Organisations applaud their heroes; yet every act of heroism is an admission that a system did not work that day — and the louder the applause, the bigger the failure.
Let me not be misunderstood: I have full respect for the person who steps up in a crisis. Without the people who bring the server back at midnight, rescue the presentation at the last minute, intervene before the client explodes, most organisations would not survive. My objection is not to the hero but to the order that normalises living dependent on heroes. Because the organisation that constantly produces heroes is in fact the organisation that constantly produces crises; applause is the music of failure.
The Economics of Applause
The problem is not moral but economic: organisations’ incentive systems pay the one who puts out the fire, not the one who prevents it. The crisis-solver is visible — the night shift, the heroic story, a name on the executive floor. The one who never lets the crisis start is invisible; their achievement is the event that did not happen, and no report is written about an event that did not happen. And so, without noticing, the organisation runs a reverse selection: the firefighter is promoted, the architect is forgotten.
The long-term product of this economy is predictable. People invest in rescuing, not preventing; systems are left fragile because fragility means a stage. The energy of the most talented is burned in recurring fires, and one day those talents either burn out or leave. The line attributed to Deming sums up the picture in a single sentence: a bad system will beat a good person every time.
A well-built system makes no sound; if you hear constant applause, something is constantly breaking.
The Questions of the Failure
When I hear a heroism story in an organisation, I ask three questions before applauding:
- Why could this crisis only be solved by one person’s extraordinary effort — where was the process?
- How many times has the same crisis occurred in six months, and was it the same person who saved it each time?
- If this hero resigned tomorrow, what would the organisation meet the same crisis with?
The answer to the third question is usually silence. Because dependence on a hero is the team-scale version of the trap I have written about before: building an organisation dependent on a person is the most spectacular form of not building structure. When the hero leaves, what remains is an inventory of unmanaged risks.
Quiet Excellence
My measure works in reverse: I weigh the quality of an operation by the scarcity of drama inside it. A well-functioning system is boring — deliveries on time, surprises small, nights spent asleep. This boredom is not laziness; it is the silence of thousands of correct choices made in advance. This is the most mature form of the chain of thought, structure, solution: the solution produced at the moment of design, not at the moment of crisis.
My advice to leaders is simple but hard to run: change your applause order. As often as you reward the hero of the quarter, call to the stage the team that produced no crisis at all — and ask them: “Which fires never started because of you?” The organisation that hears the answer to that question discovers its need for heroes shrinking.
The hero is the system’s debt. There is no debtless organisation; but the organisation that boasts of its debt does not realise it is paying interest.