CARLSBAD, Calif. -- The questions were rather blunt.

The quickly-delivered answers were, too.

It's almost as if Jon Daniels had already been through the process before. Perhaps in his own mind. The subject: The reasons for why the Rangers find themselves in this great rebuild on which they have embarked.

Had he been guilty of being too insular in thinking? Had the Rangers held on to some schools of thought too long?

"I think so," Daniels said during this week's MLB General Managers' meetings. "We have awareness of stuff we've done well and some stuff we haven't and stuff to which we haven't had enough exposure. Not the least of those is to find people outside the organization who bring outside perspectives."

As a result, the Rangers are changing how they do baseball business.

They are opening up more to areas like research and development, which includes the study and usage of more advanced analytics and probabilities. After a decade of being one of MLB's model franchises, the one that other teams tried to run down, they find themselves now trying to poach ideas and personnel from a group that have become the industry leaders. Among that group: the Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees, Houston and ever-inventive Tampa Bay.

The new assistant GM, Shiraz Rehman, came from the Cubs. The new farm director came from Team USA's 18-and-under program, making him that much more familiar with high school talent. The new manager, Chris Woodward, came from the Dodgers. When the Rangers get around to filling coaching staff positions, expect many of the candidates to come from those organizations.

And the Rangers won't be done there. They are expected to continue to add analysts and specialists over the course of the winter. It is the offseason of infrastructure, in which investments in non-playing personnel could have longer-reaching impact than any players the Rangers acquire.

The players are likely to come on short-term deals, mostly as space-holders or trade-chips, while the next wave of talent develops. The crew the Rangers hire will be charged with finding, developing and refining that wave.

It is not unlike the task Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, one of only two current GMs with longer tenure with their current team (Oakland's Billy Beane is the other) faced midway through his time with the Yankees.

Cashman oversaw a complete overhaul of the way the Yankees do business after more than a decade on the job. He reached the epiphany after "getting too much sand kicked in our faces," he said.

The Yankees, according to a survey by The Athletic, and Dodgers now employ the largest number of analysts in the majors with 20 apiece. Of course, it should be noted that teams treat their R&D departments with the secrecy of Area 51, so the exact counts may be more a guide than an index. The Rangers, according to the survey ranked in the middle of the pack with eight. Expect that number to grow, whether the Rangers acknowledge it or not.

"The best organizations are the ones that are open-minded and that don't think they have all the answers," Cashman said this week. "There are lots of terrific things happening outside of your franchise, whether it's inside the industry, other sports or in other businesses.

"Part of our job is to be the best at what you're doing while you are doing it, but also to spend the time to learn what's going on around you and outside your walls," Cashman added. "And not have the arrogance of thinking that you have the answers to everything. There is tremendous opportunity there. I have changed a lot since I first started in this job. If I hadn't changed, evolved, grown and surrounded myself with people who know more than I do, especially in things like analytics and performance science, I wouldn't be here. That [Daniels] is doing that now is a sign of leadership."

Now, just don't ask exactly what those analysts and performance scientists are doing. Nobody is giving up that proprietary information.

The best way to expand on it, though, is to raid other clubs.

Daniels' willingness to do this is perhaps the biggest single change he's made. When he came into the GM's role at the age of 28, his admirable aim was to hire good people and to promote from within. He has done that and maintained relative stability in the organization. Do it long enough, though, and at some point you run the risk of reaching a tipping point where you become too insular in philosophy.

Perhaps this happened to the Rangers. Daniels and company made a killing early on by exploiting a pair of market inefficiencies that propelled the Rangers into their long window of contention. First, the Rangers maximized the value at the trade deadline for Mark Teixeira by being willing to trade him with more than a year of control rather than as a rental. Second, the Rangers sunk significant money into Latin America at a time when many clubs were leery of the risks as bonuses rose.

There have since been corrections in both areas. The Teixeira trade chip is something that a GM gets only once in a career -- if he's lucky. The international market has since come under a uniform salary cap that keeps teams from accruing huge signing classes. But while all this was taking place, the Rangers were winning at the major league level. The major league team became the organization's sole focus.

And that can narrow the focus too much.

"We are all guilty of groupthink sometimes," said Minnesota GM Thad Levine, who was Daniels' first major hire after getting the Rangers job and then remained as an assistant GM for a decade. "We all think we are going to ward it off, but you look up three or five years later and you say maybe we tripped that wire a year or two ago. He's recognized that outside opinions are extremely valuable, too. It's an acknowledgement of their value."

Said Daniels: "The process is ongoing. Our goal is to never slip. There are probably five or eight clubs that are ahead of the rest of the industry in certain areas. We've been in that group before, and we are in certain areas, but on the R&D side we're not. That's an area we're going to look to improve."

And that is the area in which the Rangers will likely make their most impactful moves this winter because it is The Offseason of Infrastructure.