Eric is a manager at a retail store and has $17$ employees working below him. He's responsible for managing their schedules and tracking their work performance. Because he's new to the job and wants to be seen as the "fun manager", he says no one will be formally written up unless they are more than $15$ minutes late. Many of the employees then start routinely showing up $10-15$ minutes late. As a result, Eric is unable to open the store on time many days of the week and is fired by his boss. In this case, Eric failed to properly utilize which type of reasoning?