A classic MIT paper circulating on Hacker News makes a counterintuitive point about organizational life: nobody gets credit for fixing problems that never happen. The insight, from researchers studying systems thinking, captures a universal frustration in engineering and maintenance—the most successful preventive work goes invisible, because when it succeeds, the disaster simply doesn't occur. According to the paper, this systematic blindness to prevention creates perverse incentives, pushing organizations toward reactive firefighting instead of building resilience.

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