Scouting shares that paradoxical combination of simplicity and complexity found in a round of golf or a game of baseball. The goal is simple, the means direct, yet the process is complex. Scoutmastership, like properly swinging a golf club or baseball bat, takes a few minutes to learn and a lifetime to master.
Skilled Scoutmasters concentrate on one thing – the success of their Scouts. Individual Scouts will have individual standards of success so Scoutmasters have twenty or thirty different (though likely very similar) standards to work towards.
Everything in Scouting is designed to support the success of Scouts. No matter how remote the innumerable committee functions or removed the tasks they exist only to support the Scout’s individual success. In fact if we cant draw a fairly direct line back to the Scout’s success we may as well eliminate the committee or leave the task undone.
How do we know if our Scouts are successful? There are some general benchmarks and more focused goals to concentrate our efforts that will be the subject of the next post.