The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff may have been speaking to the right audience to influence the future in January when talking about the military as a “thinking, adaptive institution.”Army GEN Martin E. Dempsey was at the National Defense University addressing students from that school, the National War College and the Eisenhower School. His topic was change, something that does not come easily to the military.“The force that you lead will have to be more agile than the one I currently lead,” Dempsey said in the January 14 address. “We’ll have to be able to throttle up force and just as quickly throttle it back. We’ll have to embrace change, not just accept it or riskier elements. And while we have achieved a degree of certainty in our budget for the next two years, we still don’t yet have the full flexibility we need to rebalance the force for the challenges that we see ahead. We’ll buy back some readiness in the near term and we’ll avert a short-term crisis, but we still need to address the long-term pressures.“The challenge for our nation and for our military is how to navigate through this very uncertain and unstable world and I tell you all of this because it is you who will have to ultimately figure it out,” the nation’s top general said.Leaders in training may be the right group to effect change. An October 2013 paper produced by two U.S. Army War College professors says getting senior officers to change their minds about strategy, doctrine and policies can be difficult because some of the traits that make great officers can also make the officers resistant to changes. Called “Changing Minds in the Army: Why It Is So Difficult and What to Do About It,” the paper talks of the problems with changing course in an organization filled with people for whom change does not come easily.Authors Stephen J. Gerras and Leonard Wong say they are “not advocating capricious, wishy-washy organizational decision-making.” Instead, they highlight “the need for Army senior leaders to question their deep-seated beliefs on critical issues periodically and base their decisions on the most current information, rather than relying solely on what they have long believed to be true.”Gerras is a behavioral science professor at the War College’s Department of Command, Leadership and Management. Wong is a research professor at the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.Their paper suggests Army officers are less open to change than the general population, a view partly based on personality data collected from War College students. “This makes sense,” the two say in their report. “People with lower openness scores would probably be more inclined to join the Army in the first place. Additionally, since those who are more closed tend to be more productive, it is logical that officers viewed as successful by the institution would be even less open. … This raises an interesting paradox: The leaders recognized and selected by the Army to serve at strategic levels—where uncertainty and complexity are the greatest—tend to have lower levels of one of the attributes most related to success at the strategic level.”Army officers also possess above-average intelligence, Gerras and Wong say. “If the Army suffers somewhat from a lack of openness, at least the officer corps should benefit from the relatively higher levels of cognitive ability in a profession that requires a bachelor’s, and often master’s, degree of its senior officers.”Openness can be learned, especially if young officers see examples in their senior officers, but the rub is that this has to start somewhere. A Center for Army Leadership study, based on surveys of more than 16,800 officers, found only about half believe their units encourage frank and free-flowing discussion of ideas, Gerras and Wong say. The result is a situation in which a subordinate recognizes that a senior officer needs to make a course correction but the senior officer doesn’t see it that way, believing in his or her own experience and intuition, the report says.There are ways to make the officer corps more open to change, Gerras and Wong say.A starting point is to make young officers more introspective, in part by having them take personality and attitudinal assessments that will help them understand how they think and react. Also helpful would be having officer evaluations include a question about receptiveness to changing their mind, the report says.It is necessary to break officers of depending on intuition, which the report calls “overrated.” “Despite the documented limitations of intuition in complex contexts, senior leaders continue to pay an overabundance of homage to intuition. Leaders at the strategic level need to develop the habit of developing testable hypotheses and then implementing small experiments, or perhaps relatively unbiased assessments of historical data, to confirm or refute their hypotheses.”It would also help to broaden the experience of officers. A novel idea, the report suggests, would be to have an officer in a study group at a top-tier graduate school partner with someone who is not an officer and who could be a pacifist, communist or some other person with completely different ideas. “If the environment permits ‘Hooah!’ as a legitimate response, then it is probably not a useful broadening experience,” the report says.Dempsey told his audience, “I’ve seen incredible changes in our armed forces over the course of my career. I came into an all conscript force and it took us years for the force to become fully volunteer with all of the meaning of that word.“We are today a thinking, adaptive institution, deeply invested in leader development of the young men and women who will eventually lead it. That’s why you’re here. And that’s the edge we have to protect, especially in the face of declining budgets and increasing dynamism in the international security environment. That means we’ll have to accept some risks; we can’t buy them all down.”