If you sort things out only once something has jammed, you are permanently behind. The hat that arranges the flow in a business works several steps ahead of production, preparing today what next week will need.
The hat that arranges the flow
Three hats run in every business, even when they all sit on one head. The Product Officer drives production, the Establishment Officer builds the foundation and maintains it, and the Organizing Officer arranges the flow so production can happen. The question this hat asks is what is holding up what goes out.
According to the source, the Organizing Officer assists the Product Officer, and four actions define the post. He lines production up, gets the team into the groove of what they are supposed to be getting out, sees that the Product Officer's plans are executed, and carries out the plan himself.
In everyday terms, this hat clears away whatever sits between an intention and the doing. The booklet is clear that it is a different job from sorting paperwork.
It helps to know who this hat answers to. The Organizing Officer works for the Product Officer, and ranks equally with the Establishment Officer. Neither of those two is subordinate to the other.
Suppose a studio where the decision is that four projects come in this month. Whoever wears the organising hat makes sure a quote template exists, the designer knows the format, and no two projects collide in one week.
Or a garage. Whoever confirms the parts are on the shelf before the car arrives is organising, and without that check production stops halfway.
Now the opposite: a business where every morning begins with a hunt for the file, for whoever took the key, for what was agreed with the client. According to the booklet, that business has no active organising hat.
Several steps ahead
The booklet calls this the most useful distinction in the chapter. Whoever wears this hat and waits to be asked is already late.
The source puts it as a distance. Someone who stands four or five feet behind the Product Officer, when the right place is four or five feet in front, has lost eight or ten feet.
For a small business it means this: if you touch the arrangements only after something jams, you are always at the back. What this hat does is prepare what will be needed next week, and leave aside what broke today.
Suppose a bakery owner who orders ingredients against the holiday forecast and never against what has run out. She does not close early for a shortage.
And the opposite: a contractor who orders materials on the day they run out. Each of his sites stands idle two days on average, and from outside it looks like a supplier problem.
This is also what a business looks like when the hat is missing. The source allows that you can produce with no organisation at all. It adds that the volume, the quality and the viability will be dreadful, and that the overload will soon swamp the business. Take a garage with two mechanics who never pause, no written work queue and no check of stock in advance. Cars wait for parts and clients complain, although nobody stops working.
Why stockpile resources
From this follows a habit that sounds odd at first. The booklet says an Organizing Officer is supposed to stockpile resources: money, people and materials.
In the booklet's wording, this officer should be greedy for whatever makes the next round of production possible, and should not settle for minimum stock. The bakery above does exactly this, so the holiday never catches it without ingredients.
The return goes beyond stock. A freelance consultant with no employees set aside one hour a week for the organising hat alone. Within two months she found that a quarter of her hours were going on coordination that could be eliminated.
An honest gap: it has no clean number
The booklet says something here that it chooses to state openly, because it is true. For the other two hats, the source defines a test. For the Organizing Officer it has no measure of the same certainty. What exists is later and carries lower authority, and it describes the product of this hat as completed plans and projects.
So the booklet suggests measuring this hat by plans completed. Count the items on this month's sort-out list that actually closed. An owner who feels he got through a great deal, and cannot name one item that closed, is measuring a feeling. According to the booklet, a feeling is not a measure.
Because the hat has no clean number, it is also the first to disappear. In a dental practice with six staff, the senior dentist holds production and the practice manager holds establishment, and nobody holds organising. The booklet calls it the hat that falls first.
What the booklet has on this
This chapter of the booklet has two exercises, an analysis exercise and a build-it exercise. Later it explains what happens to a business when one of the three hats is missing, and why hiring somebody to sort things out does not replace this hat.
Whoever arranges only what has already broken works hard and stays behind. This hat starts working when what you arrange today is meant for next week.