“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome,” -Charlie Munger
When there is a problem it is great how teams can come together and solve that problem. It is exciting to be part of a team to resolve the crisis and it feels good to receive recognition from senior leadership. In the long term, this helps their career.
What about the people who keep these crises from ever happening?
I don’t want to take away from the great work these crisis teams do, it is important in the moment. I also don’t want to punish someone for the problem because it is not the person but a broken process, but we need to make it known that it is bad that we get into these situations. Maybe we need to assign root cause analysis/corrective action teams to these situations at a business level. Their job is to stop these things from ever happening again.
Our goal is not to be the hero but to get really, really, really good at doing the same thing over and over.