By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities. Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organisation isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing it.

Building the right incentives around that can be tricky, those incentives need to ensure the highest levels of management aren't themselves disincentivising their directs & their departments from surfacing pain & problems - but it's also pretty common for people to mask those signals purely out of a well-intentioned desire to help. It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not be so reactive to them.

Too many companies ground their performance incentives & processes around oversimplified ideas that don't match the reality of human behaviour

I think a good place to start is tracking all the proactive things being done and reporting them. At least then maybe someone will see why it’s quiet, because you’ve anticipated the problems and stopped them before they start.

When things come up with other teams, you’ll have a catalog of tasks that were done to show why you didn’t have the same issue. The work was done, just at a better time to avoid downtime.

Managers will let you get away with anything if you time your reports correctly. They also don't want to sit in meetings where they are reminded of better outsourcing alternatives and they chose to dogfeed instead.

We've become too comfortable, since actual toil is no longer seen in the company: Manufacturing is overseas, customer support is overseas, logistics is an afterthought with established guarantees. Thus we want the mild weather and smooth meetings. If your engineering team is too smooth, maybe you should already branch out to help other related but "struggling" teams to get your hands dirty and noticed.

The tragedy is that “nothing broke” looks like “nothing was done” to people far enough away from the system.

This thinking eventually results in The Scream Test. When the screams come as a system fails that is when they act on it.

Alas, for many parts of society there is a large amount of people that would rather be reactive than proactive. It means it is easier today but harder long term.

> It's a serious problem in this industry

s/in this industry//

Since it's entirely possible (extremely likely?) the "problem" would never materialize, this is quite reasonable.

I feel like this is a cultural symptom and something many people are hoping to solve in healthcare. Basically we treat solving problems as amazing rather than preventing problems. You get rewarded if you treat a sickness instead of keeping a healthy person healthy.

This is the same thing. We need to reward things never going wrong as a society since this is pervasive.

Car industry best practices

lol. I hate presentations. I like to run a tight ship. But that does not shine, so they made me do presentations every quarter. If you do some work, you must "take" credit. It is kinda a need when you manage people since you need to build their careers.

I finally moved on to be an IC. Same story, same pressure :) You need to present to directors not because they need to know, but because your managers have a quota of N presentations per quarter, and if you back out, someone else needs to step up.

Needless to say my productivity reduces by half and sometimes to almost zero during the week or fortnight of presentations every quarter.

I feel that disconnect is everywhere, when the suits dont see anything and act on reports

>>I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from engineering.

Given the whole point of management is to work to ensure their own survival and growth, it would in their interest to kill genuine competition when its coming up.

Who wants to raise their new competition and lose to them, no one!

Track leading indicators, pricing them if possible.