Tales of a Scout Leader: Camping, Coding and Calm in a Crisis

While my life now focuses on career as a Computer Science student, this article shares another part of my life that has been ever-present. 

I’ve been involved in Scouting for many years, starting as a young boy and now continuing as a volunteer adult leader. The Scout motto is simple but profound: "Be Prepared." That once used to mean knowing the right knots to tie or knowing how to start a fire. As I become older and see the world differently, I've found that its most valuable lessons are about mindset, planning and temperament.

Sequential Thinking in Planning and Coding

Have you ever done planning for a large-scale event? It is a rather intensive exercise in structured, sequential thinking. Your event planning is broken down into smaller components such as food, logistics, safety, activities and contingency plans. You have different people working on different components, and then we try to orchestrate everything together in a logical, step-by-step manner. Every action depends on another, and skipping a step could lead to disasters such as your Scouts going hungry over a late lunch.

This early training in structured, sequential thinking has turned out to be an unexpected superpower as I go through Computer Science. Writing code requires the same mental discipline from me. Various parts of the code depend on one another. We plan for contingencies as much as possible in our coding and algorithms.  Same muscle, different terrain. 

Staying Calm in a Crisis 

You could see now that Scout planning is very much like building something with code. Execution comes after planning, and that is very much like debugging that stubborn piece of code you just wrote. Execution is the real test, where a hundred and one things can and will inevitably go wrong.

Imagine you've meticulously planned a camp for your Scouts. It's the first day of camp, but cracks are already forming. Two members of your small organising team became unavailable for camp at the last minute. The equipment at your campsite turns out spoiled and unusable. Your participants are taking way too much time just to set up camp. What do you do?

"Debugging" your camp after that is where a leader's character is forged. What's required is not just better planning, but instead a leader's temperament. You need real discipline to suppress panic and think clearly when everyone is looking to you.  

Instead of drowning in stress and fatigue, we maintain a critical view of the program. We mentally diagnose how the parts interact, and figure out the best way to solve our problems. We decide which activities are most essential, and adapt how we spend our time and manpower accordingly. 

Conclusion

Scouting to me is a treasure trove of memories and learning experiences. As I prepare to enter the workforce, I recalled some of the valuable soft skills that Scouting has taught me, then decided to write this post. 

The ability to plan methodically, the temperament to adapt calmly are some of the most valuable "soft skills" I've ever learned. It helped me carry out technically challenging tasks, while managing people relations in my own working experience. What's an experience that has surprisingly become a superpower in your career?