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Effective Scouters are alert to possibility, to the challenge of the moment.
If we aren’t watchful, though, those transient moments of possibility become obscured by our preoccupation with competence.
There’s no inherent virtue in being an experienced Scouter, after all if you stick with something long enough you become experienced. Hopefully experience leads to competence, but competence shouldn’t obscure possibility;
As we get more experienced, we get better, more competent, more able to do our thing.
And it’s easy to fall in love with that competence, to appreciate it and protect it. The pitfall? We close ourselves off from possibility.
Possibility, innovation, art–these are endeavors that not only bring the whiff of failure, they also require us to do something we’re not proven to be good at. After all, if we were so good at it that the outcome was assured, there’d be no sense of possibility.
Seth Godin Competence vs. possibility
Consistency and competence are certainly valuable but they are not really what we are aimed at in Scouting. Our goal is not a isn’t consistent product, in fact we aren’t producing a product at all. We are working with individual one-off human beings with individual hopes, dreams, talents, and possibilities.
Our challenge is to help our Scouts weave the ideals and skills of Scouting into their individual character, not to make them into some sort of one-size-fits-all automaton. This challenge is full of possibility, but possibility is an unstable element, you never quite know where it’s going, or what it’s going to do, or how long it will be present.
Scouters have to keep moving and changing to capture possibility, we need to seize the moment and make the most of it.
