Decision Errors, Organizational Iatrogenesis, and Errors of the Seventh Kind

This paper offers a framework for understanding how management decision errors may lead to iatrogenic outcomes. Organizational iatrogenesis is the unintentional genesis of qualitatively different problems due to mistakes such as unwise intervention strategies, well-intended work on the wrong problems, or ignorance of significant correlations. Iatrogenic outcomes sometimes involve “black swan” (Taleb, 2007) scenarios. Three such error types are...