Nobody Claps for Prevention

🎧 Listen to this week’s edition · 6 min (New!)

Happy Thursday,

One of the best leaders I ever worked for had, on the surface, the most boring and uneventful leadership style.

Nothing he did ever stood out. His projects landed without fuss. His meetings finished early. When deadlines loomed and everyone else was in full panic mode, he’d usually sorted the problem out before anyone even realised there was a problem.

While the rest of us were running around, he was the calm one in the room, quietly getting on with it.

Nobody ever called him a hero. There was never anything to be a hero about. It took me years to realise that wasn’t luck. It was one of his most impressive strengths.

When I look at organisations now, I can’t help but wonder: who are we actually rewarding? The firefighters, or the people who stop the fires from starting in the first place?

🧠 LEARN something.

A couple of MIT researchers, Nelson Repenning and John Sterman, spent years studying why organisations struggle to improve. They wanted to know why improvement programmes that worked great in a handful of companies so often failed elsewhere. The title of their paper says it all: “Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened.”

The real problem here is timing. Firefighting and fixing the problem have immediate payoffs, and everyone sees it. Prevention, on the other hand, pays off later, and when it works, it looks like nothing ever happened. No one is watching.

So when the pressure’s on and something has to give, it’s the work nobody is watching that goes first. Prevention gets dropped to deal with today’s fires, which creates more fires for tomorrow, and round and round we go.

But here’s where the research gets even more interesting. In a follow-up study, they found the trap is held in place by how managers explain the problems.

When things keep going wrong, some managers tend to blame their people: they’re not trying hard enough, they’re not careful enough, they just don’t care enough. So they push harder and tighten control. People get even less time to fix the underlying causes, so the fires keep burning, and the manager’s belief gets confirmed. The researchers call this a self-confirming attribution error.

In other words, the trap isn’t just sitting in the system. It’s in the story leaders tell themselves about why things keep going wrong. And that’s where it gets personal.

🤔 THINK about it.

When someone fights a fire, fixes a problem or comes to the rescue, we usually tell that as a story of organisational or individual success. We reward them and celebrate their rescue, their firefighting and their leadership in a crisis. We give them recognition, promotions and new opportunities. All true.

But let’s also be honest about the more uncomfortable bit. A lot of leaders like the fire. A crisis gives leaders clarity, urgency and a reason to be needed. You walk in, make the call, and people look relieved. They look up to you, and it feels good as a leader. Quiet prevention, on the other hand, gives you none of that. It’s just another Tuesday in the office.

In fact, it’s not uncommon to see leaders who love firefighting and rescuing so much that when there’s no crisis, they’ll find one, or create one. It’s how they feel needed, and how they get to shine.

So when the same kind of problems keep coming up and landing on our desks, we need to ask ourselves: are we fighting fires, or are we preventing them? If you’re the leader who always finds yourself having to save the day, there’s a fair chance you’re part of the reason the day needs saving in the first place.

Turns out my boring boss had made a choice most of us avoid. He swapped the applause for the outcome, the adrenaline for the calm, and being needed for being useful.

✅ DO IT to get results.

Next time a fire lands in front of you and you feel that little urge, or hit of adrenaline, to do something about it, or to praise someone else for jumping in, ask yourself a simple question: “What would have stopped this fire from happening in the first place, and who should have had the time and capacity to prevent it?” That’s a much better question than rewarding whoever is fighting the fire in the moment.

When it comes to behaviour in organisations, it’s pretty simple: people will do what you reward and incentivise them to do. Reward prevention, and you get prevention. Reward firefighting, and you get more fires.

Do this well, and it’ll look boring. But then again, that’s the point.

Until next week, keep it real, and stay curious!

Kenny

CEO & Founder | The Bridge Leaders