ORGANIZING AND HATS

The org board shows the pattern of organizing to obtain a product.
A board then is a flow chart of consecutive products brought about by terminals in series.
We see these terminals as “posts” or positions.

Each one of these is a hat.

The term hat is slang for the title and work of a post in an organization. It is taken from the fact that in many professions such as railroading the type of hat worn is the badge of the job. For example, a train crew has a conductor who wears a conductor’s hat—he has charge of the passengers and collects fares.
In an organization, there is a flow along these hats.

The result of the whole board is a product.

The product of each hat on the board adds up to the total product.

Working It Out

The waste of people involved in no org board and the loss of product justify any amount of effort to work out, make known and use a proper org board.

Man instinctively uses an org board and protests the lack of one. The rawest recruit walking aboard a ship assumes the existence of an org board, if not a posted one, at least a known one. He assumes there will be somebody in charge and that different activities will be under different people. When there is no known org board he protests. He also feels insecure as he doesn’t know where he fits into this organization.

Almost all revolts are manned by people who have been excluded out and are not on the country’s org board. This is so true that a ridiculous circumstance occurred in the US. A president found he had “professional relief receivers.” Certain people had assumed the status of “government dependent” and were giving this as their profession. It was of course a post of sorts. And because it wasn’t admitted as a post by the government, there were some riots.

The effort to belong or to be part of is expressed by an org board. A person with no post is quite miserable. A person with an unreal post feels like a fraud or a mistake. Morale then is also considerably affected by the quality of an org board or its absence. The overall test for the group, however, is its viability, which means its ability to grow, expand, develop, etc. Viability depends on having an acceptable product. Groups which do not have an acceptable product are not likely to survive.

The volume and acceptability of a product depends in no small measure on a workable, known org board. This is true even of an individual product. An individual or small group, to get anywhere at all, requires a very exact org board. The oddity is that the smaller the group the more vital the org board. Yet individuals and small groups are the least likely to have one. Large groups disintegrate in the absence of an org board and go nonviable in the presence of a poor one.

The quality of a product, usually blamed on individual skill only, depends to an enormous extent upon the org board. For example, one disorganized mob that was trying to make a certain product was worked to death, harassed, angry at one another and had a wholly unacceptable product at about twice the usual cost; when organized to the degree of a third, still without proper schedules, still largely untrained, they began to turn out an acceptable product at about half the effort—so even some organization worked.

The product volume and quality depends utterly and totally upon the org board and hats and their use. You can train individuals endlessly but unless they are operating on a workable org board they will still have a poor or small volume product.
Lack of a known and real org board can spell failure. And lack of knowledge of the subject of organization has to be substituted for by pure genius at every point.

Thus to make anything at all, to improve any product, sustain morale and distribute work equitably and make it count, one has to have a real and a known org board.

So how do you make one?