No Fireworks Leadership

Third time in two months we had an incident. Five minutes of downtime. Two engineers at 8 PM trying to magic it back to life. The fix wasn't clear. Reverting to the previous deployment was faster. If we were lucky, everyone would keep living their evening and we could figure out what actually happened next morning.

So we reverted. Seven minutes down.

One of the engineers sent a message to the channel. People sent their emojis. The CEO sent his own message thanking the two of them for their response.

I also sent my congratulations to the team. These were some good reflexes. Having the product down for longer would have been a hit for our SLAs and our customers. We managed to fix it before getting a user report so they indeed were the heroes of the day on that Wednesday.

I meant every word. They stayed calm. They made good decisions under pressure. They deserved the recognition.

But something still didn't sit right with me.

The Work That Never Happened

Our industry loves heroes. The engineer who stays up late to solve the bug. The firefighter who responds to chaos with clarity. We build these stories. We celebrate them. We promote on them.

But I was also watching two people get celebrated for being excellent at something that should never have needed to happen.

There was another team somewhere in your org. Quieter. No emergency channels lit up at night. No all-hands messages. No CEO shout-outs. Stable complex deliverables. The deployments are smooth. Six months ago, an engineer anticipated a scaling problem and redesigned the data flow. Not flashy work. Nobody ran it as a project. It just works. So there's nothing to solve. There's no story.

That team is doing the work.

They prevent crises. And nobody's going to thank them for it because the world kept running like it should.

Prevention Work

This pattern doesn't just apply to engineers. It shows up everywhere the work actually matters.

A manager notices someone has gone quiet in meetings. Ask better questions in a one-on-one. The person admits they've been thinking about leaving. Nobody else knew. Leadership didn't know. But the manager noticed the shift and asked. They figure out it's not the work, it's feeling unseen. They make space for them to lead the next project. Three months later they're engaged again. They never actually leave.

Another team lead sees tension building between two people. It hasn't blown up into conflict yet. But they feel it. They have separate conversations with each of them. They reframe how they work together. The conflict never becomes a crisis because they caught it before it needed to be a crisis. They help their function work.

A security engineer reviews the codebase for patterns that could become vulnerabilities later. She flags an auth flow that works now but has architectural debt. Nobody's exploiting it. There's no incident. But she catches it before it becomes a problem. She works with the team to fix it quietly. Nothing breaks because nothing was broken yet.

In all three cases, the result is quiet. No incident report. No resolution story. No tickets. No metrics. Just the thing that didn't happen.

And quiet work disappears. You are still preventing. And prevention looks like nothing happening. No fireworks around it.

Why The System Can't See This

This is where both things converge into the same structural problem.

You can see the heroes. They make noise, generate data, strategically talk to the right people. The engineer who responds to incidents creates incident tickets, response times, resolution stories. The manager who handles a crisis creates escalations, decisions, visible outcomes. These are measurable. Reportable. Concrete.

Prevention work generates nothing. No tickets because nothing broke. No metrics because nothing failed. No story because the thing that could have happened didn't happen. In any system that measures what breaks and who fixes it, prevention work is invisible by default.

At small scale, this is manageable. A manager knows their team. They see prevention work happening. But as organizations grow, you need metrics and dashboards to track performance across multiple teams. And those dashboards measure incidents, not prevented incidents. Response times, not problems avoided. So the system reinforces itself. The things you can measure get resources and attention. The things you can't measure get squeezed out.

Add promotion systems on top of that. Career growth is tied to impact. Impact is tied to what's measurable. So people optimize for measurable work. Reactive work. Firefighting. Because that's what generates the data that gets you promoted.

This isn't malicious. It's structural. Organizations didn't sit down and decide "let's only value reactive excellence." They built systems to measure and manage performance. Those systems naturally gravitate toward what's visible. And prevention work, by definition, isn't visible.

This is how stable systems become unstable. Not because people stop caring about prevention. But because the org architecture makes prevention work invisible and reactive work visible. So over time, the people who would do prevention work either adapt and start firefighting instead, or they leave for somewhere that values what they actually do.

What Leaders Actually Do

At some point you realize the system isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do. It measures what breaks. It rewards who fixes. It celebrates visible outcomes because visible outcomes are easy to quantify.

And if you’re a leader inside that system, you don’t get to wish it behaved differently. You have to lead inside the reality you’ve got.

Start where your reach actually matters. In your one-on-ones, ask a simple question: "What did you stop from happening this week?".

Write it down. Because prevention evaporates faster than anybody thinks. It looks like nothing. It feels like nothing. And unless someone captures it, it gets treated like nothing.

Bring those notes to performance conversations. Read them back.
“You redesigned the data layer and stopped three scaling issues before they existed.”
Say it clearly. Because the default conversation is always about who sprinted into the fire. Someone has to speak for the people who built a world where the fire never started.

If you manage managers, make them do the same. When a team has zero major incidents, pause the room. Ask why. Make them say the names. Because if they don’t, the system will treat stability like luck. And luck doesn’t get rewarded.

Push upstream where you can. If you have the authority to question what the company measures, do it. Audit your dashboards. Ask why you’re tracking reaction time but not resilience. Ask why you can tell me how many things broke last quarter but not how many were avoided.

This is the part that feels like fighting dragons with a broomstick. You’ll lose fights. You’ll annoy people. You’ll get the quiet "is this really worth it?” look from the folks who love their dashboards exactly as they are.

That’s fine. This isn’t about winning. It’s about signaling that prevention counts, even if the machinery wasn’t built to see it.

Why it matters more than you think

Somewhere on your team is a quiet expert. The person who sees failure modes before everyone else. The one who redesigns something small and invisible and in doing so prevents the thing that would have kept ten people up at night.

If that person watches enough firefighters get promoted while their own work disappears into silence, they’ll leave. Or they’ll stop doing the prevention work that makes everything easier and start chasing visible chaos instead. Humans adapt to incentives. Even the wise ones.

You can’t rewrite the entire org. You can’t force people to value what they can’t see. But you can slow the decay. You can make sure at least one corner of the building knows the difference between foresight and adrenaline.

That’s not revolution. It’s maintenance of values. The unglamorous kind.

The small victory that still matters

When you make prevention visible, when you insist that quiet excellence counts, you’re not trying to save the whole system. You’re modeling a different one.

Maybe the org never changes. Maybe your best people still leave. But they’ll leave knowing what it feels like to work somewhere that recognizes the difference between stability and luck. They’ll know what to build when they get the chance. They’ll know what to defend when the incentives turn against them.

That’s not a grand win. It’s not a fix.
It’s choosing to lead with your values when outcomes won’t cooperate.

And sometimes that’s the only real power you get, and the one that ends up mattering the most.