Hey, National Executive Board (NEB)! It’s time to use the Konami code: unlock your superpowers!
Your composition has changed: You’re smaller, and some of the old guard departed. You can be quite effective!
You’ve got to save Scouting from its #1 existential threat: A culturally rotted, poorly performing national organization, that sees itself as its own customer, which is winning a decades-long war of attrition against the base.
To do this, you’ve got to use the Konami code and make some bold decisions uncharacteristic of past NEBs.
(Technical note: Some things I speak to might be delegated to other bodies, like the National Executive Committee. Because of BSA’s precarious state and decades of BSA’s failures to correct itself, I feel it’s important for the NEB to set some expectations directly.)
Two key measures of NEB effectiveness
In 2023, the NEB approved a five-point plan to start turning BSA around. This plan has a lot of great things. But it doesn’t directly address two issues and a method that I find so foundational, that without them, it’s unclear if this turnaround can succeed.
The two issues: Ending bigotry and driving away those with bad ideas.
The method: Providing uncharacteristically clear direction to the national bureaucracy.
Priority 1: Ending bigotry
The NEB must make a shot across the bow and finally end BSA’s rampant bigotry, killing harmful policies concerning girls, gays, and God. The NEB’s history of piecemeal, reluctant steps, sometimes requiring chiding from its own leader, are unacceptable, insufficient.
Remaining bigoty includes BSA’s misogynist-appeasing, separate-but-equal regime for girls, which also slaps the transgender community, and BSA’s bigotry towards atheists and agnostics, a perversion of James E. West’s original intent1.
The action plan is simple:
- Delete the coed ban. Replace it with nothing, allowing all units to have self-determination on gender.
- Delete BSA’s ban of atheists and agnostics, which slaps the Jesus of the bible. Yes, this means the NEB countermands its own 2018 affirmation of religious bigotry. This happened before, such as the 2013 partial reversion of a 2012 affirmation of bigotry.
Priority 2: Running off poor performers or those with bad ideas
This sounds cynical, but it’s crucial.
National has a lot of great people who are genuinely committed to Scouting’s success. But these dedicated folks are overwhelmed by 1. many gold-looper volunteers and professionals with bad ideas or who perform poorly and 2. by program committees that moat themselves off from the base, create little or no value, do things the base does not want, and exist mainly to affirm the elite-ness of their members.
The NEB must take concrete steps to affirm that this culture will change.
Ending bigoted policies–my prior point–is a big part of this.
The other part is to affirm a culture of accountability for the national organization. Our fundamental accountability measure for all national roles or committees must be, “What value do you produce for families, Scouts, and unit-level volunteers?” If we can’t find a straightforward, net-positive answer to that question, then we must have a time-boxed proposal to get there. If neither can happen, then we abolish the committee or role or seek the net positive by replacing those in the role or committee.
This will set new expectations. For example, BSA’s lack of a public apology for or public repudiation of its 2023 war on Cub Scout camping shows this is considered acceptable conduct for its bureaucrats. With a new expectation of producing value for the base, wars against the membership will, for the first time, be considered unacceptable conduct, initiating correction to seek the net positive.
This also stops throwback reactionaries from morally bankrupting BSA. Allowing them to use BSA as a tool in their culture wars was always harmful to the base. If we’re serious about putting an end to gold-loopers’ attacks on the base, then we’ve neutered the throwback reactionaries!
This will cause some to feel uncomfortable. It will induce departures. Those preferring an environment of unaccountability or of tolerating uselessness will leave.
Lesson learned from the United Methodist Church
If we make poor performers or those with bad ideas feel uncomfortable, we’ll get departures. That may cause some disruptions. But it’s necessary. The United Methodist Church (UMC) just showed us why.
The UMC had bigoted, anti-LGBTQ+ policies for decades. Naively, many in the UMC believed that we could reform those policies while appeasing our bigots. We tried this for decades and failed. Not only did this naivete delay reform, the bigots kept jabbing the knife deeper.
It wasn’t until the 2020-2024 mass exodus of bigots that the UMC could finally reform. And it finally did so last week, repealing bigoted policies.
The BSA is in a similar position. We’ve wasted decades coddling poor performers and those with bad ideas. This appeasement has brought us to our knees. If we want a viable BSA, the appeasement must end. But we may have to shrink to grow.
You may counter with, “But wait, [group x] and [group y] already fled. Isn’t that enough?” No. Their culture remains firmly in place. National continues to not give an inch on its performance problems or its bigotry. More departures are needed to right this, and these departures can be encouraged by the NEB setting clear and appropriate expectations.
Let’s talk about departures: Who cares? Really, who cares? Some people at national need to find a different way to serve humanity. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out! In my campaign to put sunlight on the national organization’s manifold sins, I have come across so many good, caring, competent, rational people who could be shoo-ins for vacated roles. The easiest part is abolishing or refilling vacated roles! (Related: To succeed at re-filling roles, national has to stop using gold loops as a reward to long-term loyalty. Instead, national must seek competent innovators from all levels of tenure.)
This will pivot the NEB from being a board of bystanders
The NEB has two key jobs:
- Appoint and supervise CEOs.
- Set corporate strategy.
Instead of doing those jobs well, or at all, prior NEBs were mainly boards of bystanders.
Kowtowing to the bureaucracy
Evidence comes with decades of terrible CEO appointments.
Instead of appointing competent leaders to the CEO role, past NEBs kowtowed to BSA’s bureaucracy, limiting its CEO candidate pool to former District Executives surfaced by BSA’s awful career system. Thanks to this, the NEB caused decades of harm by saddling BSA with CEOs who were visionless bureaucrats with weak leadership skills.
Roger Krone, who was appointed in 2023, broke this mold! He is the first CEO with leadership chops since Harvey L. Price, who in 1976 began to countermand his predecessor by restoring BSA’s outdoor-adventure focus.
Declining to set strategy
More evidence of poor past NEB performance comes with how it declined to set sound strategy, instead fomenting a leadership vacuum. This vacuum handed the national organization’s rudder to its moribund bureaucracy and to throwback reactionaries.
The bureaucracy’s hand on the rudder is demonstrated by how BSA’s programs, advancement system, uniforms, and more have drifted listlessly for decades, now confusing and bloated with unchecked accumulation of random ideas. Yeah, yeah, I know, a lot of responsibility for these failures nominally falls on program committees, but since they historically are puppets of or allies with the bureaucracy, the fingers point back to the bureaucracy.
Throwback reactionaries’ hand on the rudder is evidenced by BSA’s moral depravity–our bigoted flexes on gays, God, and girls–and dire fiscal conditions. While NEB declined to provide useful direction, throwback reactionaries used BSA as a tool in their culture wars. Throwback reactionaries’ bigoted flexes were so extreme, in addition to destroying much of our goodwill and 80% of our membership, we now have a $439 million white elephant that’s underwater, digging the hole deeper with staggering annual losses.
As long as bigotry and tolerance of poor performance still have the upper hand in BSA, we should expect continued brand damage:
The NEB must stand up to the moribund bureaucracy
Back to my point: If the NEB is serious about its mission, in addition to setting clear direction on ending bigotry, it will stand up to the bureaucracy, setting expectations that its lousy performance will no longer be tolerated. This starts by denying a proposal to stall elimination of the coed ban.
Some background: Reliable informants convey that the NEB is set to end the coed ban this week! But the NEB still plans to kowtow to the bureaucracy which predictably is asking for it to stall reform: A useless pilot program is proposed. Given BSA’s normal practices, this should stall reform at least another year.
BSA’s pilot programs are useless, bureaucratic stalling exercises. In recent times, all major knowledge produced by BSA’s pilot programs, if any (!), could have been predicted by a competent professional or volunteer. But recent pilot programs seem to produce so little. Examples:
- The pilot programs for allowing girls in Cub Scouts and Scouts BSA produced nothing. All outcomes could have been easily predicted from Michael Surbaugh’s “the fix was in” introduction of the separate-but-equal regime at the 2017 NAM.
- The more recent pilot program for coed Cub Scout dens is notable for the absence of significant changes in how Cub Scout packs operated.
Instead of pilot programs, we need competence.
And we should have that competence: With coed older-youth programs for 56 years, BSA has had plenty of time to figure out coed. It has had coed Cub Scouts since 2018 (sorry, rulemongers, virtually all packs flouted national and ran coed programs since 2018!). And many troops have chosen the moral high road, flouting BSA’s separate-but-equal regime for girls, instead running undercover coed operations. BSA already has all it needs to navigate full coed across every program.
But let’s suppose I am wrong? (I’m not, but let’s pretend.) BSA has unlimited phone-a-friend to other USA youth-serving organizations, nearly all of which are fully coed or permit it. We also have unlimited phone-a-friend to all of BSA’s WOSM peers, which have been fully coed for decades.
The NEB’s repudiation of the coed ban must be full, final, and immediate. The bureaucracy has no reason to stall this. If the repudiation is not full, final, and immediate, then we’re inviting bigots and some bureaucrats maintain control. Back to the proposed bureaucratic stalling tactic–the pilot program–it is an invitation for those with bad ideas to sanitize their folly by clinging to any part of the coed ban they can save. For example, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them warp the pilot program to validate single-gender patrols. The current coed-related rules applicable to Cub Scouts or Venturing are already an overreach (I have a future article developing on this). Any post-coed-ban standards that go beyond those are almost certainly evidence of uncorrected cultural rot.
How each community navigates its coed experience must be up to that community, unencumbered by even a single vestige of the separate-but-equal regime for girls.
Conclusion
BSA is at its most fragile point in its history. Suffering a recent, catastrophic membership loss, teetering on a second bankruptcy, reeling from decades of appeasing those with bad ideas and poor performance, and with programs and services badly needing a cleaning up and realignment, it’s crucial for the NEB to take a shot across the bow.
The NEB must set clear expectations now, in a visceral way, that bigotry, bad ideas, and poor performance are no longer welcome in the national organization. It starts this by deleting all bigoted policies (the separate-but-equal regime for girls and religious bigotry) in a full, complete, and final way, which importantly includes denial of bureaucratic stalling tactics (pilot programs).
- I have yet to write about this, but James E. West, the first Chief Scout Executive, created the original language that is behind today’s Declaration of Religious Principle (DRP). When understood through the lens of the USA’s Third Great Awakening, it’s unlikely James meant for the DRP to become a ban on atheists and agnostics or to be as in-your-face as it is today. ↩︎
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