The Problem
Organizations often celebrate people for solving problems that should never have occurred in the first place.
A major cyberattack is contained. A critical outage is resolved. A supply chain disruption is managed. A compliance failure is corrected. The individuals who lead the recovery effort are recognized as heroes.
Yet the root causes like the unpatched systems, deferred maintenance, weak controls, ignored risks, inadequate planning, or underinvestment in resilience, often receive little attention.
As a result, organizations can unintentionally reward crisis management more than crisis prevention.
The Cause
The value of prevention is invisible; the drama of recovery is not.
When preventive measures work, there is no breach, no outage, no operational disruption, and no headline. Success appears ordinary. Leaders see costs but not the disasters that were avoided.
By contrast, a crisis creates urgency, visibility, and a compelling story. Recovery efforts are easy to observe and measure. Heroic actions become memorable, while years of preventive work remain largely unnoticed.
This creates the Preventable Problem Paradox:
The more preventable a problem is, the more likely organizations are to celebrate its resolution rather than question why it occurred at all.
The Solution
Shift recognition from recovery alone to resilience.
Organizations should ask a different set of questions:
- How many incidents were prevented?
- How much downtime was avoided?
- Which risks were eliminated before they became issues?
- What controls reduced exposure?
- Which investments increased resilience?
Leaders must reward the people who strengthen systems, reduce risk, improve reliability, and prevent failures, not only those who respond after failure occurs.
The objective is not to diminish heroism. Organizations will always need skilled responders.
The objective is to reduce the number of situations that require heroes in the first place.
The highest-performing organizations understand a simple truth:
A hero saves the day. A preventer ensures the day never needs saving.
One restores resilience.
The other creates it.
And while organizations need both, they create lasting value only when they reward both.
The Preventable Problem Paradox:
Organizations often celebrate the people who fix preventable problems while overlooking the people whose work would have prevented those problems from occurring at all.