Five Things I Learned From the Boy Scouts - Divide and Conquer

As a tour guide, I get paid to tell people about Washington, DC (or New York, or Philadelphia, or wherever).

Sure I do. What I actually do is herd people. Forty or fifty at a time. From hotels, unto planes and trains (and the ubiquitous bus), through museums and monuments, and to three meals a day. This is what keeps me hopping and where I earn my money. The blather coming out of my mouth? Heck, I’m not even sure what I’m saying some times.

So anything that makes that easier, and turns a mob into a crowd, or better yet, an organization, is a good thing. And one small technique I’ve noticed with my previously with some school groups crystallized with my experience with Boy Scouts this weekend: unit articulation.

It’s hardly a term most of us are familiar with, and it wasn’t one bandied about when I was a Scout. It wouldn’t be until years later, as a Naval Officer, that I’d come into contact with the term, and only recently have I pondered how it applied to guiding. It's one of those arcane military organizational terms, one of those they seem to come up with for fun.

Simply put, unit articulation is the concept of subdividing an organization into smaller parts, more or less permanently. In a Boy Scout Troop, this is a number of Patrols, in our case this weekend, 4 Patrols of eight Scouts each. In many school groups I’ve worked with, they’ve applied the same concept, dividing the group into various chaperone groups, with each adult responsible for a set number of kids.

So what? And why would this be helpful for a school group?

Well, first off, on the administrative side, many times on a tour you need to divide your group. Both restaurants this weekend asked us to send in smaller groups for seating purposes. It’s a lot easier to seat many batches of four that it is a herd of forty. Or you may have two guides at a Capitol tour. Or a half dozen other examples.

It also makes counting far easier (and oh, how I hate the counting). Each group counts their folks up and reports to the leader who only has to track four groups and not forty people. It seems small, but you may have to count your people a dozen times a day (or more). The difference between one minute and five minutes for a count adds up. Quickly.

Conversely, if a person is missing, this quickly identifies who they are, something not to be scorned. I’ve seen ten minutes go by where a group knows someone is not there but can’t figure out who.

Finally, as discussed yesterday, this allows for real leadership to be done by yet more students. The subgroup leaders will be responsible for their group in the same way the overall group leader is. The more kids doing things with real responsibility, the more engaged they are in the process, and the less disruptive they will choose to be.

Some of these items seem small, but making routine tasks routine is one of the biggest challenges in any organization. This tour is an organization, applying a little organizational skill to it lets you do the fun stuff. You can spend your time taking in the sights or you can spend it tracking down Bobby.