Scoutmaster Podcast 365

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. Hey, did I ever tell you the one about the Scoutmaster's bunk at summer camp?

Well, it hasn't been made up yet. Oh yeah, it's really, it's come to this.

Hey, this is podcast number 365.. Hey, Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. We've gone through three or four podcasts in our foundation series And over the next three we're going to wind it up by looking at and talking about three main things: about scouting, about playing the game, patrols, advancement and youth leadership, And these are the key pieces that occupy most of what we do as Scouters and make scouting what it is for young people. What we're going to do is ask ourselves why they're part of scouting, how they are intended to function and what our role is in making them happen. This week we're going to be talking about patrols.

Remember to get in touch with me with your comments and questions. I'll tell you how to do that towards the end of the podcast, But for now, let's get started, shall we?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, a multifaceted man of many spigots, a human soup bean, and they give him on his own time.

There's a quartermaster. Everybody knows. There's a song about him. This is how it goes. Just a little diddy 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 quartermaster store. My eyes are dim, I cannot see. I have not brought my specs with me. I have not brought my specs with me. If you'll remember, one of the things that I've said somewhere within this series of podcasts is that Scouting presents us with one goal and one method. The goal is to develop character.

The method is the patrol method, And it's likely I'm going to do what I always do, and that is use the terms patrol method and patrol system interchangeably. But in a little bit I'm going to differentiate between those two terms. But just stick with me while we figure a couple of things out first.

So step one is asking the question: why do we even have patrols? And when I first became a Scouter, I looked at the whole patrol method thing and was happy to have it operate in this kind of vestigial manner that the Scouter's prior to me had been doing, which is it's basically a way to administer a larger group by dividing it into smaller groups. That seemed to be the reason that we had it. But if you look back at our history, and you just look back at the principles upon which Scouting was founded, you see that this is not the key reason. Even though it makes sense administratively to take a big group of people and divide them into smaller groups to better manage them, that wasn't why we started having patrols.

So let's jump into the way back machine here for a moment and look at what happened when Scouting started. And forgive me if you've heard all this before, but Baden Powell, the founder of Scouting, is a British Army officer in Africa during the Boer War. He achieves a certain fame back home as a war hero. He writes a book about the methods that he used in South Africa and he calls those methods Scouting. He comes home to Great Britain to find that people involved with youth are using this book and is encouraged to write. Scouting for Boys and foments a worldwide phenomenon.

There is no Scouting movement. There is no Scouting organization. There's only the book and the idea. Basically, what happens is young people get the book and they just start doing Scouting.

And the way that they do that is by making up a patrol, and there's a great story about this, told by a fellow named John Thurman, who was one of those young people, and I want to read you some of that story. Thurman wrote: in the early days of Scouting, boys from all over the country, and later from all over the world, bought the book Scouting for Boys and formed themselves in patrols.

I want to repeat, formed themselves. This means that someone- a leader, not appointed by anyone in particular, but chosen by other fellows because those same other fellows were willing to follow him- gathered around himself a crowd of chaps who wanted to be scouts. They formed a patrol and they started to train themselves using the book Scouting for Boys as the only God. But they found- as patrols have always found- that there were many things they did not know, many things they could not find out and many things they could not do without the help of some adult.

So the practice grew of a number of patrols getting together, forming a troop and usually finding their own Scoutmaster. So this is why we have patrols, because patrols are the basic unit of Scouting. We didn't begin with troops and with adults being involved.

We began with young people taking the book, forming themselves into patrols and then finding out that well, we could have some advantages if adults were involved with this and we would have the benefit of scale if we brought our patrols together into a troop. Now the rest of this story is told in a post on ScoutMasterCGcom called Why Do We Have Scoutmasters? And I will link to it in the podcast notes.

But in our discussion of the patrol method or system, I think this is all very helpful in understanding how to apply the patrol method. See, Baden Powell saw that young people formed their own little gangs and groups and thought that this would work out well and set the number at around eight because that just seemed to work really well.

So the patrol was just the natural affiliation group that a young person would normally form anyway, and this was the basis of the entire Scouting movement. Now, if you've been around for a while, you've probably heard these two terms- patrol system and patrol method, and most of the time when we talk about it they're kind of interchangeable terms.

I want to differentiate between those two terms and separate them into two different approaches, and you're not going to find this in the literature anywhere. This is just my own way of looking at it. What's the difference between a patrol system and a patrol method.

I'm going to say that we can use those terms as shorthand for two different approaches to how we work with patrols. If we work with the patrol system, we're paying attention to the administrative idea of having a big group split into smaller groups, represented by a central body, and it's purely an administrative tool used for convenience and efficiency. In contrast, when we talk about patrol method, we're talking about the processes of discovery and development that happen within a patrol or a small group, because the patrol method doesn't just apply to young people in a scout troop, it also applies to cubs and dens and venturers and crews. The system part has different administrative terms, names and practices, but the method part is the same.

So let's think about the method. Back to Thurman's story. In the story Thurman talks about like their first camping trip and it's hilarious. They made plenty of mistakes, they tried out a lot of things with mixed success.

So what happens in patrols is there's a thousand little interactions and things are popping and moving along and this is the way character is developed, or you end up with the Lord of the Flies kind of situation where things go downhill very quickly. So our role is to make sure the first situation happens and prevent the second.

And the way that we do this is how? Think about it for a moment. It's an easy answer. It's the ideals of the scout, oath and law. It's encouraging our scouts to follow those ideals and put them into practice in all of the interactions and things that they have with their patrol.

Now, if you've been following through this series, you've gotten the sense- along with me, hopefully- that all of these things are incredibly simple things and a lot of times simple things have this kind of oxymoronic nature to them where they are the most durable. Yet they're also the most fragile things about a given system. As scouting developed into a worldwide movement, the organizational imperatives began to change and morph and usurp, in some cases, some of the original intent in the way which this was all set up.

So a digression for a moment to explain myself, because I've talked about scouting organizations in all of this, in these foundational series, a couple of times. So let's be very clear about exactly what I'm saying. You've no doubt come into scouting through some kind of an organizational setup. If you're in the United States of America, you've probably come in through the Boy Scouts of America or the Girl Scouts of America.

We have to understand that those organizational things are going to warp and obscure some of the more simple things, because keeping organizations aimed at the individual in the small group is a really difficult thing to do. Now, interestingly, none of what I have shared with you runs counter to the policies and rules and procedures of any organization that I know of, and, at the same time, most of what I've said does run counter to the culture that's been established within in those organizations about what scouting is and how it functions.

I think it's important enough for me to repeat that None of the advice that I'm giving you, none of the way that I'm describing how scouting works in this foundational series, is intended to, nor, in fact, does run counter to any of the policies, procedures or rules of any scouting organization that I know of, but it often does run counter to the culture that that organization has created. The culture that organizations create is kind of a macrocosm of the things that each of us as individuals brings to the scouting program. If you have a background in academia, if you have a background in business, if you have a background in the military, if you have a background in the trades, you're going to bring certain understandings of the way an organization operates, whether it's a national organization or a local organization, or your scouting unit, whether it be a cub pack, a scout troop or a venturing crew.

You know, if I put you into a room full of 40 young people and I said, okay, present them a scouting program, while you would begin with the way that you manage things, with your understanding of how to bring order and effectiveness to the way that this is all going to work. So those are all administrative and organizational imperatives.

But the patrol method goes a whole lot deeper and it's a whole lot more important than those surface things and its importance is its simplicity because I will say, I'll repeat myself again- the real reason that we want to have patrols is that the interactions within that patrol, when they are based on the ideals of the scout, oath and law, is the key way, the key stage for character to be developed in our scouts. And we've been encouraged through training to examine the way small groups work through some stages of development like forming and norming and storming, and it's all rhyming and it's great.

But forget about it, because the intent and reason that we have patrols is not that they become a high performing subset of a broader organization. Now, that's very likely to happen anyway without our intervention.

But that's not the reason that we have them. Remember why do we have them?

Everyone? Because that's the environment in which character is built. And when you examine what a patrol does and how they do it, you will likely be dissatisfied and you need to manage that dissatisfaction by living with it, mostly because this is not a flaw of the patrol method. This is a feature of the patrol method. A patrol full of young people is pretty much always storming, is pretty much always chaotic, is pretty much always searching for even the basic elements of organization and coherence and skill. And it's fine, that's the way it's supposed to be, because it is within that search, it is within that process of discovery that our scouts develop a character.

So here's a t-shirt that you can get and hand it out to all the adults in your troop. It says: don't fix that, leave it alone. The game is being played, it's working. This is how things happen. This is what we're aimed at.

This is what we want to see. I'm not talking about anarchy and violence and horror shows- those you stop- but just the day to day, the feeling around trying to figure out what's going on, the process of discovery, of working together, of resolving conflicts, of trying to figure out what leadership means and how to follow leaders, and how to put one foot in front of the other and one stick at a time on the fire- all of those things that we think we ought to fix are the heart and soul of what we really want for our scouts. That thought perhaps embodies the most practical advice I can give any scouter, which was said to me in a statement that's always stuck with me by a friend of mine who is a scouter with me: let them live their own lives now. Believe it or not, this is highly practical advice. It's just probably not what you really want to hear. You would rather me talk about your agenda for a patrol leaders council meeting, or how do you select patrols, or how does a patrol like patrol leaders, all of those other practical things.

Well, I've written about those, I've spoken about them before. They're not hard to find at scoutmastercgcom. But as you look at the materials that you're given by your scouting organization, as you look at the administrative plans at the patrol system, remember the patrol method and preserve the patrol method rather than promote the patrol system. Once again, I really want to hear your thoughts about all this. Get in touch, ask me questions. It's easy to do and I'm going to tell you how to do that in just a moment.