Introducing Systems Thinking Early

By Sgt. Maj. Liela Shadmani, Ph.D.

Sergeants Major Course

July 17, 2026

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Here's a scene you've lived if you've worn a uniform long enough. The battalion operations section spent months building a training schedule. Logistics and supply built a separate one at the same time. By the time both sections compared notes, the unit had published conflicting guidance, burned long nights and weekends of planning time, and consumed enough staff meeting hours to train a rifle platoon.

Nobody was slacking. Nobody dropped the ball. The system failed them because nobody taught them to see the system. That's not a leadership failure, it's a curriculum failure.

Senior leaders who eventually encounter "systems thinking" often do so too late, after 15 to 20 years of direct-level thinking that calcified into habits they no longer recognize as limitations. The result is a force that executes brilliantly at the squad level and struggles to synchronize at higher echelons.

The U.S. Army's failure to deliberately teach systems thinking at the early stages of enlisted leader development, beginning at the basic leader course (BLC), creates real and recurring inefficiencies, reinforces linear mental models, and delays leaders' ability to operate effectively at the organizational level.

Training Tasks Instead of Thinking

The Army is world-class at teaching leaders what to do. It's inconsistent at teaching leaders how to think when tasks don't fit neatly into a single lane. That inconsistency isn't accidental. It's a design choice. BLC, as outlined in Army Regulation 350-1 and the BLC Program of Instruction, prioritizes developing NCOs who can lead teams, enforce standards, and execute tasks within the framework of operations (Department of the Army [DA], 2025).

That's exactly the right emphasis for newly promoted corporals. The problem is that BLC doesn't deliberately develop systems thinking: the ability to understand how actions interact across time, echelons, and organizational boundaries.

And because no subsequent courses treat that development as a priority until leaders reach the senior ranks, they take on battalion-level responsibilities with a direct-level brain in organizational-level jobs.

Systems thinking is the ability to see how interdependent elements interact over time through feedback loops, delays, and unintended consequences (Sterman, 2018). In Army terms, it's the difference between seeing a task as a checkbox and understanding it as a move inside a larger system that will respond to whatever you just did.

Peter Senge (2006), author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, called this "the discipline of seeing wholes" and argued that most organizations train people to manage parts and then wonder why the whole keeps breaking.

That description fits the Army precisely.

Army Design Methodology (ADM) rests on this exact foundation. The Army expects leaders to frame operational environments, identify relationships, and anticipate developing behaviors (DA, 2015). It just doesn't build the cognitive foundation until they complete field-grade or senior enlisted education courses, by then habits are already set.

The Cost of Not Teaching Systems Thinking

This is not an abstract debate. There are real costs, and they're measurable. A 2019 RAND Corporation study found that Army company leaders spent significant portions of their duty time on administrative requirements disconnected from training and readiness (Saum-Manning et al., 2019).

That administrative burden was generated by organizational systems producing competing demands without shared understanding of cause and effect. Leaders who think in straight lines create friction in systems that don't move in straight lines.

Duplicated effort is the most visible symptom. Organizations without shared mental models routinely spend time and resources correcting friction they created themselves (Sterman, 2018; Kunc & Morecroft, 2010).

In Army language, it leads to redundant taskings, conflicting guidance, and logistics plans that have nothing to do with operations plans, and training calendars that collapse by the third week of the quarter. These failures happen because leaders don't see how their decisions interact and impact across echelons.

Senge (2006) identified this pattern as one of seven organizational learning disabilities called "the fixation on events." He proposes that leaders who train to react to immediate events, rather than to understand the systems producing those events, will react to the same problems indefinitely.

The Army's persistent friction in staff synchronization isn't new. It's the same problem recycled across generations because the root cause remains untouched.

Learning Systems Thinking Too Late

In the Sergeants Major Course (SMC) Department of Operations (DAO), the moment systems thinking lands is unmistakable. It usually happens in mid-conversation, not mid-facilitation.

Students who run battalion operations sections or manage brigade training calendars for years will stop, stare at a causal loop diagram, and say something that sounds almost like an accusation directed at the institution itself: "This is double work. This is exactly what we've been doing for years. Why didn't anyone teach me this when I became an NCO 10 years ago?"

They're not venting. They're doing the math. The fuel burned on logistics runs that should have been synchronized from the start. The credibility spent at staff meetings produced nothing because two sections unknowingly planned the same requirement. Time taken from Soldiers because senior leaders didn't understand what their decisions would produce downstream.

These are the students who navigated 15-20 years of Army service without anyone naming the pattern they kept running into. One student sat in class and asked a question that stayed with me: "Is it too late to learn this as master sergeants when we might be assigned as battalion or brigade operations sergeants major?"

It's an honest question. And the fact that a master sergeant asked it at the SMC is a problem the Army created. Research confirms what that moment represents. Leaders tend to cling to familiar frameworks even when those frameworks no longer match the environment in which they operate (Weick et al., 2005).

Senge (2006) called this the "mental models" discipline, which are deeply held internal pictures of how the world works and govern how leaders interpret situations and choose their next move.

When those mental models go unexamined for 10 to 15 years, they don't just shape behavior, they become invisible to the person who carries them. The answer to that master sergeant's question is no, it's not too late, but it'll be harder than it needs to be.

The Transition from Doing to Aligning

Promotion to sergeant major doesn't change what you know, it changes what the job requires. Most leaders never get that memo.

At the direct level, leadership is about doing, owning the task, driving completion, personally resolving friction, and building a strong foundation. The problem is that the Army never tells leaders the job changes in fundamental ways as responsibilities expand.

At the organizational level, leaders are no longer the primary executors. They operate between executing elements, providing value in alignment, not output.

Many leaders resist this shift without knowing it. They feel ineffective when they stop producing visible results. They over-control because they equate visible activity with organizational value. They insert themselves into execution when the unit needs synchronization, and in doing so, they become the bottleneck they're trying to prevent (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003).

The RAND study found that when senior leaders direct execution details, subordinate leaders lose the time and space required to develop their own personal judgment (Saum-Manning et al., 2019). This isn't a theory. It's a documented cost.

Senge (2006) described what this transition demands through the discipline of "personal mastery," the capacity to clarify what you genuinely want to create, to see current reality clearly, and to hold the tension between the two with patience rather than urgency.

Systems thinking gives leaders the framework for this shift. It teaches them to shape conditions rather than control actions, to align purpose across sections that don't naturally coordinate, and build an environment where subordinate leaders can make sound decisions faster (Siegenfeld & Bar-Yam, 2020).

Systems thinking teaches one more thing the Army rarely says out loud: the most powerful move is sometimes the one you choose not to make.

When ADM Becomes Performative

Classrooms have their own version of this problem. When students encounter ADM for the first time without a systems thinking foundation, they approach it like every other Army product: get it done, brief it, and move on.

The rich picture becomes a drawing exercise. The causal loop diagram becomes a box-and-arrow product. Briefings happen, instructors check the box, and nothing significant changes.

This isn't criticism, it's what happens when a methodology is introduced without building the cognitive capacity it takes to make it work. ADM addresses ill-structured, wicked problems that resist standardized solutions and it takes reframing the problem before any answer can be useful (DA, 2015; Rittel & Webber, 1973).

Systems thinking is what makes ADM work as intended. Without it, leaders optimize instead of design, produce answers instead of asking better questions, and default to control instead of making genuine inquiries (Mingers & White, 2010).

The shift happens in the classroom when students stop trying to complete the ADM product and instead use it as a lens to see the larger picture.

That shift almost never comes from ADM instruction alone, it requires cognitive habits where leaders practice seeing systems they should have learned earlier in their careers.

When students ask why the rich picture matters or what causal loops have to do with real operations, it is the signal that the foundation was never built.

Sense-making as a Core Leadership Function

Stripped of jargon, here's what organizational-level leaders do: They help their organizations understand what's happening, figure out what it means, and build a shared understanding so the staff can act coherently rather than at cross-purposes.

That makes sense, and it's a central organizational leader's function to effectively coordinate action or adapt to changing situations (Weick et al., 2005). And it's the most important function battalion or brigade operations sergeants major perform on any given day.

In the classroom, something shifts when students begin to understand. They stop describing systems thinking as a concept and describe it as a job requirement.

They see that conducting a real needs analysis, tracking the indicators and triggers in their operational environment, and tracing a decision's second- and third-order effects are not academic exercises, they're a battalion or brigade operations sergeant major's daily responsibilities.

That realization tends to come with urgency because most of those students are less than a year from holding that position.

Visual models, causal loop diagrams, and narrative framing are not classroom abstractions. They are the instruments leaders use to build a shared understanding across a staff that doesn't naturally operate on the same picture, which is a critical sense-making element (Mingers & White, 2010).

Senge (2006) described this as "team learning," the capacity of groups to develop collective intelligence that exceeds the sum of its individual parts. A battalion staff without shared mental models doesn't multiply capability, it divides it.

Leaders who understand systems stop asking whether tasks were done, they ask whether actions moved the organization in the right direction. This takes different kinds of leaders who ask the right questions and provoke systems thinking. Developing these leaders begins with incorporating systems thinking into all leadership courses.

What Effective Implementation Looks Like

Effective implementation requires a deliberate, progressive approach that builds systems thinking as a cognitive habit across the entire enlisted leader development continuum. This doesn't require another elective block of instruction, it takes proper sequencing that connects all leadership curricula.

At BLC, the goal isn't to teach operational art to newly promoted corporals, it's to introduce one foundational idea: every action exists within a system, and actions produce effects beyond what they can immediately see.

That concept, introduced early and reinforced consistently, changes how NCOs read maintenance requests, build training schedules, and coordinate resupply.

Research shows that leaders perform considerably better in dynamic environments when they learn early to recognize feedback, delays, and interdependence (Mingers & White, 2010).

At the Advanced Leader Course and Senior Leader Course, systems thinking applies directly to staff functions: how logistics decisions create second-order effects on operations, how a personnel actions ripple into readiness, and how section planning decisions create downstream friction for all other sections.

At the Master Leader Course and SMC, it's the operating lens for planning, organizational diagnosis, and leader development rather than a new concept introduced for the first time.

Senge (2006) described the learning organization as one where "people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together" (p. 3).

This idea creates a pathway to improving leader development that should start at BLC, not at the SMC.

Why the Basic Leader Course Matters

BLC is where the Army makes its first serious investment in leader cognition. The decisions made there are about what counts as thinking and what counts as executing, shaping the mental models young leaders carry with them for the rest of their careers.

Early cognitive framing shapes long-term performance in complex environments (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003). Senge (2006) argued that building the capacity to see systems requires sustained practice that starts early in a person's development.

Early exposure to systems thinking improves judgment, reduces rework, builds shared understanding, and develops leaders who ask why before defaulting to how. Getting this early exposure requires a fundamental change in the Army's leadership education system, starting with the BLC.

Introducing systems thinking at BLC doesn't compromise the standards the course is built upon, it expands what they eventually produce.

A young sergeant who early on learns that every action exists within a system becomes a leader who asks better questions, a staff sergeant who coordinates instead of competes, and eventually a sergeant major who leads the organization rather than just manages its tasks.

This foundational and critical way of thinking will reshape how leaders plan and execute at all echelons, benefiting how organizations operate in dynamic and complex environments.

Conclusion

Everything in this article leads to the same idea: introducing systems thinking early will help leaders recognize double work, wasted resources, and coordination failures that hinder organizations.

The Army doesn't lack capable leaders. It produces leaders trained for precision in linear environments and then sends them into systems that don't behave linearly. This cognitive capability gap creates a cost that isn't abstract.

The cost is both organizational and personal. Leaders don't just absorb friction, they internalize it, carry it forward, and pass the same cognitive gaps to the next generation.

Introducing systems thinking early doesn't weaken discipline or undermine execution, it strengthens both by giving leaders the cognitive tools they need to understand how their actions shape the system for which they're responsible.

The Army already has the right frameworks; ADM, mission command, and the military decision-making process. What's missing is the foundation those frameworks need to function. That foundation belongs at BLC, reinforced at every subsequent leadership course, and normalized in unit operations long before anyone sits down in an SMC classroom.

References

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Department of the Army. (2025). Army training and leader development (AR 350-1). https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN44161-AR_350-1-001-WEB-2.pdf

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Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 155-169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730

Saum-Manning, L., Krueger, T. C., Lewis, M. W., Leidy, E. N., Yamada, T., Eden, R., Lewis, A., Cotto, A. L., Haberman, R., Dion Jr, R., Moore, S. L., Shurkin, M., & Lerario, M. (2019). Reducing the time burdens of Army company leaders. RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2979.html

Senge, P. M. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization (Rev. ed.). Doubleday/Currency.

Siegenfeld, A. F., & Bar-Yam, Y. (2020). An introduction to complex systems science and its applications. Complexity, 2020, Article 6105872. https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/6105872

Sterman, J. D. (2018). System dynamics at sixty: The path forward. System Dynamics Review, 34(1-2), 5-47. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sdr.1601

Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409-421. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the NCO Journal, the U.S. Army, or the U.S. Department of War.

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