Plummeting productivity, massive layoffs, sour relations between management and labor, executive incompetence and dishonest business dealings all plague the workplace. It is small wonder that the act of work is a source of stress and anxiety for millions.
How to increase job efficiency and productivity, how to handle upsets and confusion in the workplace and how to overcome exhaustion are all matters that concern both the laborer and the manager. Their resolution would bring about not only greater security but greater satisfaction.

Work not only can be both rewarding and fulfilling, but as the major activity in most of our lives, it should be. Utilization of this information will help you make it just that.

One might be led to believe there was something confusing about navigating one’s career in the world of work. And confusion there is, to one who is not equipped with guides and maps.

As one looks at the many factors which might derange his life and undermine his security, the impression is, confusion seems well founded and it can be said with truth that all difficulties are fundamentally confusions. Given enough menace, enough unknown, a man ducks his head and tries to swing through it blindly. He has been overcome by confusions.

Enough unsolved problems add up to a huge confusion. Every now and then, on his job, enough conflicting orders bring the worker into a state of confusion. A modern plant can be so poorly managed that the entire thing appears to be a vast confusion to which no answer is possible.

Luck is the usual answer one resorts to in a confusion. If the forces about one seem too great, one can always “rely on his luck.” By luck we mean “destiny not personally guided.” When one turns loose of an automobile wheel and hopes the car will stay on the road by luck, he is often disappointed. And so it is in life. Those things left to chance become less likely to work themselves out. One has seen a friend shutting his eyes to the bill collectors and gritting his teeth while he hopes that he will win at the races and solve all his problems. One has known people who handled their lives this way for years. Indeed, one of English novelist Charles Dickens’ great characters had the entire philosophy of “waiting for something to turn up.” But luck, while we grant that it is a potent element, is only necessary amid a strong current of confusing factors. If one has to have luck to see him through, then it follows that one isn’t any longer at his own automobile wheel and it follows, too, that one is dealing with a confusion.

It would be wise, then, to understand exactly what a confusion is and how it could be resolved.

A confusion can be defined as any set of factors or circumstances which do not seem to have any immediate solution. More broadly, a confusion is random motion.

If you were to stand in heavy traffic you would be likely to feel confused by all the motion whizzing around you. If you were to stand in a heavy storm, with leaves and papers flying by, you would be likely to be confused.

Is it possible to actually understand a confusion? Is there any such thing as an “anatomy of confusion”? Yes, there is.

If, as a switchboard operator, you had ten calls hitting your board at once, you might feel confused. But is there any answer to the situation? If, as a shop foreman, you have three emergencies and an accident all at the same time, you might feel confused. But is there any answer to that?

A confusion is only a confusion so long as all particles are in motion. A confusion is only a confusion so long as no factor is clearly defined or understood.

Confusion is the basic cause of stupidity. To the stupid all things except the very simple ones are confused. Thus if one knew the anatomy of confusion, no matter how bright one might be, he would be brighter.

If you have ever had to teach some ambitious young person who was not too bright, you will understand this well. You attempt to explain how such and so works. You go over it and over it and over it. And then you turn him loose and he promptly makes a complete botch of it. He “didn’t understand,” he “didn’t grasp it.” You can simplify your understanding of his misunderstanding by saying, very rightly, “He was confused.”

Ninety-nine percent of all education fails, when it fails, on the grounds that the student was confused.

And not only in the realm of the job, but in life itself, when failure approaches, it is born, one way or another, from confusion. To learn of machinery or to live life, one has to be able either to stand up to confusion or to take it apart.

We have in Scientology a certain principle about confusion. It is called the “Doctrine of the Stable Datum”.

If you saw a great many pieces of paper whirling about a room they would look confused until you picked out one piece of paper to be the piece of paper by which everything else was in motion. In other words, a confusing motion can be understood by conceiving one thing to be motionless.

In a stream of traffic all would be confusion unless you were to conceive one car to be motionless in relation to the other cars and so to see others in relation to the one.

The switchboard operator receiving ten calls at once solves the confusion by labeling, correctly or incorrectly, one call as the first call to receive her attention. The confusion of ten calls all at once becomes less confusing the moment she singles out one call to be answered. The shop foreman confronted by three emergencies and an accident needs only to elect his first target of attention to start the cycle of bringing about order again.

Until one selects one datum, one factor, one particular in a confusion of particles, the confusion continues. The one thing selected and used becomes the stable datum for the remainder.

Any body of knowledge, more particularly and exactly, is built from one datum. That is its stable datum. Invalidate it and the entire body of knowledge falls apart. A stable datum does not have to be the correct one. It is simply the one that keeps things from being in a confusion and on which others are aligned.