The butler is gone. Baden-Powell’s movement isn’t. And the difference comes down to one word.

Scout Leaders’ Vlog · May 2026 · 4 min read

Baden-Powell never called it a club. He never called it an organisation. He called it a movement and this week, a retired internet butler reminded me exactly why that word matters more than ever.

Ask Jeeves is gone. After thirty years, one of the most revolutionary search engines of the early internet has quietly shut its doors. If you’re old enough to remember it, you’ll remember why it was special, you could type a real question in plain English and get an answer. No keywords, no SEO. Just ask Jeeves. In the late 90s, that was genuinely revolutionary. It was the search engine’s unique selling point, and people loved it.

“Ask Jeeves was ahead of its time. The problem was, it stayed in the 90’s.”

While the internet kept evolving and Google quietly took over the world, Ask Jeeves stood still. And then came the decision that sealed its fate: when the company was sold in 2005, the new owners dropped the butler entirely. The one thing that made Ask Jeeves memorable, its personality, its USP, the thing people actually connected with…… was gone. They tried to modernise by stripping out everything that made them special. And so, eventually, was Ask Jeeves.

Sound familiar? It should. Because Scout Leaders fall into exactly the same trap and I’ve given it a name: the Jeeves Trap.

The Jeeves Trap Falling into the Jeeves Trap means one of two things: either you stop moving entirely and become irrelevant, or you chase every new trend and accidentally lose the things that made you worth showing up for in the first place. Both will finish you off.

Think about what Scouting looked like 20, 50, or 100 years ago. The programme has changed beyond recognition and rightly so. Things done in the early days of Scouting simply wouldn’t be allowed now. We’ve updated the safeguarding, modernised the activities, and evolved the way we communicate. WhatsApp groups, social media recruitment, AI tools these aren’t threats to Scouting. They’re just the new version of moving with the times. Baden-Powell would have used them.

But….and this is the Ask Jeeves lesson, modernising doesn’t mean ditching everything that made you special. The campfires, the badges, the teamwork, the values, the sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself. Those aren’t old-fashioned. Those are the butler. Don’t drop the butler.

“We’ve always done it this way and it always works.” The most dangerous sentence in Scouting.

Most Scout groups have at least one. You probably know who I’m talking about. The Leader who treats tradition as untouchable, who sees any change as a threat. And look, I love Scouting tradition. But there’s a difference between honouring your roots and refusing to grow. Ask Jeeves honoured its roots so hard it forgot to grow, and now it’s a pub quiz answer.

So here’s the honest question every Scout Leader needs to sit with in 2026: are you a movement, or are you Ask Jeeves? Are you recruiting volunteers the way you did 20 years ago, or have you gone where people actually are? Are your Scout meetings relevant to the young people sitting in front of you today, not the ones from a decade ago? Are you using the tools available to you, or are you still treating a printed newsletter as cutting edge?

The good news is that Scouting has always had the answer built in. Every generation of Leaders has asked the same questions: how do we make this better,safer, more relevant? That instinct to question, improve and keep moving is exactly why we’re the world’s largest youth movement. It’s why we’ll still be here long after the next Ask Jeeves comes and goes.

Baden-Powell called it a movement for a reason. Keep moving. And whatever you do don’t drop the butler.

Over to you — are you doing enough to keep Scouting relevant for young people today, or are you holding onto the wrong traditions? What’s one thing in your group that could use a fresh look? Leave a comment on the video and let’s start a conversation.