.

Judging a person's performance on their job by only counting "things" produced in a time period focuses attention narrowly on today or this week. Long-range ideas that might interfere with production for a few weeks, but would greatly improve things long-term will always be abandoned. Actions that improve quality, but decrease quantity must always be ignored. Things that would improve customer service, but which interfere with "getting the stats up" will never happen.

And, because the managers at every level are rewarded for "up stats" and penalized for "down stats" the whole structure becomes narrowly focused on "getting the stats up", every person, every job, every level.

The inevitable result of "stats" is "stat push". This is a heavy demand for ever-higher statistics from management and the frantic doing anything and everything to be able to report higher statistics by the worker.

Imagine a job, a section, a department, a division or a corporation where things like planning, scheduling, improvement, coordination, cooperation, responsiveness are all ignored in favor of "getting the stats up". That's chaos and disaster. It's deadly.

Imagine what happens when a worker must endlessly report higher and higher numbers of products, "or else!" Either the quality goes out the window, or the numbers are faked. As the demands for higher "stats" continue, it is, inevitably, both.

Another side-effect is that the statistics become less and less connected to reality. This is why the Church of Scientology reports eight million members (or is it twenty?) when reality is so much less: They have counted the "Scientologists statistic" for years and the statistic has been a flat-out lie. This is why you can't get off the mailing list: That would cause the "bulk mail out" statistic to go down, and that can't happen. This is why Scientologists get super-hard-sell pressure phone calls for money on Wednesday night: Stats are reported on Thursday and must be up "no matter what!"

The end result is crap products, upset employees, angry customers and eventual and inevitable business failure. And that is solidly built into "statistics" as defined and managed by the Hubbard Administrative Technology.

And, while statistics is considered one of the more important pieces of Hubbard's Admin Tech, it isn't the worst, by far. But that's enough for a sample.

A few times, some Scientologist has attained managerial status in a department of a major corporation and secretly implemented Hubbard Admin Tech in his department. Not going to name any names, but the departments so "enhanced" became disaster zones. Customer and employee complaints helped upper management track down and eradicate the Hubbard Tech to recover sanity. It really doesn't work.

For the True Believers of Scientology, this is hard to take. Their business fails and they blame themselves for not "applying it correctly". But the harder they try, the more exactly they attempt to apply Hubbard's instructions, the deeper they get into trouble. Unless and until they recognize that the fault lies with Hubbard's policies, they can't escape the endless downward spiral of hopelessly applying his policies more and more strictly while their business tanks and their employees suffer.

The Church of Scientology runs strictly on Hubbard Admin Tech. You will have noticed how effective they are. Anyone escaping from Scientology's Sea Org has horror stories relating to Hubbard's Admin Tech and the organizational insanity it engenders. This is just another reason why the Church of Scientology has failed, is failing and will always fail.
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40 comments:

  1. timely post... i've just started reading up on this subject. thks for insights here, is always good to know about just how precious their "stats" really are! ;)

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  2. Actually, the Scientologists are absolutely correct when they say that if their statistics policies are followed the way you described, then they just weren't followed properly.

    In The Scientology Handbook, it describes plainly the very problem you mention:

    "Production as the only target type can become so engulfing that conditional targets even when set are utterly neglected. Then operating and primary targets get very unreal and statistics go DOWN."

    In case that's not clear, what it's saying is that one avoids being engulfed in an ever-spiralling demand for higher stats by closely monitoring when your targets need to be adjusted. Production for production's sake is NOT the only desirable target, and The Scientology Handbook says so in plain English.

    Of course it's madness to expect a company to move 1000 widgets one week, then 2000 the next, then 4000 the next, then 8000, etcetera, endlessly, with the same target, the same product, and the same resources. Sooner or later you reach a point where the demand for higher stats becomes physically impossible, or supply exceeds demand. But that's NOT what the Scientology stat system is about.

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  3. Hi anonymous Scientologist,

    Nice try. Either you haven't worked at a Scientology church, or you are trying to fool everybody.

    You quoted a few sentences of bafflegab to try to prove that there is some other way to apply Hubbard's "tech". It is applied exactly the way I described in every Church of Scientology I've worked at or heard of.

    Your bafflegab sentence does not change the way Hubbard's tech "works". And anyone who has worked in a Scientology church or has worked in a "Scientology company" knows how much trouble this "tech" causes.

    It doesn't matter how much you try to spin it. In practice, it simply doesn't work.

    There is no evidence, anywhere, that shows Hubbard's Admin Tech is of any benefit at all. Let me be very clear here. I know of no company that has used pure Hubbard Admin Tech that has ever prospered. There is ample evidence that it fails. Just look at the church itself.

    Or, to see a real disaster, visit the Int. Base in Hemet. Oh, Lord! That place is a nightmare! Hubbard Admin Tech at its finest! The micromanagement is so bad that it is a miracle that anything gets done!

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  4. Your analysis is spot on. Having worked in Scientology for 35 years, I can tell you that the system Hubbard lays out is topheavy, cumbersome, impractical and results in abuse of staff. For a laugh, read the Wall Street Journal article from 1995 about the botched attempt to put Hubbard's "tech" into use in the Allstate Insurance Company.
    http://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/allstate.html

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  5. A very true analysis.

    When I was a Scientologist, I ran a department of programmers. Yes, that's like herding cats, but as a pretty good manager, I knew how everyone was doing. I didn't need "stats" to tell me what I already knew.

    But, more importantly, my evaluation uncovered the fact that there was absolutely no way to "staticize" programming without immediately and automatically creating crap programs. There is no possible stat that does not automatically encourage really bad programming.

    Stats are a very stupid substitute for simply paying attention to what's going on.

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  6. Having worked in Scientology for 30 years, from the mission network to the Int Base, I concur with what you are saying about the stat madness. It fixates attention on present time and is initiative killing. And I think it eventually results in the good people getting busted and lost to the organization. You know, the type of people who actually want to creatively get something done instead of being forced to stat push their way through life week after goddam week.

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  7. Actually I agree with much of what you say, however there are some things that I don't.

    Any way, instead of get into a long tedious and possibly tendentious debate on the validity of stats or statistics.

    As Disraeli once said.

    "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

    Here I'd like to address the former two of the three.

    For instance you and many critics say :

    "The Church of Scientology runs strictly on Hubbard Admin Tech."

    This is a complete fallacy. The fact is that if the Church of Scientology ran strictly on policy then there would be no such thing as the Golden Age of Tech, since it directly violates HCOPL 16 April 1965 Issue II Drills Allowed.

    There would also be no such thing as disconnection, since the practice was canceled by HCOPL 16 November 1968 Disconnection Canceled.

    Those are just two random examples.

    There are many others.

    The fact is that the Church of Scientology hasn't been run strictly on policy since David Miscavige took over.

    Instead, it is being run on arbitrary orders, nebulous "Advices" of questionable provenance and SPDs or Scientology Policy Directives that the public and the majority of staff,unless they are in the Sea Org and in many cases part of the upper management echelon are not allowed to see.

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  8. Thanks for your input. Yes, it is well known that Miscavige only runs altered versions of L. Ron Hubbard's tech. But the local churches try very hard to adhere to Hubbard's policies. They have all the policies; They study them and apply them carefully and "religiously".

    And they fail.

    The fact that Miscavige constantly cross-orders official policy just makes it that much worse.

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  9. "Thanks for your input. Yes, it is well known that Miscavige only runs altered versions of L. Ron Hubbard's tech. But the local churches try very hard to adhere to Hubbard's policies. They have all the policies; They study them and apply them carefully and "religiously"."

    Just saying it unfortunately doesn't make it so.

    The fact is that most staff are not trained in Scientology policy or tech.

    They are as ignorant of the subject as most critics.

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  10. So, your argument is "Is not!" to my "Is so!" ;-)

    Hmmm. Perhaps this is going nowhere. I think the opinion of whether staff in local churches do or don't try to apply Hubbard's admin tech is based solely on personal experience. Mine was 20 years in various "local orgs", first as staff and later as public. I found the staff to be, for the most part, earnest and trying to do good. Their training varied but they knew their job was to follow Hubbard's policies. Your experiences, in different orgs, different times, have led you to a different opinion.

    But, in any case, this is completely irrelevant to the main topic: L. Ron Hubbard's Admin Tech does not work. Looking at the results, that's pretty obvious to everyone (except True Believers).

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  11. I don't know what orgs you were in but in the orgs I worked in which included SO orgs the bulk of staff were not even hatted for their posts.

    Therefore, the majority didn't have such things as PPC and PCLF. Many of them were "instant hatted" which means they were verbally instructed by their senior on how to do their post.

    Most of them didn't have other technical actions like a full DRD and Objectives, though they were run endlessly on "sec checks", which is "no auditing" in the extreme.

    So with the above said I beg to differ with your above assessment of the Admin Tech.

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  12. Oh, this is good! I would love to hear why you think L. Ron Hubbard's Admin Tech is workable.

    You do realize that, if it worked, it would have prevented, and automatically corrected all the problems and alterations? That's what Hubbard says!

    You do realize that, if it worked, there would be some company, somewhere that could be pointed to as 1) exactly and fully applying Hubbard's tech and 2) showing incredible success.

    Instead, there are failures, alterations, and Miscavige-ology. So, what you need to do is provide the name of a company that uses Hubbard's tech fully and is incredibly successful, as promised by Hubbard.

    I really would love to have that information.

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  13. I hate bumping, but I started reading your blog today, and it seems that anonymous chose a bad time to stop checking the archives.

    Or they just muddied the waters enough.

    Actually, I worked for an overpriced vacuum distributor in WI that was ran by a Scientologist (when I was a teenager), and we (in marketing) were pressured to use the same hard-sell techniques that the "church" used. I had to fire someone if they were downstat for two consecutive weeks. This includes people whose numbers were down because they were asked to assist other departments, had taken sick time, or something else. The company lasted 3 years before everything went belly under. On a positive note, I think this made him realize the folly of Admin Tech, which may (or may not have) been his reason for leaving.

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  14. Oh, this "Anonymous" person did come back and read my answer, that is certain. But, you see, I asked for something concrete to back up his/her statement that the Admin Tech worked.

    Just one bit of proof.

    And there is no proof. With all the claims and all the time and all the money invested by the church, there is absolutely not one single bit of proof that Hubbard's Admin Tech has any benefit.

    So he/she couldn't answer me.

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  15. It's September now and he STILL hasn't answered.

    Poor man, he can string a few sentences together but I never felt he was trying to make things clear or working for mutual understanding. The introduction of the terms "...PPC and PCLF....full DRD and Objectives..." in his July3 post was first to distract or provoke Bill from staying with the theme - 'the tech doesn't work' and then to bore the readers. This verbal tussle was not 'two sides of the story' (pick one but give the other the benefit of the doubt) The scientologist, knowing he can't convince, and he only appeared to put spanners in the works anyway , abruptly disappears from the arena.

    A simply and very sad fact is that scientologists cannot behave themselves properly. Everytime -and forgive the generalisation for I havn't yet come across an exception, the sole function of a scientologists appearance in discussion is to discredit or undermine what he see's as an opponent. When confronted with a question demanding verifiable facts they skip and dance around like ballerinas.

    Either communication skills are used to batter into submission or they are employed to entice.
    I recently viewed again a recording of the opening of the new Berlin org with Chick Corea before the camera. "The church is open, you only have to come inside." he said. I was reminded of the story of Hansl and Gretl. The wicked witch couldn't play guitar but she did at least offer the kids REAL sweets.

    General Public AYC

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  16. Yes. Time has passed and still no answer to a very, very simple question.

    The ultimate, unanswerable request to a Scientologist: Give us some proof!

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  17. I agree that some of the statistics stuff is simply stupid. Isn't the statement "every post has a stat" an absolute? That should be enough to put an end to that insanity, but is it?

    The janitor would be better off just doing his job than trying to manage a statistic. The only valid question here is, "Was the cleaning done properly?" It's either a yes or a no, not a statistic, and none of Hubbard's opinions on statistics changes the fact that we've only got so many toilets to scrub and garbage cans to empty.

    Heck, just arguing the point makes me feel cheap and dirty. It should be self-evident.

    I have to take exception with your suggestion that it's Hubbard's Admin that is the problem with churches, however. It isn't that "In practice, it simply doesn't work." The problem is that, in the church, it's never even really "In practice"!

    I watched my local mission and church and Int Management fail to apply policy after policy after policy while I was on staff at a mission. It was insane. For example:

    Reg and ED told me several times that the mission would reimburse me for anything I bought for it (supplies, whatever), completely in violation of financial planning policies.

    IAS events, reg-type events were invariably these emergency things clearly in violation of HCO PL "Too Little, Too Late", which apparently NO ONE in the church has ever read. Pretty sure its in OEC Vol 2.

    "We always deliver what we promise." I can't tell you how many times I saw that one violated. So many promises made to me by one and all were lies. It's one thing to protect the church with legal forms. It's another to use those legal forms to make it OK to break promises.

    The refund policy was routinely violated. Any time a refund request came in... well... naturally, those funds had already been spent, and it was crazy trying to handle it. If the church would just do what the policy says -- refund the money, refuse services in the future -- and leave it at that, no legal threats, no insane routing forms, no ARC-breaky handlings, none of it -- we wouldn't have any of that upset on church lines at all.

    "Yeah, I went into that Scientology place, but I didn't like it, so I asked for my money back."

    "Did they pay you back?"

    "Yeah, they mailed me a check a few days later."

    That would be the end of it. No upset. Clearly, church management *wants* to have these upsets in the field. Miscavige needs enemies.

    Oh, but there's more. Hubbard commented negatively on Sea Org stealing staff members from missions and orgs -- but any time a staff member was an upstat, Sea Org would come in and take him away. Orgs were protected from franchises recruiting org staff, but no such protection went the other way. The recruit-from-below behavior is all, of course, designed to ensure that missions and orgs lose their upstats and crash.

    Hubbard also had pretty explicit policies on not sharing address lists of raw public with other orgs/groups/etc. -- and yet I watched SMI order the missions to give up their address lists (via the InComm computer system), and all the missions just turned up their bellies and complied. I pointed out the policy this violated to the ED. He just shrugged.

    Heck, there's a policy letter that's part of either Staff Status I or Staff Status II (or, at least, it was...) which clearly points out that seniors who run around demanding that "stats go up" are poor executives. Irony? I'll see if I can locate that issue.

    Just start reading the policy letters. You can probably just open any OEC volume randomly and find something that the church is doing in violation of whatever policy you happen to open up to.

    And tech?

    It's funny how in KSW, Hubbard points out that it's bank that says the group is everything and the indivudal is nothing. I'm guessing every Scientology exec has so many MU's earlier in the document that he's never really read that line.

    What about "The Hidden Data Line" that Miscavige and the compilations unit have to Hubbard now? How's that working out for everyone? I wonder if that HCOB is even in the Student Hat any more?

    Sorry. With so many examples on the Internet, I don't need to summarize. You know them.

    My point is simply this: if you want to fault Hubbard Admin Tech, show me a place where it's actually been genuinely applied first. Then, let's critique it. Until then, what we have is a bunch of crazies running around pretending to be Sceintology administrators, doing everything they can to make sure Scientology fails by focusing insanely on the one thing Hubbard told them explicitly not to: run around screaming to get the stats up.

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  18. I understand your point about it "not being properly applied". But I have two key points about that.

    First, it cannot be "properly applied" because it is self-inconsistent and, well, crazy. If you try very, very hard to apply one policy, you will inevitably find you are violating other policies.

    Second, the most important part of Hubbard's Admin Tech is that it is self-correcting. Supposedly. What with Org Officers and Qual and Cramming Officers and all that, the Hubbard Organization "automatically corrects" any mis-application of Policy. So why is Hubbard Policy never, ever being applied correctly.

    Obviously, the fault lies with Hubbard's Tech itself. If Hubbard's Admin Tech really worked as Hubbard claimed, it would have automatically and "terminatedly" handled any outnesses. It did not because it can not.

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  19. I've read almost all of your site now... I agree with about 99% of it. The rest... who cares?

    Thank you for putting this together. I'd recently been thinking of doing something like this, but you're handling it far better than I would.

    OK, you make some claims in your last reply. Let's look at them.

    "If you try very, very hard to apply one policy, you will inevitably find you are violating other policies."

    Examples? Just a couple would suffice. I mean, I could see how "applying refund policy" kinda counters the policies to "make money, make more money, make others produce so as to make more money...", but really, these aren't contradictory, since upsetting people has clearly been shown to create problems that decrease income. So this straw man I've offered won't really suffice... perhaps you can give a solid example or two?

    Then you said, "Obviously, the fault lies with Hubbard's Tech itself. If Hubbard's Admin Tech really worked as Hubbard claimed, it would have automatically and 'terminatedly' handled any outnesses. It did not because it can not."

    That is completely specious. Policy doesn't apply people, people apply policy. Heck, in my perfectly normal non-Scientology job, we have policies. We have IT policies. We have policies on taking personal time off. We have policies on non-disclosure and keeping proprietary information secret. We have policies on when to be at work and what days are holidays. If I don't adhere to these policies, I risk losing my job, but it's not the policies' fault that I didn't perform them, any more than it's the Hubbard policies' fault that so-and-so didn't perform them.

    Hubbard himself said that policies are intended to make the organization expand, and to hell with any policy which doesn't do that. Intsane Mismanagement glommed onto all the crap policies which inhibit expansion and dropped the decent ones. Why Hubbard felt compelled to include the craptastic policies is a bit of a mystery , but at least we can both agree that he clearly was not perfect. The basic error is this fixed idea that Hubbard was 100% right and couldn't have made a mistake or messed up on a policy.

    The trick, then, would be to reject that notion and then to figure out which policies are the correct ones and which are not.

    If we can agree that Miscavige is suppressive (or even if we have to restrict ourselves to non-Scientologese and simply agree that he's a frackin' nutcase), and we can agree that doing the opposite of what the nutcase is doing would a good start, then here's the obvious answer: Drop the policies the current Int Management is working from, and adopt all the ones it has rejected.

    Maybe it's self-correcting after all. But it's still gotta be applied.

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  20. I don't have my Policy Volumes anymore so I can't quote any. But, as I said in my article, one of the key indicators is that there are no successful companies that actually use Hubbard's stuff because when they've tried, it doesn't work.

    You claim that, in the thousands of organizations that have used Hubbard's Admin Tech (and many tried very, very hard), none of them applied it "correctly" and that's why it didn't work. Do you see the intrinsic problem with that idea?

    You certainly may be right, but it merely points out the fact that applying Hubbard's stuff "correctly" and completely is, by real world test, impossible. And that means the tech is fundamentally flawed.

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  21. "You claim that, in the thousands of organizations that have used Hubbard's Admin Tech (and many tried very, very hard), none of them applied it 'correctly' and that's why it didn't work."

    OK, first of all, I made no such claim. I'm talking about the church, which is supposed to be applying the policies. Second, your assertion is an instance of the fallacy of large numbers. Worse, you are suggesting that you know that Hubbard's admin policy has never worked for any company which has tried it (yet I can think of two that I know of which currently use it). Where are your data sources for this? You fault the church for making unsubstantiated and unprovable claims -- do you hold yourself to your own standard, or is it OK for you to just make stuff up as it suits your argument?

    Factually, I don't know, Just Bill, whether any businesses have applied it correctly or not. (Not even the two I know about.) If they were applying it the way Miscavige (mis-)applies it, then of course (!) they were doing it very, very wrong, no matter whatever else they were doing.

    What I'm saying is that, as far as running the church is concerned -- for which Hubbard's policies were explicitly written -- show me just one organization, mission, whatever, which actually applies the admin correctly and completely -- because I have yet to find one that doesn't pick and choose policies that suit its collective dramatizations, rather than adhering to all of it.

    "... but it merely points out the fact that applying Hubbard's stuff 'correctly' and completely is, by real world test, impossible." You're still clinging to that specious idea. Please explain to me how it's impossible, by real world test, to refund people's money promptly and then simply refuse any further service? Please explain to me how the purchase order system is impossible, by real world test, to implement? Please explain to me how, in the real world, it's impossible to plan things more than a week in advance? Please explain to me how it's impossible, in the real world, to write out a complete invoice? Please explain to me how it's impossible, in the real world, to use an in-basket/out-basket system? Please explain to me how it's impossible, in the real world, to throw away crap policies that are detrimental to the success of the organization? Etc., etc., etc.

    Those are all simple policies. They are not hard to implement (unless you fail to implement financial planning properly and spend everything without anticipating that there will be refund requests...). In fact, they exist easily enough in the real world, in some form or another, in all of the (non-Scientology) companies I've worked (and currently work) for. These ideas aren't new to Hubbard, either. Scientology has its own spin on things, sure, but those are relevant for the church.

    There is a lot of good policy. This does not mean, however, that it's the only possible policy, and it doesn't mean that it's all good, either.

    Policy is about having decisions made and agreed to so that everyone knows what to expect and doesn't have to try to solve problems we've already got answers for. That's the only reason we have policies -- whether it's a church or a government agency or a retail store. Doesn't matter if they're Hubbard's policies or someone else's.

    Scientology includes its ESTO system, and its statistics, and its conditions formulas, and most especially its ethics system, and these are certainly among the more controversial aspects. And in some cases, these are pathetic policies to implement, especially outside of Scientology. If Scientologists weren't so fixated on Hubbard-like-Jesus and could actually think for themselves, they could see how these systems are being abused by suppressives and clearly need to be modified or abandoned.

    CounterfeitDreams makes the point especially well with respect to statistics versus book sales in the real world. Heck, every retailer knows that post-Christmas, there is a sales slump. Every retailer understands that seasonal variation happen. My own employer knows that purchases tend to pick up at the end of the business year because business units have budgets they need to spend to justify having their large budgets, and then it continues into the new year because new annual budgets means business units have some money to spend. Summers are the slow period in my industry. And every farmer knows that he has no harvest during the winter and he plans for that. Educators couldn't possibly be getting student points during vacation periods (OMG! DOWNSTAT!) Etc., etc., etc. So the church's unreasonableness-as-a-virtue is just some other stupid fixed idea which doesn't work as an absolute. It's not a bad policy, it's just that the real world doesn't work that way or respond well to hard sell 24/7.

    I have seen far too many instances, however, of people complaining that something "didn't work" (not Scientology-related) only to find out that they didn't follow the directions properly -- or even at all in some cases. I can't count how many times I've come across this. Doesn't matter if it's running a piece of software, following a dietary or health regimen, or even bowling. It would be hardly surprising (and so far I've seen far too many examples of it) of people in Scientology failing by *not* applying Scientology policies, rather than failing because they're applying Scientology policies, and yet insisting that they're "following Scientology policy". In fact, that's all I saw in Scientology: policy after policy after policy *not* being followed because of the altered importance of "GET THE STATS UP!" Stupid, stupid, stupid.

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  22. I'm not going to argue with you. We actually are in agreement. Some of the stuff included in Hubbard's Admin Tech works. Some does not. We could debate percentages, perhaps. Any intelligent person can make the workable stuff work and can discard the crap. Those, like Miscavige, who have low intelligence, can't do that. Actually, it appears that Miscavige actually prefers the policies that are most destructive.

    The mystery, as you point out, is how True Believers could put Hubbard up there as "perfect" when so much of his supposedly flawless technologies have obvious problems.

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  23. Hubbard set up Management tech so that nothing gets done.
    It has NOTHING to do with whether staff are hatted or not. Because it really doesn't matter.
    Hubbard's Admin tech is set up to ONLY manage and not DO. Even the lower staff are busy doing BP's, conditions, keeping track of stats, putting together compliance reports, comm evs, musters, staff meetings etc.
    And for anyone wondering, Hubbard Management Technology IS Scientology! Literally.

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  24. Thanks Truth,

    You sound like you've been there. Anyone wanting to read what the application of Hubbard's Admin Tech was like at the highest levels of the church should read Counterfeit Dreams. Eye opening!

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  25. Go to any major university's college of business and ask them about management by statistics. Get ready for a lot of laughing.

    My dad was a management consultant in the 1960s and 1970s, and wrote about management by objectives when it was a new idea.

    He showed me and my siblings when we were kids (we will never forget his dinner-table examples, using cutlery and food as visual aids) how management by statistics was a flawed system.

    Google management by statistics and you'll see a bunch of WISE businesses pushing it - but nobody else.

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  26. @Anonymous
    Thanks for the additional information. Yes, it doesn't take much analysis to uncover the fundamental flaws of management by statistics.

    Scientology staff absolutely dread "Thursdays at 2:00" when statistics are turned in, yet they cannot accept the idea that anything is wrong with it. I guess the rest of the world should be glad that the Church of Scientology uses Hubbard's Admin Tech. It pretty much guarantees that the church fails.

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  27. I've carefully observed both Mountain View Org and Rons Org Frankfurt. Both orgs deliver roughly the same amount of service -- that is, students on course, and total amount of TA in the HGC in a given week. Yet, Mountain View has 86 staff, and Frankfurt has only 4. The difference? Rons Org does not necessarily apply admin tech if they find it doesn't work. Oh, no call-in is needed either. The academy fills up with no phone calls.

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  28. Re: Mountain View vs Ron's Org

    Thanks for the first hand report. It's very true -- successful Scientologists have always been those who are smart enough to do what works, not just rotely follow Ron's arbitrary dictates.

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  29. I just read through this back and forth on the "Admin Tech." SCN Anonymous sounds like a Born Again Christian arguing against Evolution. Religion doesn't kill, people kill.

    I was trained on all the SCN/SO Admin Tech. After leaving I went back to school and got a working MBA. I went through my Business studies with the intention of deciphering my SO experience...false data stripping so to speak. And after spending almost 30 years managing large Projects for some of the largest companies in the world and being successful at it, I know a bit about real Admin Tech and it's correct utilization for continued results. The inherent tendency for departmental sub-optimization when incorrect statistical management is used seems to be ever present, and the push of individual statistics with conditions in orgs where there is a total lack of experienced and knowledgeable leadership typically results in total mayhem.

    Hubbard was never above using existing WOG material when putting together management stuff. I remember that the CMO, when directed to pull together info on filming, came back to him with the few mentions he himself had made in past tapes and bulletins. He looked at it and told them to go over to Hollywood, as filming tech had already been developed. He warned that you just had to make sure you pulled the good from the bad. Hubbard's goal in pulling together Admin tech was to give the orgs some structure and process so that the money would flow. It is interesting that I found WOG books that predated Hubbard's "discovery" of different Admin processes and strategies. And, I have to tell you, management technology has grown light years beyond the simple stuff he found back in the 60's. Hell, he probably had to be simple, as he had a bunch of starry eyed, untrained idiots between him and the public he was trying to get money out of. The Military put together Project Management tech during WWII and the stuff of the Data Evaluator's course was out there also. Same with Marketing tech.

    Pushing to get individual stats up weekly is just wrong. And having individual stats that conditions are applied to tilts the deck when leaders don't understand all the variables and are under the same gun themselves.

    Statistics will always fluctuate because of normal variables, even in a controlled process. It is the noise of the process itself that creates this fluctuation. Only fluctuations outside of the process noise (there are ways to determine that), require individual attention. Otherwise, one should be attempting to improve the overall process. Deming (father of Quality) stated that 95% of problems in business is due to process and not individuals. So...putting all the attention on each person and their production keeps attention from being put on the overall process that management should be improving. SCN's stat management is along the same lines of blaming all case handling deficiencies on the preclear/preOT. It is great for manipulating people.

    I continue to be perplexed that people with little or no education in management technology set themselves up as experts from studying the simplistic and sometimes erroneous stuff Hubbard had others fudge together for him (oh, yes he did...and didn't give anyone else credit). Most policy bulletins handled immediate deficiencies in operations, and were kind of am "idiots guide to how to take the garbage out". He definitely had his opinions about how the garbage should be taken out, but we don't know the underlying motivation or reasoning on it. "Don't you see?"

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  30. @MBA

    Thanks for your comments and observations. Good stuff, much appreciated.

    You've pointed out one of the basic flaws in all of Hubbard's work. Because it is studied and applied by true believers, they are unable to correctly observe its failures and shortcomings, or to adapt. While Hubbard did borrow from "whatever worked", his devoted followers cannot. Hence, massive failures which they cannot see, cannot accept and cannot correct.

    Thanks.

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  31. They are often called robots, the ones who: “cannot see, cannot accept and cannot correct.” Recognition is AL (Awareness Level): “+1”, Robotism is midway down the negative ALs. Some are clear on all subjects, some on a few subjects, some on none. At your level you’ll recognise truth faster than those on a lower level.
    Between -1 Help and +1 Recognition would probably go: 0 Order: you file: ‘like with like’, so creating Orderly files, so creating Recognition (includes (as in flowchart) Contexts), so creating ‘Communication, Perception, Orientation, Understanding, Enlightenment,’... etc. If you’re below that level you wont accord Order the importance (not more, and not less) that it deserves, and so stack up charge for ommitting an AL all subsequent ALs are built on. Bit like if you dont have -4 ‘Need of Change’ you dont have any subsequent ALs on that subject for lack of interest in it (the Tone Scale echos the ALs).
    http://creativeinspiration.org/uncategorized/dos-and-donts-guide-to-great-web-design/ basically says: 1. Identify flowchart sector/pages, then 2. Wireframe out sector/page functions, 3. Designate fonts, pictures, etc – that is like AL 0 Order – so is net 3.0 Giant Global Graph, net 4.0 WebOS (Web Operating System), etc – bringing Order/making intuitive/clearing context distortions, etc.

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  32. @Anonymous Re: Awareness Levels

    Sorry, didn't make much sense out of what you wrote. I know what you're talking about, the Scientology Awareness Levels, but I really don't see how that has anything to do with reality.

    I no longer try to shoehorn Scientology concepts into real world situations. It always obscures rather than enlightens. I have much better success just seeing what is there, without adding artificial numbers, charts, labels and so on.

    But that's just me.

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  33. Dear Just Bill,
    Agreed that the sane, sensible Scientologist would keep what works and throw out what doesn't. However, LRH's "Keeping Admin Working" Policy Letters makes that a crime. That is a problem if you are on staff. Sounds like Ron's Org in Frankfurt has found a way around that. Good for them.

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  34. There is the Management Tech. Then there is the Church (true believers) and then Others. When Others apply it, it seems to have some workability. I know of some Scientology companies that are successful and run on LRH management tech. To wit: Survival Strategies and Survival Insurance. What I don't know is whether management threw out the stuff that didn't make sense and kept what did make sense.
    I have worked in Church environments and the whole stat thing was such an incredible waste of time. It starts with keeping the stat,reporting the stat, graphing the stat, doing Conditions on the stat, production meetings about the stats and then there is the FEAR FACTOR which zaps creativity and innovation. It's a killer. Now maybe LRH didn't mean it to be that way. But that's the way it is and I have never seen it otherwise in a Church environment. And why...because LRH has to be 100% right or else. That makes for a pretty crazy scene.
    Since Scientology isn't a religion in Germany, they have the luxury of being sensible. Also I believe Ron's Org is part of the Indie field. Again, that would give them the luxury of being sensible.
    So I don't know if it is fair to say the Managment Tech is crap or that once Scientology morphed into a religion, common sense went out the window and without judgment just about any system is crap.

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  35. @Ann

    The point isn't that Hubbard Management Tech is total crap, some parts are not bad. The problem is that significant parts of it are really, really horrible -- and will destroy an organization.

    And you are not supposed to pick and choose. According to Scientology it is all perfect and nothing can be omitted.

    But even if you do select out the "good" and reject the bad, what you have left doesn't match the already proven management systems worked out by actual business people and tested in actual businesses.

    Maybe a Scientologist, by carefully picking and choosing and fudging and fixing, can make a "Scientology company" work, but that really isn't a glowing endorsement of the Hubbard Management Tech, is it?

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  36. Hi Just Bill,
    I was thinking about the Admin Tech today and just want to vent. I hope that is okay. Do you remember the policy that says that if stats are down that means that someone is pushing them down? This might be part of "The Why is God" reference. I don't have my green-on-white handly, so I can't go look it up.
    Anyway, I really objected to this reference. Let's say it is Christmas and public want to be with their family or shop or God forbid, sing Christmas carols and decorate the house. BUT NO. Stats can't go down. So staff had to hammer public to put in extra time and etc. So holidays were feared by staff, much like Thursdays at 2:00PM because heads would roll if stats were down.
    When I would question the rationality of applying that reference in that manner, the answer I would get would be "there is always something one can do". And the hidden message was "unless are you being suppressively reasonable!" GLARE.
    My viewpoint was "or you can just relax and enjoy Christmas". But my viewpoint was not very popular.
    So my experience on staff completely proves your point. The Admin Tech was nutty, at least the way I saw it applied. And that is just one of MANY examples. And I am sure you could write your own book on this.
    But if I may, I would like to play devils advocate for a minute.
    What about those groups like Singer and Sterling who are field consultants and sell the Admin Tech to chiropractors, physical therapists and dentists? Over the years, I have meet a number of those types who were extremely happy because the Tech was helping them achieve their goals, expand their practices, live more balanced lives, etc. And they happily became Scientologists.
    This winning group, however, was quite different from the Scientologists I saw who tried themselves to put Tech in their companies. The majority had businesses that were failing. This dichotomy always puzzeled me.
    If you have any insights on how this could be, I would be happy to hear them.

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  37. @Ann

    I'm not so sure about how successful the various "Scientology companies" really are. I've read the "success stories" but that's not evidence and that's not facts.

    Also, it is my understanding that W.I.S.E. consultants aren't working from the full green volumes, nor from actual Scientology policies but from a rewritten "secularized" subset of policy.

    Which policies did they choose to implement? How were they revised? What other business practices do they also include?

    Without that information, it would be impossible to figure out whether any companies are using pure Hubbard policies, nor what the actual results have been.

    Maybe someone who has experience with both W.I.S.E. and church organizations can clarify what actually is going on.

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  38. I worked at WISE a long time ago and can verify that the WISE consultants work from rewritten secularized subset of policy. The successful companies I know of, operate from those. Thank you for helping me work thru this confusion.

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  39. Thank you for this info. I mistakenly interviewed at a company today that is run by Scientologists in the Management Technology method. UGH. I don't want any part of this.

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