Centennial Unit Award

[ScoutDadof5 10]

...I gotta admit that I am glad to see this discussion pick up.

 

These are the same exact things that we have been discussing in my district and trying to make sense of. And that's kinda what I though would be the case accross the country when I posted this as a recently returning UC...

 

Michael

 

 

[Venividi 35]

I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised if "retention" is given a different, non-sensical meaning by BSA. Retention, Active, Serve, ... someday there may need to be a special dictionary.

[Gold Winger 9]

The requirements show what is important to BSA. Advancement, Friends of Scouting and growth. All of which are tied to money.

 

Does any parent really care if quality unit was won when they are looking for a pack or troop? Probably not. They look to see if the boys are having fun and learning. They look to see how the leaders deal with the boys.

 

I'm with RagnerT on this one, scrap the whole thing.

[GaHillBilly 10]

Hm-m-mh. The light dawns . . . Eyes are opened . . . My cynicism is renewed . . .

 

+ I read the form.

 

+ I have an SM who's VERY motivated by Council / District awards

 

+ After being very puzzled about it, I now have a working hypothesis as to why an SM would want an recently approved ASM (me) to (a) propose less, and do less with the troop, AND to (b) go through BLT and SMST. See #1 on the form.

 

+ Likewise, I have a working hypothesis as to why a SM, who'd initially approved the idea of working with the 4 older boys to get them through 1st class, suddenly reversed, and wanted to see ALL the boys move up in rank together, even though most of the younger ones could hardly care less. See #4 on the form.

 

+ And, I also have a working hypothesis as to why -- even though we didn't do anything else as a troop in September -- we did an out of town fund raiser at a location about 2 hours away and 'camped' at a KOA instead of just driving. The cost of camping - several adults brought large trailers - consumed about 35% of the money raised! My son and I drove, but still ate supper before they did. See #5 on the form -- I'll bet dollars to dimes that that 'camp-out' gets counted when the form is turned in.

 

I'm not questioning that the *intent* that seems to be behind award is good.

 

All things equal, it's better for troops to be outdoors more, to have trained leaders, and to retain their Scouts and Scouters. However, it seems to me that the accounting fallacy is at work here.

 

Once you reward someone based on a distortable metric that attempt, but fails to some degree to measure a desired activity, the result will be that some workers or volunteers will focus on actions that maximize the metric, rather than the desired actions. To the degree that the metric measures something OTHER than the desired activity, the resulting focus on the metric will REDUCE or even ELIMINATE the desired activity.

 

The only way to avoid this is either (a) to not measure or reward, OR (b) to make sure that the metric used correlates perfectly with only the desired activity, and not with any other activities. Of course, this is very hard, and so accounting system design always ends up, to a greater or lesser degree, distorting the business (or volunteer) activity.

 

And so you get things like wasteful and hasty 'use the budget up' end-of-cycle spending, or fund raising 'camp-outs' at KOAs.

 

 

GaHillBilly

[eolesen 10]

And, to add fuel to the fire, I'm told there's some fuzzy math allowed by the ADC and DC to still sign off on units receiving CUA if a unit missed their stated goals because of reasons perhaps outside their control (i.e. leader training was set at x% but classes weren't offered).