---
id: "prereq-systems-thinking"
type: "prereq"
source_timestamps: ["¶21"]
source_url: "https://hbr.org/2025/09/dont-let-ai-reinforce-organizational-silos"
source_title: "Don't Let AI Reinforce Organizational Silos"
tags: ["mental-models", "leadership-skills"]
related: ["concept-purpose-first-approach", "quote-fragmentation-choice"]
reason: "Required to understand how optimizing a local departmental metric can negatively impact the global corporate outcome."
sources: ["tail2"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-tail2"
originDay: 2
articleStem: "hbr-tail-130-ai-reinforce-silos"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2025/09/dont-let-ai-reinforce-organizational-silos"
sourceTitle: "Don’t Let AI Reinforce Organizational Silos"
---
# Systems Thinking

**Prerequisite:** Systems Thinking.

**Why it's required:** To understand how optimizing a local departmental metric can negatively impact the global corporate outcome — the mechanism behind every effect in this article.

The authors explicitly state that leaders must “approach AI implementation with the very systems thinking you want your organization to embody” (see [[quote-fragmentation-choice]]). This requires understanding how different departments, data flows, and incentives interact as a holistic system, rather than viewing them as isolated components. It is the cognitive foundation for the [[concept-purpose-first-approach]] and for interpreting the contrarian insight [[contrarian-local-success-global-failure]].