Staff = bureaucracy. I mean that in the objective, academic sense, not the colloquial, derogatory sense. It is a social-collective all its own, with typologies and dynamics governing structures and relations throughout. We expect our people to operate -- thrive, even -- in this kind of environment, yet we do not teach them about it. This would be useful not just for staff, but for commanders (since we are a leader-centric organization) and just about everyone else as all are touched or even governed by the influences of the "laws" of bureaucracy and the ill-fitted organizational types to which we are married.

The fields of organizational sciences and collective action bring quite a bit of research to this area and we do not touch it. Authors like Schein, Mintzburg, Arquilla, Barabasi, Moffat, James Wilson, Zegart, Senge and Rothstein all touch upon organizational structure, flow, culture, and "fitness" of organizational types and the environments that surround them and are contained within them. Some, like Arquilla and Rothstein, deal directly with military issues of organizational mis-fit.

We barely study anything from this field in the brief overview of the Army as a "learning organization." What little study we do engage in begins just as the leadership FM: with the presumption that the US Army is a learning organization. That presumption itself is indicative of the lack of understanding of what a "learning organization" actually is. Those of us who have studied the above issues will say that the Army is NOT a learning organization, though it does contain people and groups who do learn. The Army is the very difinition of the "traditional" model, as opposed to the "learning" model. The difference is transparent to those who have not studied it, and thus it makes for rather silly discussion in the halls of Ft Leavenworth, Carlisle Barracks, and the satellite campuses.