Are you a planner? In your personal life? In your Scouting role(s)? Do you decide upon goals for the year as you approach a new year (whether you write them out or not)? Personally, I have such a weak memory that I know that I must write out my daily plan, a longer-term plan, and an annual set of goals. I find that an annual assessment of what I accomplished over the past year leads me to think about what things I need to build upon and what things to change for the coming year.

As a one-time Scoutmaster and a current troop and pack committee chair, I treasure the time I spend with my Key 3 counterparts and unit commissioner to evaluate what we accomplished over the immediate past year (with some attention paid to previous years) and what didn’t go as well as planned or as we would have preferred. We never have a sense of failure or reproachment for missing goals; rather, those misses (some near, some not so near) always lead us to setting new goals for a new year to improve our units.

Unit commissioners are well acquainted with the concept of unit assessments, including simple assessments, intermediate assessments, and detailed assessments. The annual (or semi-annual) detailed assessment is at the heart of the planning process. With a completed Journey to Excellence Unit Scorecard in hand, the detailed assessment sets up the unit leadership for a workable plan for the coming year. Expressed in the form of a Unit Service Plan—a significant part of the detailed assessment form for all types of units—unit leaders can clearly discover and understand their strengths and their opportunities for improvement. A plan for improvement is a significant indicator that the unit has dedicated itself to providing the best possible program for its youth members in a manner consistent with the BSA mission: to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.

Commissioner-written assessments, as well as self-assessments, are not tasks that commissioners must slog through because an administrative commissioner is browbeating them so that their own statistics look good. What assessments really represent is a tremendous opportunity to analyze, to plan, to plan to succeed. Take a hard look at the Unit Service Plan diagram—assessments lead to a plan, which involves commitment from specialists to assist units to implement their plan and meet their goals. It’s not magic; it is a tremendous and valuable process.