Essay
What 40,000 Scouts Taught Me About Operations
In 2023 I helped coordinate logistics for the 25th World Scout Jamboree — 40,000+ participants from 158 countries, all moving through the same campsite, the same meal lines, the same shuttle schedules, at the same time. Nothing about that scale is intuitive. You learn operations by watching a queue that isn't supposed to exist form in front of you, and then figuring out, in real time, why.
A process is just a promise you can keep at scale
The plans on paper were beautiful. The moment 40,000 people touched them, the plans became suggestions. What actually held the event together wasn't the schedule — it was a handful of simple, repeatable rules everyone could follow without needing to ask a supervisor: which line, which wristband color, which exit. The best process is the one nobody has to think about.
A system that only works when everyone follows instructions perfectly isn't a system — it's a hope.
What actually changed
Three things I've carried into every role since:
- Design for the tired version of the person. Plan for someone on hour fourteen, not the version reading the manual fresh.
- Escalation paths matter more than the plan. Things will go wrong; what matters is how fast the right person finds out.
- Cross-cultural clarity beats clever wording. With 158 nationalities in the same camp, the instructions that worked needed no translation to understand.
A small example
One evening, a shuttle route quietly stopped making sense — buses were arriving faster than people could board, and a bottleneck started building at the gate. No one had scheduled a fix for that. We rerouted boarding on the spot, reusing the same wristband-color system built for the meal lines, and the backup cleared in under ten minutes. It worked because it was simple enough to repurpose under pressure.
I've applied that same instinct everywhere since — in a legal team's document backlog, in an admissions pipeline, in a marketing calendar. The scale is different. The lesson is the same: good operations isn't about controlling every variable, it's about building something simple enough to survive contact with 40,000 real people.