> How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?

That’s the trust thing. Maybe the SVP trusts the people in his organization are capable of making the appropriate change without his supervision and what he’s doing is coaching them on how to do an incident postmortem properly.

Of course as you called out, the SVP might already have all the necessary details to do more than that. But simply pushing people in the right direction is a big piece of leadership’s job, at least when they have people they trust.