The prevention paradox might be the most significant obstacle organizations face when building resilient systems.
And yet, hardly anyone talks about it.
When we successfully prevent a threat before it happens, people often wonder if the threat was even real in the first place.
The year 2000 bug (Y2K) perfectly illustrates this problem.
After years of preparation and billions in investments, January 1, 2000, passed without any major incidents.
But rather than celebrating this success, many dismissed Y2K concerns as overblown hysteria precisely because the preventive measures worked as intended.
This “prevention paradox” challenges organizations investing in resilience today.
When potential disasters are successfully prevented, the very absence of catastrophe makes it difficult to justify the resources spent on prevention.
It happens because our brains struggle to value “non-events,” things that didn’t happen. We’re wired to respond to and remember actual events and visible outcomes. When a disaster is prevented, there’s no dramatic story to share.
When you combine that with hindsight bias, where, after a non-event, people say:
“See? Nothing happened, so clearly it wasn’t a real problem.”
Rather than:
“Nothing happened because we took appropriate precautions.”
Organizations struggle to maintain support for preventive measures when their success results in an absence of evidence.
And paradoxically, the more successful organizations are at prevention and resilience, the more their efforts appear unnecessary in retrospect.
This creates a cyclical problem:
1 — Organizations invest in preventive measures
2 — These measures successfully prevent disasters
3 — The absence of disasters makes the measures appear unnecessary
4 — Support for preventive measures decreases
5 — Organizations become more vulnerable to future disasters
To prevent that paradox from happening, organizations must:
- Document the “alternate reality” and use simulations to show what could have happened without prevention
- Share “near miss” stories and highlight specific instances where measures prevented failures
- Learn from others’ mistakes and point to organizations that failed to prepare
- Frame costs properly and present prevention expenses in the context of potential losses
- Create visible milestones and break prevention into measurable achievements
- Build institutional memory and document why protective measures exist
- Educate regularly and help stakeholders understand the value of resilience
The key to overcoming this paradox is to make the invisible work of prevention visible, measurable, and valued throughout the organization.
It’s challenging work, but critical for maintaining long-term resilience.
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If you struggle to improve resilience in your organization, contact me. I’ve spent the better part of a decade helping organizations transform their approach to system resilience and chaos engineering.
