Scoutmaster Podcast 361

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. Hey, I'm back again. Yeah, I know it took a little while, Sorry about that, Doing my best to pay attention to what's going on at ScoutMasterCGcom. I sure appreciate your emails and things like that. Like my father would say, this is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp

Stick. I mean, most things are right. Hey, this is podcast number 361.. Welcome back to the ScoutMaster podcast. This is Clarke Green and and finally, yes, we're back with the promised series of talks about what scouting is, kind of foundational series of talks. It's gonna go for four or five podcasts and I'm going to need your help and I'll remind you of this later in the podcast.

I need you to reply to these podcasts and ask me questions. Let me know if I am effectively communicating. I am asking you for your reflections, your ideas, your questions about this podcast. You can get in touch with me very easily. Go to scoutmastercgcom, Click the contact link at the top of the page, or you can get in touch with me at Clark at scoutmastercgcom. C-L-A-R-K-E at scoutmastercgcom.

My attempt in the next several podcasts is going to be to explain what I understand about the basics of scouting and to build on a foundation of ideas that should help you be a better scouter. It's my theory that having these basic ideas in your head and understanding the way that the whole process works is how you figure out what practical things you should be doing or what you shouldn't be doing.

So if you've come to this podcast looking for quickly actionable things like program ideas and methods and stuff like that, you're probably not going to find it here, because there are plenty of resources that I've created that you can find at scoutmastercgcom and you can find on any number of other places online And in books and other materials that have been produced for over a century of scouting. There's just this wealth of practical, quickly actionable things out there, But they're not really all that useful. Without knowing why you're doing this and how the whole process works, These podcasts are going to tend to be much shorter than one would expect. If I've done my work of distilling these ideas down, it shouldn't take that long to explain them.

So that's what I'm going to do, And then we're going to follow up with your questions, ideas, reflections in the next podcast. So, with all that in mind, let's get started, shall we

I think ideally when we get started on something like this. What would be best if we started with a totally clean slate And you didn't have any presumptions about what scouting is or how it works.

Now, that is an impossibility, isn't it? Because everybody understands something about scouting.

So what I want to ask you to do is just kind of open your mind and lay aside what you think scouting is and follow along with me as we start with a blank slate and build on basic ideas. So I'm going to employ a big analogy here for this entire series. That's the best way that I've figured out how to do this. It's a big analogy. Analogies are great because they take something that is familiar to us and explain something that is unfamiliar. But let's remember that analogies break down at some point.

We can't push them, because an analogy is not the thing that it is set out to describe. So if I say A is like B, that doesn't mean that A is B.

So just kind of keep that in mind because, as I said, analogies break down. So now that you have that, you have that warning, let's go.

The analogy I want to apply to scouting is that scouting is a game. I'm not the originator of that analogy, The founder of scouting. Robert Baden Powell is the first person to talk about scouting in that way, And it would be a good idea for us to go back and to look at the early history of scouting, not out of nostalgia for it but just as a way of understanding how it functions and how it works.

So here's a lightning review, okay, of the way scouting started. Robert Baden Powell was a noted British Army officer, famous in Great Britain for a campaign called the Siege of Motha King during the Boer War.

So that's in the late 1800s. Baden Powell employed some unique military strategy during the siege that he wrote about in his book AIDS to Scouting in 1899. AIDS to Scouting became unexpectedly popular with people working with youth in Great Britain. Baden Powell saw this.

He was encouraged to write a book specifically for young people, And so Scouting for Boys was published in 1908.. Baden Powell openly depended on many of the ideas in a book called The Birch Bark Role of the Woodcraft Indians, published in 1906 by Ernest Thompson Seton, who would go on to be one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America. But when Scouting for Boys was published, there was no organization. There was not. Baden Powell didn't start an organization, He published a book. That book got into the hands of young people in Great Britain, boys and girls- and they started their own scouting adventures.

They formed patrols and started doing what was in the book. Adult involvement and organizations came later.

Now, all of that history is helpful to know because it helps you form a concept of this game that we're playing. The game came first. Everything else came later. Very much like when, in 1891,, Dr James Naismith nailed a peach basket up on the wall in Springfield, Massachusetts.

There was no league, There was no NBA, There was just the idea of this form of the game that we know now as basketball. So the game existed before all of these formal things. It's important to understand that about scouting, because the elements of the game are the most important thing, Not all the things that have been created around to contain the elements of the game.

So our analogy is: scouting is first and foremost a game that's played by young people and it can be done without any kind of organizational support. Fortunately, we have organizational support, but the organization is not the game.

As we go through this series, we're going to talk about what's important and what's not. What's important is understanding the game and helping young people play it, That's all. A game has a set of rules, and rules are important because they define the game.

So scouting has sets of rules and policies and procedures created by the organizations that contain scouting. You're the member of such an organization. You should understand the rules, policies and procedures of that organization and as a scouter, you're honor bound to follow them. It takes a certain kind of person to be a scouter, Let's let's face it, and often that certain kind of person is not all that interested in being told what to do by some organization somewhere. But no matter what the organization, if you look at their rules, policies and procedures and you understand the basics of the game, the rules, policies and procedures begin to make a lot more sense.

So I am not disdainful of these bigger organizations and I encourage you not to be. I encourage you to look for the support that they offer, enabling you and your scouts to play the game of scouting.

So at this point we know that scouting is a game and that that game is defined by rules, policies and procedures that are presented by the organization that you're a part of. But it's also defined by those very things that were present when the game began and we're going to call those the strategies and methods, the locations and the skills of the game and the goal of the game.

So let's start by talking about the strategies and methods, which are different than the rules. And here's one big thing that I think gets confused when we go to train scouts is that we take the strategies and methods, the rules, policies and procedures, we mix them all together and we present that as a way to be trained in this thing called scouting, and it doesn't work all that well because, while they're interdependent, they're not easily understood when they're all mixed up.

So we need to be more theoretical when we're talking about the strategies and methods that we apply. The rules, policies and procedures are limitations and definitions. Strategies and methods are more open and interesting.

Before we go any further, we have to understand that we've reached a point where our analogy breaks down, because in games you have a competition, which teams or individuals are in competition with each other. In scouting, we don't have competitions with other individuals.

What we have is a challenge to achieve personal goals rather than competition between individuals or teams. Yes, we may have competitions between individuals and teams, but they are not the goal of the game. They're a method employed in playing the game.

So what are our strategies and methods? Well, you're probably familiar with a list of strategies or methods, and there are a list of eight, there are a list of 10, there are a list of 12.. There is one key method or strategy that we employ in scouting and we typically call that the patrol method, but the word patrol is a bit of a stumbling block in understanding what we're talking about.

So let's call it the small group method, because the scouting game is played in small groups. In a scout troop it's a patrol, in a cub pack it's a den, but you get the idea. It's a small group. I would say that probably most people don't think of it in those terms, but that is the key method, and the reason that it's key is because scouting works on that small group basis. That's where we really advance towards the goal.

So what is our goal? Well, our goal is not to score more points than the opposing team or individual. It's not to rack up a bunch of individual achievements. Our goal is quite intriguing because when Baden Powell founded scouting, he founded it based on the idea that it would develop a set of ideals. In scouts, Those ideals are embodied by the scout, oath and law, which are expressions of things that have been at the forefront of every enlightened human endeavor throughout history, and the development of those ideals in individual scouts is our goal.

We'll talk about that more in depth as we go along, but for now that's the important point. Games also have a location, and this is this is where the analogy works pretty well, but not exactly well, because the location that we play the game of scouting in is the outdoors, and that is more important than it might appear at first blush. But we play our game of scouting in the out of doors. Games have sets of skills and scouting has a set of skills. Every game involves skills. You have to dribble a basketball, you have to be able to swing a bat and hit a baseball and you have to be able to put accurately playing the game of golf.

You take any of those skills in isolation and they don't have a whole lot of practicality outside of the construct of the game, but the discipline of mind and body that you apply in learning them in the game applies outside of the game. Scouting is the same way, kind of, because some of the skills in scouting don't have tremendous practical application outside of the game. Some of them certainly do, but, like a free throw, a home run or sinking a 20-foot putt, mastery of those skills is not the most important thing. The idea is the process that you went through to master those skills can be applied to many other areas of life, and the same is true with scouting, even though some of the skills are very applicable outside of the construct of the game.

So let's go back and review this for a moment. We're using the analogy that scouting is a game. It, within that analogy, it shares the components of most of the other games we're familiar with. It has sets of rules and policies and procedures, it has strategies or methods, it has a location, it has skills and it has an ultimate goal.

I want you to think about this particular phrase. Scouting is the development of character in individual scouts, achieved by applying the patrol method. I kind of have this fascination with trying to boil things down to one sentence. That's my one sentence.

The game of scouting is a development of character with individual scouts by applying the patrol method, and I think that will be oft repeated as we move forward in these foundational talks: the game of scouting and the other games that we've talked about. There is something about them that has this kind of internal conflict because they are theoretically perfectible things. There is a theoretical perfect basketball game. There's a theoretical perfect baseball game. There's a theoretical perfect round of golf, but they're only perfectible in theory. To my knowledge, the only game that has ever achieved theoretical perfection is bowling, where you can actually roll a perfect game.

There are aspects of the other games that you know where you have a no-hitter or something like that that I guess you could argue are expressions of perfection. But when we construct games we have this idea of perfection of the game that is theoretically attainable but is practically unobtainable. Scouting is the same way. There are things about scouting that are theoretically obtainable but practically unobtainable, and realizing that takes some pressure off because you understand that the process of playing the game is the most important thing.

Not attaining a state of perfection in the game- and this is an important concept because you- you know if your particular personality is- is aimed at achievement and perfection and you focus too closely upon that- it can make you kind of frustrating to be around and make you less effective as a scouter, and it's a pretty common frustration for most of us because we know that there is theoretical perfection in the game out there, but that perfection is practically unobtainable. And what will help you kind of deal with that basic cognitive dissonance, which is really aggravating, is the idea of measurement, because measurement is part of games.

The rules, policies and procedures set objective metric standards for measurement of the games and in scouting, yes, there are some objective metric standards for measurement, but the most important measurements towards achieving our goal, which is the development of character based on the ideals of scouting, are individual: where did you begin, how did you proceed and where did you end up? Did you end up ahead of where you began? Then we've succeeded.

Now that kind of definition of success can be characterized as creating an excuse for not having done better. But every measurement that matters in scouting it's a complicated calculation of who the scout is and what their background is and what they're capable of doing, and it's something we'll examine closer as we go on.

So that's my introductory talk about the foundations of scouting. I'm very interested in hearing your questions, your ideas, your comments and reflections on it. You can get in touch with me by going to scoutmastercgcom and clicking the contact link at the top of the page, or you can email me at clark at scoutmastercgcom. It's clark at scoutmastercgcom.