Thought of The Day - Heroes and Planners

As has been pointed out by many people, everyone loves a hero and no-one notices a planner. By definition if you avoid a bad event happening no-one notices, the bad event didn't happen and because it didn't happen then maybe it wasn't possible for it to happen.

To borrow from The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; imagine if in 2000 someone had made locked bulletproof doors on airlines mandatory, 9/11 would have never happened. Would that person have been given awards, recognition and admiration? No, instead he probably would have, at best been ignored, at worst been reviled by pilots and airlines for implementing a 'pointless' security feature.

This leaves me in an interesting quandary, i know it is better for the companies i work for to be a planner, however the incentives at work are all set up for hero's. Is the way forward to identify catastrophes before they happen, plan for what you can do when they do happen and then let them happen? I suppose the problem, even with delayed planning, is the full magnitude of the fuck-up is never realised so no-one knows how bad it could have been.

Thinking about it from the other side, how could you incentivise planning? How do you quantify what could have been and how likely it was to occur, even if it doesn't?