Scoutmaster Podcast 217

This is Andy McDonald and I am a Scoutmaster with Troop 196 in Winnersprings, Florida. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me.

And now for you, Scoutmaster. So I'm always after you, aren't I about stepping back? Let scouts do stuff.

Let them make their own mistakes- right And not dangerous mistakes- but let them experiment and explore and find things out for themselves And then you know you can help them with it afterwards. Here's a great story about that from Bess Elwell Cook, who is a Girl Guides Leader in Australia. She sent me this story Apparently one meeting. The guides were making something that the Australians call Anzac Biscuits And a rough translation is oatmeal cookies.

Okay, And one of the patrols ran out of sugar And they decided that baking soda- you know that looks like sugar- that will just use baking soda instead. That's the kind of mistake that has immediate consequences that they learn about very quickly And they're probably not going to make that one again. Bess said that they did learn that that was probably not a great substitution to make in baking and that the faces were priceless. I imagine they were. Hey, this is podcast number 217.. Hey

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

Let's take a look at the mailbag Heard from our friend Rob Knapp, who said this: thanks so much for the reply to my question in last week's podcast. You have a way of making things clear. I can't express how much better Troop 348 is running after I found the blog. I still have some adults to win over, but I'm not going to give up. By the way, my son and I really enjoy the Brick Mason episodes. He's 14 and listens to the podcast when we're together in the car.

I'm glad that we can be of service. I'll need to put together a Brick Mason episode again soon. Joseph Patrick got in touch with us via Facebook. Keep it coming. He said I use the blog every week. What a lifesaver.

This past week one of the posts on the blog was about simple versus complicated scouting. Rebecca wrote in to say I love the post. I have two Girl Scout troops and this thinking transfers to Girl Scouts as well. I could not agree more. Scoutmaster Run commented on that same post. He says: you change a boy's perspective this way: A boy packs his pack, His patrol goes in the woods.

They set up camp, collect firewood, build campfires, They cook food. They thank their creator for the food They eat together. They clean up, They de-literate trail, They observe nature. They hike in the forest, They count stars, tell jokes around the campfire, sleep intents. They clean up the site, They head home. The boy unpacks, checks, cleans and stores his gear.

In this simple process we see the growth of cooperation, fellowship, leadership, service, reverence, planning, preparedness, knowledge, self-reliance and confidence. It's pretty straightforward, pretty simple and pretty effective.

Well, Ron, I couldn't agree with you more. On that same post, I got this from Tom Harrison, who's with Sea Scout Ship 510..

What a terrific post, Probably one of my favorites so far. I should note that a unit in venturing is correctly identified as a venturing crew, not a venture crew. You also left out sea scouts. I would like for you to consider identifying the Sea Scouts BSA program occasionally in your post.

So changing the post to include venturing, exploring and sea scouts would be wonderful. Thank you for your work on the behalf of the BSA and hopefully, venturing, exploring and sea scouts too.

Well, thanks, Tom, for your thoughts. Actually changed the wording to the post to be even more general and I think it helps. It's important to understand: I'm not writing on behalf of the BSA and I'm not exclusively writing or speaking to members of the BSA.

So when I'm writing about scouting in general, as I was in this post, not including ships and posts and varsity teams is pretty much a conscious choice. When I deal with BSA-specific policy or programs, I really do my best to do my research and write and speak with technical accuracy, But when I'm writing about scouting in general, I want to use the simplest language possible. If I attempted to include each of the specific organizational program names used around the world, I'd end up with a pretty long list.

You know, in Canada they call ventures a venture company and they use the term venture scouts. In Australia, in the UK, Singapore, in Japan, in Brazil.

And then there's girl guides- and guides are not called scouts strictly- and all the other groups in the scouting family. There's Trail Life and the Baton Powell Service Corps and the navigators.

There's just tons and tons of terminology And one way I think I can be useful is separating the basic principles of scouting from that kind of well-worn organizational jargon that we're all familiar with. I've been a loyal BSA scouter for more than 30 years, but I'm attempting to write and to speak to scouts in general, Not just my fellow BSA scouts.

So thank you once again, Tom, for your thoughts. It helped me sort that out a little bit more.

I want to make sure to thank Steve Fox, who put together a great set of thoughts and resources on world scouting that I posted on the blog this week. You definitely want to check that out. The article is called Taking Your Place in the World Scouting Movement.

In that article that Steve was so generous to share with us, there's a ton of resources for you and your scouts to raise your awareness of scouting around the world a little bit and, to you know, actively participate as a member of the World Scouting Movement. I think it's really a worthy read, so make sure to go check it out at ScoutmasterCGcom. If, like the other folks who've been in touch with us, you found the blog and the podcast and the other resources we offer to be useful to you, you can return the favor by becoming a ScoutmasterCGcom backer.

Now, what we do with funds from backers is we pay for the expenses involved in producing the blog and the podcast and the other resources and making them freely available to scouts and scouters all over the world. And I want to take a moment to say a special thank you to Barbara Becker, who signed up as a backer this past week. Becoming a backer is pretty easy: Just go to ScoutmasterCGcom and you'll see a support link in the main menu. Follow that. You can sign up to become a backer, Depending on the level you choose. As a thank you, I'm going to send you a copy of one or both of my books: Thoughts on Scouting and the Scouting Journey.

If you haven't read the Scouting Journey or Thoughts on Scouting, they're available on Amazon. Check them out if you will. And finally, in my little diatribe of self-promotion, here you can join 1,900 other scouters who have the ScoutmasterCG app installed on their mobile device, And you can get the app on Google Play and iTunes. And when you do, you'll be able to get direct access to every addition of the podcast, because the podcast archive is on there And it'll update with the podcast. It's published every week. You can also read all the blog posts, And I created some other resources in the app that I hope that you'll find useful.

In this week's podcast, in Scoutmastership, in 7 Minutes or Less, I want to try and offer you some guidance if you're having some basic disagreements with the way Scouting is being presented in the unit that you're a part of. And then we've got an email question to answer And that's going to take up the rest of the podcast, so let's get started. Shall we Scoutmastership in 7 Minutes or Less.

From time to time, I hear from Scouters who have some basic disagreement with the way things are going in their unit. Now, these disagreements aren't over things that endanger Scouts, So let's be clear about that. Things that endanger Scouts have to be corrected And you need to take positive action to do that. The disagreements I'm speaking of are generally around the application of the patrol system or the way youth leadership is, or maybe just kind of the general attitude or the way meetings are conducted.

You know style and interpretation and application differences. The basic scenario I see repeated time after time is that someone in a supporting role in a scout troop or a Cub Scout pack or a venturing crew or whatever unit you're involved with, is not happy with the way the folks in charge are doing things And, in a spirit of absolute goodwill, they try to encourage changes and they're either rebuffed or ignored.

Now, adult roles in scouting are set up so that there are certain people in charge of making decisions. Now, in terms of a scout troop, that's what I'm most familiar with In a scout troop, the Scoutmaster and the committee chair and the chartered organization representative are basically the decision makers. It's not a democracy, it's a hierarchy, and it's a hierarchy for a very good reason.

Now, without wanting to digress into issues that are going to cloud the question at hand, naturally you would expect the decision makers in a scouting unit to be interested in building consensus and taking direction from that consensus, not just ordering people around, but very wisely. Scouting is set up so that there are decision makers, because when it's time for decisions to be made, it's got to come down to a group of people or an individual who's going to make the final call.

Now, if you aren't in a decision making position, this can be very frustrating. What do you do if you find yourself in a situation where you have very basic disagreements about the way things are being done and you're not in one of those decision making positions?

Should you just go with the flow, or maybe you can just keep trying to influence change, or maybe you can just make the changes yourself? Once you've talked these differences over with the people who are making decisions and you've offered your point of view, and that point of view has been rejected, you have two basic choices. One is you're going to stay and play the game their way. Two is you're going to go elsewhere. There's no third option of staying and making things change. If you aren't in a decision making role, it's just not going to happen.

You're only going to make yourselves and other people unhappy. When I tell people this, sometimes they respond by telling me that if they were to leave and to go elsewhere, they would feel like they're abandoning scouts to some inferior interpretation of scouting and they feel that it's their job to set everybody straight for the good of the scouts.

Well, I'm going to say it again: Once you've clearly offered your vision and assistance and you've received a no answer, then it's time to take one of the two options: Mounting an end, run around the decision makers. That's not an option. There's no third option, where you stay there and you institute the changes despite the fact that people have clearly said no, That's not what we're going to do. It's not going to help. It will have exactly the opposite effect. Think about this for a moment Now.

Put yourself in the position of a manager who has a dissatisfied employee who wants to change the way things are run and decides to just unilaterally make those changes? Are you going to continue to employ that person? Probably not.

Put yourself in the position of a head coach of a baseball team who has decided they know better than you, so they're going to go change the lineup without consulting you. What would you do as that head coach? I would get rid of the assistant coach, because that's not the way the game works.

Now I've had people disagree with the way that I work as a Scoutmaster, and when we discuss those disagreements, I explain what I'm doing, and if they don't like it, if they don't accept that answer, further discussion on the subject really becomes nothing less than complaining. Every once in a while, I've had a scouter who mounts an end run and tries to make changes that we've discussed and I've rejected. And I've got to tell you: uncooperative volunteers don't last long. They get frustrated or we ask them to leave. It's an extraordinarily rare occurrence, but when you come to loggerheads like this, you've got to make decisions.

So let's remember what those two decisions are: You stay and play the game the way that it's being played in that unit, or you decide that you're going to go elsewhere. Now, if you're volunteering for scouting, that means you have a son or a daughter involved. Probably that's going to definitely influence your choice. If your child is dissatisfied with the way things are going in the unit and they want to make a change, then look into the options. In most places there are options.

There are other units and you go and investigate those and you find one that matches your vision and then you can channel all your energy into actually making a difference rather than being frustrated people who don't share your vision. If your child is happy where they are with their friends in the unit that they're in, you're probably going to want to leave well enough alone, because this isn't about you as much as them, right? If you find yourself on the horns with this particular kind of dilemma, let me know, get in touch.

I've been there before and I've worked with a lot of people who have been, and you know there is a chance that maybe I can be of assistance to you. I make it all sound really simple. I understand, and when you're in the middle of a situation like this it doesn't seem simple, but I've got to tell you it's actually just about as simple. As I explained Based on my experience, you've got two choices. This is how it goes just a little did he doesn't mean a thing. But when the boys are marching, how they love to sing, there were mice, mice eating up the rice in the stores.

In the stores there were rats- rats big as blooming cats. In the quarter master store. My eyes are dim. I cannot see. I have not brought my specs with me. I have not brought my specs with me.

Write me a letter, send it by name email. That is folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. This question comes via the contact feature on the Scoutmaster CG app from Jack Curran, and Jack says: hello. I'm a huge fan of the blog and I've found a lot of inspiration in your podcast.

I believe the troops should be entirely scout led, but our assistant Scoutmaster in charge of helping the quarter master with troop equipment is, I think, taking his role a little too far. He tells the senior patrol leader what to do and he takes over as quarter master if the scout quarter master is not there, instead of getting another scout to fill in. I've recommended your podcast and I hope that he'll figure things out, but he feels like scouts don't do a good enough job and almost always doesn't trust them to do the work well. Jack, I'm glad you're enjoying the podcast.

You know the difficulty we run into with many adults is they fail to understand the real aim of our work, and I always accept the premise that folks are volunteering for scouting out of good will and they really want to make good. It's just that a lot of times we don't make the connections that we need to make.

If the goal of our work was well maintained storeroom or troop trailer or making sure we had every single piece of gear we needed while camping, it would definitely stand to reason that adults who are generally more capable and thorough should be in charge. But this isn't our principal aim.

This isn't our real goal at all, is it? Our job is not making sure that there are no mistakes. Our job is providing the opportunity for our scouts to gain some experience and to build character by doing things for themselves, and for that to happen, we really have to keep that goal, that aim, uppermost in our mind.

Now I've been in this exact same situation before, where an adult you know who was detailed off to mentor the quartermaster to the conclusion that there was absolutely no way he could entrust a scout age boy to take care of things and to be thorough and tended to take over and do everything whether the scout was there or not, so this is definitely not an unusual problem. Now, as a regular listener to the podcast, you're going to be very familiar with what I'm about to say, because I find it is a pretty effective way to help folks understand what their role as a scouter is, and that is to liken scouting to any other kind of athletic game and to liken a scout troop to an athletic team. You have coaches, you have players.

Coaches coach, they help develop skills, they share knowledge and then they step back and they let the players play the game. The difficulty in scouting is unlike a football game or a baseball game or something like that. There's not a hard and fast line on the field about where players go and where coaches go.

You know, in a football game coaches can't run out onto the field. They'll get themselves kicked out of the game if they cross the sideline. And they run out onto the field.

In scouting that sideline isn't marked, so it takes a lot of work and a lot of thinking and some experience on the part of scouts to understand where that sideline is. Maybe that analogy will help with this particular scouter and agree where the sideline is at, when it's game time and when it's practice time, and what their role is precisely. As I said, not an uncommon problem, but there's a way out, and it begins with fostering this basic understanding of what our real aim as scouts are. Listen, if you have a question for me, you can get in touch and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.

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