Leadership, like parenting, is mostly preventive. And preventive work is thankless.

We celebrate cures. We notice intervention. We thank people when something dramatic is fixed, rescued or reversed. We rarely acknowledge the work that stops harm from happening in the first place.

Donald Henderson, the epidemiologist who led the global eradication of smallpox, once remarked that he had never been thanked for that work. Millions of lives were saved. Entire futures were uninterrupted. Yet the impact remained largely invisible. There was no individual moment of rescue. No single patient who could point to a before and after.

Much of a patient’s experience of care centres on visible intervention. When you or a loved one survives a life-threatening illness or undergoes a complex procedure, gratitude has somewhere to land. The benefit is immediate, personal and tangible.

We are good at recognising what we can see. We struggle to notice harm that did not occur.

That distinction has stayed with me because I recognise it in both parenting and leadership.

I have never felt comfortable taking credit for my children’s successes. When they do well, it feels like their work. Their effort. Their decisions. At most, I was present, cheering from the sidelines.

Failure feels different.

When something goes wrong, when a child struggles, lashes out or falls short, my attention turns inward. I think about the environment they were in. The signals they were receiving. The things I assumed were fine because no one was raising an alarm.

Credit drifts away from me. Responsibility settles closer.

I see this most clearly in my son’s experience with school. From early on, he was curious and energetic. At times, deeply bored. Some school environments met that with curiosity of their own. Others responded with labels. Over time, behaviour became the dominant way he was understood. Meetings followed. Narratives formed. His “reputation” often arrived before he did.

At home, he was engaged and inquisitive. At school, he was increasingly treated as a problem to be managed.

Eventually, we moved him. He made friends. His energy was interpreted differently. His needs were better understood. A great deal of difficulty was avoided through a shift in environment.

I still find myself asking why I did not move him sooner? Not in a spirit of self-blame, but with an awareness of how easily one defers when those in authority sound assured. How persuasive it is to be told that a situation is being handled. How hard it is to act preventively when the alternative outcomes remain theoretical rather than visible.

That pattern repeats in leadership.

Someone close to me once remarked that, in his role, almost everything that reaches him arrives as a problem. Complaints surface. Risks are escalated. What is working rarely announces itself. If he were to take that flow of information at face value, he might assume that everything is perpetually on the brink.

Instead, he has learned to read the absence of noise differently. To recognise that many things are holding precisely because someone is paying attention, outside the spotlight, without recognition.

It is hard to notice what is missing.

When outcomes are attributed entirely to oneself, attention swings like a pendulum between credit and blame. Success feels inflated. Failure feels heavy. The pendulum never quite comes to rest and there is little space to observe what is holding steady.

A more neutral stance refines attention. The problem that did not escalate can come into focus. The calm that prevailed.

Personalising credit or failure amplifies the swing. Evenly held responsibility allows things to be seen as they are.

And that is what clinically unremarkable really describes. Not the absence of pathology, but the presence of enough care, balance and attention that nothing remarkable needed to happen at all. Wellness prevailed.