# 246: Scouts
Story behind the Passage
This morning when I walked the dog, I heard the boy scouts sing. They are camping in the neighborhood. For hours afterwards, I had this earworm in my mind. Here is the refrain of the song:
Ich bin ein gemeiner, zerlumpter Zigeuner,
doch Freiheit ist besser als Geld
für mich, mein Pferd und die Welt
As I was listening to the song, a thought suddenly hit me: I know nothing about the origins of the scouts. I remember that my host dad in the U.S. did scouting with my younger brothers but that was it. And when I was a kid, I kind of associated being a scout with the Western movies; saloons, horses, whiskey, men fighting. While I never joined any scouts group in Germany, I probably lived part of my childhood as a scout by climbing trees, playing in the dirt, imagining all kinds of adventure stories. But how can I know that this has something to do with scouting? Again, I have no clue. But then another thought struck me: I have a book in my shelf about the Boy Scouts of America.
I found that book in a bulky waste box in my city, maybe a year ago or so. It must be from a U.S. citizen in my town because I cannot imagine any German owning this. And I remember there were other English books and dictionaries in the box. Here is what the cover looks like:
As with many books, I grab them because I take an initial interest in them but that is it. Then it can happen that the book ends up sitting there for years without me ever looking at it more closely. But I still know it is there until my life somehow points to it. This happened this morning. So, I opened it and got a first impression of what it contains. And the response was: wow! It indeed seems to be the complete manual of scouting. I then went online and nourished my initial curiosity about the origin of the scouts movement. As I found out, it actually started in Britain, not in the U.S. What I then read was even more intriguing: It basically started with a method invented by a guy named Robert Baden-Powell!
The reason why I am getting so excited about methods these days is because I think a lot about them in relation to business. After all, if you do not build physical products, you will always end up selling a method, even if that method is then called “service.” But the boy scouts’ origin in a method struck me even more because of the content of the method. Here is what it says on Wikipedia about the milestones of it:
- scouts law and oath
- learning by doing
- small group team work
- advancing and attractive programs
Now, when reading this, especially the holistic nature of the method, it should be very clear where I am heading, right? My guess is that scouting is one of these places where you would find many future entrepreneurs. Again, I have not started any serious research on this today but I am sure there is some out there. What I found at first glance was that there are magazine articles about the scouting past of famous leaders and CEOs. So, my initial impulse seems to have some truth to it. But there is more to think about, obviously. What I mean is the relationship between the scouting method and the liberal arts education. That is not the reason why I have chosen the passage above, though.
What I have been struggling with for the past almost two years now is my longing to learn more about the natural sciences. First it was just a big awakening that I am totally blank in this respect. Gradually, the interest has narrowed down to the aspect of materials sciences. The funny thing is: I once worked for a physics cluster and there were many people working in the field of material sciences. But I never really know what they were studying exactly. Now that I am thinking so much about this, I kind of regret I never really went into it. Yet, they were doing really advanced science on this on a level which probably even knowledgeable people in the natural sciences cannot understand.
My Learnings
“We are bound to her to the end of our days — to this globe that has been spinning through the universe for possibly three billion years at more than 200 miles a second!” The first part of the sentence is quite philosophical. And that already tells you much about the second part. What we can definitely say is that there is hardly any other natural science discipline which is so philosophical as physics. Most physics people I know are among the smartest people I know. You might say that this is a bias because, since I have no idea about physics, I cannot assess their capabilities. That is true but there is another side that I can “assess” in some way, which is the depth of their thinking, their intellectual ability, and the perspective of looking at the world which they reveal by talking about it.
Now, the interesting finding of today is, the scouts book obviously is not a physics textbook. But really, if you flip through all 500 pages, you get a lot more than this. I would say, the book is like an interdisciplinary life “Bible.” You get knowledge about the earth, the stars, the animals, and human behavior. There is practically no field left out. And the reason for this is very simple: You need all this knowledge to survive in the wilderness. Including knowledge about leadership and human behavior.
This finding that the challenge of survival in wilderness is the selection criterion also reveals something about the nature of learning which I might have underestimated in the past. Not that I did not learn because I missed seeing this aspect. On the contrary, I have been learning but it is not at all necessary to know the logic behind it. That is “science” in some way. The doing does not require this knowledge. It happens intuitively. What I am talking about is very simple: curiosity. That probably connects scouting with science and science with the form of learning that is presented in the book. Here is what the etymology dictionary says about the origin of scouting:
late 14c., “observe or explore as a scout, travel in search of information,” from Old French escouter “to listen, heed” (Modern French écouter), from Latin auscultare “to listen to, give heed to” (see auscultate). Related: Scouted; scouting. scout | Search Online Etymology Dictionary (etymonline.com)
Is that not so interesting? How come I never thought of the term more closely, even if I heard it many times? We are talking about startup scouting all the time and what I link with it is “searching.” But I never thought of it as a pedagogical concept more or less. And here comes the final conclusion which I am going to explore in more detail. Even with my limited knowledge of what I see in the book, my assumption is that someone who has gone through this kind of training really is educated in a way that students hardly get to experience anymore in Germany and many other countries where the liberal arts tradition has been lost more or less.
I know this might sound boring again because I talk about it quite often, i.e., this lack of a general education that integrates all he senses. There is nothing new to discover when it comes to the fact that this creates most value. That does not mean, however, that these specific examples do not help. If I learned one thing in the past three years as an entrepreneur it is that you need specific examples. Here is one: The boys scouts and their legacy probably left more traces in the business world than most people might be aware of. If this is the case, it also offers a specific recipe as to how to scale these strengths that scouts learn. As always, there is only one tiny issue about this finding that is in the way:
Taking action.
Reflection Questions
1) Were you a scout in your childhood or teenage years? If not, do you know any people who were/are?
2) Do you personally believe there is a connection between scouting and business leadership? Which scouting skills are most relevant for business?
3) How important is natural sciences knowledge for informed citizenship?