It’s been a moment since I’ve written an article for Smoke Signals, but I’m back with a whole lot of thoughts. I think this point in the year is a perfect time for some good old reflection, especially as we go into the new term. It’s always fun to look back and see what has been accomplished, as often the fast-paced nature of existence means we are so focused on the next thing that we forget to appreciate where we are.
When we look back, it’s always fun to marvel at the myriad activities our troop gets up to. The landmark events that stand out to me as I write this are James’ Springbok Camp, Kon-Tiki and Winter Cederberg, and there are many more.
But these are just large events that, whilst really cool, only represent a fraction of what the troop gets up to. We have scouts going on badge courses nearly every weekend, advancement getting done, patrol activities, competitions being (nearly) won, and then Thursday meetings that – in my opinion – are absolutely top tier.
But what does this give us? Is this good? How do we measure all of these things and evaluate if the the troop is doing “well”? What even does “well” mean?
For those who know me even a little, you’ll know that I love Data (not the Star-Trek character). I love numbers, graphs and trying to get things to fit into nice little boxes. If there was a number that I could get that said “your troop is 70% of the way to being a perfect troop” I’d be so happy. Unfortunately, those nice circles you see on Scouts Digital for your personal advancement don’t exist for a Troop Scouter, and I’m left here with these un-answerable questions.
To save everyone from the long philosophical journey I went on, I’ll summarise my findings here.
There are all these metrics, imperfect that they may be, which give us a glimpse into the functioning of the troop. From MOSCIP to Star Awards, Tonkin and regional competitions, all of these show us a part of the truth. In a way that you can kind-of figure out what something is based on its shadow, these imperfect metrics give us a view into what a “real” metric for the “goodness” of the troop is (akin to taking a projection of a higher-dimensional shape into a one-dimensional representation).
When we do look at these metrics, we see a nice shadow emerging. MOSCIP results were high for most of our patrols. Three of our patrols and the troop got Gold Star for the last year, and we placed 5th in Tonkin and we continuously placed highly in competitions.
But here is the thing. These metrics actually don’t matter at all. I know I’ve made the case for them, and gone on a long-winded rant about how useful they are even though they’re imperfect. But the truth of the matter is that no one in the troop should actually care about these. The real thing we should all care about is “getting out and doing scouting”.
Now yes, this is a nebulous statement, and one that would look good on a bumper sticker (“I’d rather be scouting!”) but the underlying message is truer than any metric we can get to.
The scouting system works not when we fixate on metrics and measures of performance, but when we send our scouts “out” to fully experience being independent and responsible. What is “out”, I hear you ask. Well, there’s the piece of this sentiment doing the heavy lifting, and the crux of everything I’m getting at. When we leave scouts to their own devices, fully leveraging the patrol system which, at its core, is about trusting in young people’s abilities to make good decisions on their own, then that’s when we’re doing scouting properly.
In a nutshell, we can determine how well we’re running the scouting programme by “vibes”. Yeah, it’s a cop-out. But in the end, it comes down to what we feel is right as adults in scouting. Because we’re essentially large AI models trained on many years of good and bad scouting, able to accurately label any particular instance of scouting as “good” with fairly high confidence (can you tell I have a computer science degree yet?).
So, to close off, I want to summarize what I’ve rambled on about in a neat little takeaway. 1st Claremont is honestly doing some of the purest scouting that I have seen, and I am incredibly proud of what our scouts get up to. I say this not because I’m looking at the number of badges people are earning, nor how many events are being run. I say this because it feels like we are doing something right. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t care about these metrics. Just that – and this is addressed to all the scouts – you should focus more on doing things in the spirit of scouting, rather than chasing a certain number of events/badges/positions/other metrics for the sake of it.
Phew – thank goodness Daniel has finished his waffle (as the scouts would say). Wrong! I have one more thing to add since I’m making up for the past few editions where I contributed nothing.
All of this scouting would not be possible without our incredible Adult Leaders. They put so much effort into this movement whilst all being volunteers. They do this for their own reasons I’m sure – and I encourage people to talk more about this – but one of the overarching reasons is this sense of giving back. Personally, I benefitted incredibly from this organisation, and I saw it as only logical to give back.
Thank you to my fellow scouters, most of whom are in this photo. Without you we would not be able to create an environment that is so conducive to such high quality scouting.
Daniel Le Jeune
Troop Scouter