demand for short haul electric sprinter vans and trucks to go up due to advances in 3D printing and electric drive trains. A six-week study with consultants led to a strategy proposal of outfitting UPS and FedEx with subsidized electric short haul fleets and recharging hubs on the outskirts of major urban areas. Just short of the presentation to the executive summit a systems perspective (RW.ERROR - Unable to find reference:1791) was introduced by a U.S Department of Energy specialist. The DOE explained that existing energy grids in most urban areas could not handle a large-scale conversion to locally charged electric drive train trucks and could lead to broad energy network failures. From this meta-system level of analysis, the nature of the problem looked quite different and a visioning error in this case would likely have led to serious iatrogenic outcomes. Although the team consulting with Daimler was certainly thinking at a macro level of analysis in their innovation thinking, they had not looked macro enough. Adequate visioning seems to require more than just having the capacity for taking a perspective. We suggest that better visioning entails the capacity for discerning issues from multiple levels of analysis simultaneously, from the macro down to the micro and up to the meta. Metastasis. When organizations work on the wrong problems, at the very least the original problem lingers. It may do so benignly still requiring a solution, but it may fester requiring greater resources to solve. Organizational decline is often characterized by the process of denial, followed by action involving errors of the third kind, which do not stop the decline. Unfortunately, when the organization gets around to solving the real problem, the problem has festered requiring greater organizational resources to solve but which the organization no longer has, and decline continues.
analysis was discussed and agreed upon as highly relevant prior to searches from 2002 through 2006. However, this relationship was ignored in the formal selection strategy. This led to a series of failed career starts, recurring recruiting expenses and organizational stress at the college. New leadership implemented a policy in 2007 that experienced candidates be given formal preference. With this strategy error corrected the college had a series of successful hires and low turnover. Daniel Kahneman’s (Kahneman, 2011) recalls how he noticed the now famous “illusion of validity” and how it leads to decision errors. The error is continuing a tactic that is proven to not work. Illusion of validity is the opposite situation in which the strategy decided upon is based on relationships that have repeatedly been demonstrated to be in error. We can also juxtapose this to Type I correlation error: when we hire experienced candidates despite no repeatable observational evidence that experienced candidates perform better on the job, we are making a Type I error. When we fail to give preference to experienced academic candidates despite repeated observational evidence that they do perform better on the job, we are making a Type IV error: choosing a course of action that will not be effective. Why do leaders and decision makers choose from the pool of possible solution courses of action that do not work, even in the face of evidence that they have not worked in the past, or that they probably will not work in the near future? The voluminous literature on cognitive biases and decision biases certainly helps explain this. However, specific research is needed to more tightly link the decision error literature with strategy development and selection. Error of the 5th Kind, Action (Type V), and Error of the 6th Kind; Inaction (Type VI) Action errors occur when deciding whether to act on a proposed solution. Managers, after deciding what needs to be done, face a decision of whether or not to take action. Distinct from other parts of the overall process, there comes a time when the manager or leader must “make the