The highest skill is achieving the objective without contest, by shaping the situation so opposition never forms.
Sun Tzu's formulation. The institutional version is that the best-run organisations produce few visible crises, which makes their competence invisible and their budgets vulnerable.
In practice
- A supplier who resolves a delivery problem by resequencing the schedule before the client notices is never thanked, because the client never knew.
- A safety team with no incidents in four years is asked to justify its headcount, and has nothing to point at but the absence.