Nobody thanks you for the crisis that did not happen

There is an asymmetry at the top of a company that nobody warns you about.

The disasters you cause are visible, dated and attributable. The disasters you prevent are not events. They are non-events, and nobody has ever been given credit for a non-event, because there is nothing there to point at.

A chief executive told me she had spent four months talking her board out of an acquisition. She was right. The target was bought by someone else and written down eighteen months later. What she got for this was a reputation, in one director's mind, for being cautious.

The first effect is on the record. Over a career, the visible half of your judgment is the half where you acted and it went wrong. The half where you declined and were right leaves no trace. So your internal ledger and everyone else's are both skewed against you, permanently, and by the same mechanism.

The second effect is stranger and more corrosive. Because prevention is invisible, it starts to feel like nothing. People who are excellent at seeing round corners often describe their own work as though it were luck, and after enough years of this they stop being able to distinguish the two themselves.

The third effect is on behaviour, and it is the expensive one. If action is rewarded and prevention is not, the rational move is to act. A reorganisation is legible. Leaving a working structure alone for another year is not, even when it is the better decision by a distance.

There is one habit that works against this and it costs about ten minutes a quarter.

Write down the significant decisions you did not take. What you declined, what you expected would happen if you had, and the date. Keep it somewhere private and do not show it to anyone. Then read it back a year later.

This is not a filing exercise. It does three things. It gives you a calibration record, which is the only way to find out whether you are actually good at this or have been lucky in a favourable market. It gives you the evidence when your own confidence goes, and it will go. And it slows down the reflex to act for the sake of being seen to act, because the alternative now exists in writing.

The people I have seen do this consistently have a noticeably different relationship with their own judgment. Not more confident. More specific. They can tell you what they are good at predicting and what they are not, which is a rarer thing at that level than it sounds.

You will still not be thanked. The board will not send a note about the acquisition that did not happen, and the market will not reward a quarter in which nothing broke.

That is worth accepting early rather than discovering slowly. The job pays in outcomes, and a good proportion of the outcomes you produce will be invisible by their nature. If you need the work to be seen in order to keep doing it well, this particular seat will grind you down, and it will do it quietly enough that you will blame something else.