This policy letter is revised. The second paragraph of the original said that it was dangerous to talk about the subject because somebody could do an immediate make- wrong by saying “This means don’t try to raise any stats.”

WHAT exactly is a stat push?

Well, exactly that happened. There was a heavy campaign run into all Flag Operations Liaison Offices and to orgs designed to discredit asking for raises in stats. (The person who did it and failed to push production quotas is suspended and under Comm Ev.)

The danger in talking about this subject at all is that someone can do an immediate make-wrong by saying, “This means don’t try to raise any stats.”

The whole point seems to have been missed. It was this: You can’t ask for a NUMBER, you CAN and MUST ask for a SOMETHING.

So to understand this subject at all, one must have a pretty clear idea of exactly what is meant by “Don’t push stats.”

That something is a product. It is a thing, a tangible item.

First of all one has to know precisely that STATISTICS ARE AN INDICATOR; THEY ARE NOT AN OBJECT.

Right at this minute, as a result of a mission, HCO PL 16 Nov 76, “Production Quotas” has now been provided with thoroughly researched subproducts one has to push in order to get the PRODUCTS. These are the real tangible actions you have to take to get a number of actual products. In other words, by getting many exact minor products, you then can achieve the valuable final product.

WHEN YOU PUSH THE INDICATOR YOU DO NOT OBTAIN THE OBJECT IT REPRESENTS.

STATISTICS are those numbers which simply count the products attained or obtained.

PRODUCTION IS COMPLETED CYCLES OF ACTION, NOT JUST NUMBERS.

Stat management is the only kind of management you can do on a production scene. Management by statistics was brought to a fine art in Scientology admin tech. To discredit it is, of course, to court failure.

The figure “1” in “1 apple” is not the apple.

Abusing statistical management is also something of a crime. It has been done by some managers who said “Get the stats up” without ever saying what subproducts you had to get that would then make up the product.

Therefore pure, raw, naked stat pushing is an outpoint called “wrong target.”

Stat management is a valuable tool and has gotten us over the years. To discredit it first by saying first just “Get the stats up” without saying how or what or why was one side of the pendulum. Then the pendulum swung clear to the extreme and people were being made guilty for even watching stats or demanding or working to raise them.

Pushing a stat without doing anything to bring about the stat is therefore an aberration.

So let’s get a little middle swing of the pendulum now.

Demanding a stat without doing anything to see that it occurs or putting anything there to make it or correcting anything that is preventing it is an aberration built out of either psychosis or ignorance of what should really be done.

It is perfectly all right to demand that stats rise so long as one says what subproducts and products make up those stats and gives some indication of what people should do to get the stats rising.

It is quite true that stats must be kept up. But unless they are kept up by putting something there or correcting something that is there and getting all the cycles of action done by all those who should do them, the stats will DECREASE and eventually vanish.

It is perfectly all right to do stat management.

An order, a telex, a yell to the effect “GET THE STATS UP” is so much wasted time.

And it is perfectly okay to come down hard on people or orgs who fail to get their stats in viable range.

Further, such an order or telex or yell in any form has a very deteriorating effect. Individuals or staffs look at it in a properly weird light. They are there, they are doing what they can, they have problems and tangles and barriers. And telling them to “Get the stats up” causes various reactions, none of them very good. Essentially, it gives them neither help nor direction and even subtly informs them that the person ordering either does not know or does not care what is going on and is not about to help. The eventual reaction can become an ignoring of that command channel.

So long as you give t-hem some idea of what small products (subproducts) they have to get to make up the real products, you are NOT doing a stat push.

There are some specialized actions in stat pushing. Chief amongst them is the “GI push.”

So long as you give people some direction and guidance, you can yell for stat increases all you want.

The usual indicator of this is a neglect or abandonment of staff or caring about staff. One sees no real effective attention on recruitment, training, apprenticing, hatting, future execs. And when one sees this it usually follows that there is a “GI push” going on somewhere in the executive strata. Why this indicator? Well, you see, it only takes a small handful of people to get in GI and where executive attention is fixated on a “GI push” the various production staff, HCO and the rest of the org aren’t “necessary.” You find this with EDs who reg instead of getting Registrars and putting an org there, with EDs who go for credit unions and odd financial deals. And you will also find they have the biggest number and amount of refunds and the biggest backlogs AND a shrinking and unhappy org. Unfortunately, they soon also get a crashing GI for none of the support actions are being done across the divisions.

And you better.

The reason “GI pushing” happens so often is the structure of the society itself. The only real crime for which one can be punished by the governments of today is lack of money. In other crimes if one has the huge sums necessary to hire lawyers one can often get off. But the crime of having no money is the only crime one cannot get out of. There are even laws which cause the arrest on the street of persons who do not have so much money in their pockets or wallets: it is called “vagrancy.” So with the whole aberrated society on a big “GI push,” with Wall Street measuring values only in how much something costs, with wages and prices soaring, at this writing, to total social disaster, it is no wonder that short-sighted and untrained or even aberrated executives get into a “GI push.”

The answer to not having money is, of course, to make more money. And there is nothing whatever wrong with that. BUT that is not done with a “GI push.” It is done with putting a whole org there, every part of it functioning and delivering with all the bugs out of its lines, and making a lot, lot, lot more money. Fifty trained staff producing everything an org is supposed to produce will make far more money than five guys concentrating on GI only and letting the rest of the org go to blazes. The GI made by the fifty will go on increasing. The GI made by the five (and not backed up by the rest of the org) will decrease week by week and then crash.

Let us take some examples of “stat pushing”:

The room is cold and the staff is wearing overcoats and using blankets. Mr. Stat Pusher walks over to the thermometer on the wall and sees that it reads very low. So he yells at the thermometer, “Get the stat up!” Nothing happens of course; it still says 15°, so he yells at the staff, “Get that stat up!” Now, in this instance, having a stat pusher around, the org has no Treasury Div and so there was nobody to pay the bills and the fuel company has refused to deliver further fuel. The janitor is missing because there is no HCO to hire one or keep one on post so there’s no one to light the furnace even if it had fuel. And due to an unhatted Financial Planning Committee, that also doesn’t meet or exist, no new boiler was ordered when the old one blew up last year. The stat pusher seems incapable of observing these facts, and is too unskilled to bring them to rights. So he continues to yell “Get the stat up” and the staff wears more and more coats and blankets until at last it is just a quiet scene of solid ice.

If the letters out stat is down, this is a bad INDICATOR. It is vital that one keeps stats and observes when one goes down. It is extremely hard to manage on one’s post or in an org unless one has a stat. But, in going down, WHAT is being indicated? A lack of letters out. So what does one do? Does he yell “Get the letters stat up” or does he look into this? If he looked into it he could find the real Why, handle it and the letters stat would go up. He might find that the Letter Reges were all sacked so as to increase the unit pay one week and that he has somehow gotten a nut onto a personnel or finance post (whose R/Ses make even his head jerk back and forth). He might find that the typewriters had broken down. He might find that Dept 5 people were all being used by Div 5 to handle their files. At the very least he will find something aberrated or ignorant going on which has to be handled before the letters can be flooded out again. WHEN this is found and handled, THEN the letters out stat will go up.

So Mr. Stat Pusher is essentially operating on a short circuit. He cannot or will not look. And there is another variety of stat aberration which comes about after a lot of “Get the stat up” has failed. This is Mr. Stat Ignorer.

Mr. Stat Ignorer is driving along in a car and he looks at the speedometer. It says 15 m.p.h. He glares at the needle for a moment and then handles it. He pastes a piece of paper over it so it can’t be seen. And sits back and drives contentedly. If he’d looked, he would have found he had three flat tires and an engine about to run out of oil and explode.

Then there is also Mr. Stat Faker. He knows that he will get in trouble if his STAT is down. So he simply dreams up a figure and puts it on graph paper. He is encouraged and rendered confident in this because he is sure that no senior will come around and notice the towers of unanswered letters or the huge backlogs of cramming orders or the mobbed waiting room of unhandled public or the mountain of uncorrected and unfiled address plates. He is confident because no senior has in the last year or two. And he can say “I’m an upstat” when the Ethics Officer tries to hit him for keeping the front door to the org obstructed with his motorcycle. And he is recognizable by a caved-in case, low morale and a hunted look of glee as he creeps through the org.

There is one common denominator the stat pusher, the stat ignorer and the stat faker have. And that is AN ABSENCE OF SKILLED MANAGEMENT.

We have investigatory tech. It is there for use. We have the Data Series evaluation tech. It is there for use. We have administrative tech. And it is all published and there for use. And further, when it is known and used, proven times without number now, production and prosperity occur AND show up as statistics which INDICATE that production and prosperity are occurring.

Yes, it is very, very true that an org or a manager or an auditor or file clerk gets in trouble if their stats are down.

Yes, it is true that stats should exist and be used.

But it is equally true that the way to get a stat is to put something there that can get something done and get the lines debugged and the scene handled.

The fate of the stat pusher, the stat ignorer and the stat faker is to look around one day and find no org.

It’s a very long way between yelling or telexing or writing “Get the stat up” and handling things and getting production cycles completed so that the stat WILL go up.

The stat, properly stated and honestly kept, IS a vital indicator of the scene. If you know how to use them you can get the areas that have to be handled. And if you know your policy and tech you can find the real Whys and get real handlings and get things whizzing.

We mean to have all the stats going up because this INDICATES a bettering state of affairs for everyone.

The job of the Product Officer is NOT to yell “Get the stats up.” The Product Officer is there to notice and order things like “Get those letters answered so they get answers.” And the job of the Org Officer is to carry out the handlings the Product Officer finds necessary to get production rolling.

A fire-breathing Product Officer is worth his weight to every staff member IF he is trying to get and is getting production which results in bettered conditions, better products, better prosperity and THIS will incidentally show up in the stats.

It’s a world of things that have to be done and coordinated before the stats go up.

We are in the business of people, we are in the business of a bettered world. We have to have completed cycles of action. And these are shown in stats.

We are also in a world of exchange and would be no matter what ideology we lived under. We have to “make GI” and we have to have “the stats up.”

But our success is measured in terms of the ACTIONS we do, for only those show up in the indicators called statistics.

So, okay. Let’s go about it the right way. And find what is holding the stats down and handle and correct those things and so, honestly and swiftly, become upstat.