Over time, processes that seek to decrease entropy and create order are valued, but improving them gets more difficult as well. If you're seeking to make the organized more organized, it's a tough row to hoe.Far easier and more productive to create productive chaos, to interrupt, re-create, produce, invent and redefine.
Most of our work as Scoutmasters is like hiking a trail; start here and end up there. But things are not always that simple and organized. It's not always a steady pace forward. We start, stop, regroup, retreat, advance, turn around, sit down, stand still, walk, run, crawl, limp, saunter; but at least most of the time we are doing something.
There's a fair amount of productive chaos in Scouting(two words not often associated with one another). As a matter of fact we are specialists in productive chaos. Ideally our plans proceed in a straight, well disciplined line but that's hardly ever the case.
Leadership is interuppting, re-creating, inventing and redefining. Yesterday's plan may not work today. While the destination doesn't change the way we get there does.
The term that I use is benign neglect. I neglect to do things for Scout that I could do but also that they are capable of doing. The opposite of this is malignant neglect. That's when you don't feed an infant. That's when you don't step in and make sure that proper first aid is being taken care of for a fairly serious problem.
It's also called delegation. Chaos is what something appears to be when other people do something that's in our area of responsibility or expertise. For instance, most of us would not see chaos while watching a Wimbledon match. We are not qualified to call it chaos. It might look disorganized or out of control to our untrained eye. We might feel the same way if we went to the shipping department at Amazon.com. It looks disorganized to our untrained eye, but we know that they are professionals and they know what they are doing.
What really gets our goat is when we plan, and work and train and teach and inspire and then give it to them and they make it look ALL MESSED UP. Chaotic! Remember, the Scouts are the professionals. They know what they are doing. This is the part of leadership that is really hard. You must not lead to lead. You are only the leader if someone else is leading.
So I did it wrong. Last Tuesday I got up in front of the Scouts and did some instruction. I shouldn't have done it that way, but there is some time pressure. I bought the new camp stoves, I read the manuals, there are certain things that I want them to do with the new stoves, I'm going out of town for two weeks and the camporee is next weekend. There was not enough time for a separate meeting to train the patrol leaders and instructors and then have them pass it on down.
So I gathered the whole troop around a table and I demonstrated the stoves and told them not to use metal utensils on the griddles and not to put two cook surfaces on at the same time and some more stuff. It's not the way I should have done it. But here is my point. I started off by telling them that I wasn't going to do this again. They better pay attention because next time they would be instructing new Scouts in how to use a troop stove. I think that they believe me. We adults don't teach knots to the patrols, or lashing, or first aid or any of the Scout skills. Our leaders do that.
I stepped in, reordered the chaos a bit and now I'm stepping out. The Scouts believe me because that's how it normally works. I hope the guys running things the next couple of weeks will do the same.
Posted by: Larry Geiger | March 11, 2011 at 04:01 PM