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. When organizations work on the wrong problems, at the very least the original Metastasis. 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.
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.
AMP_Meckler&Boal_Decision_Errors_Iatrogenesis_Error_7thKind_2018.docx