The Reliability Paradox
We protect what's broken and ignore what works - until it breaks.
We allocate attention to problems, not to reliable systems. That's why keystone failures are catastrophic - no one prepared for loss of something that never failed.
The most dangerous keystones are the ones that work so well you've forgotten they exist. Organizations allocate attention to visible problems, not to reliable systems. The danger zone is high-impact components with low visibility - they never fail, so they never get attention. No documentation, no redundancy, no succession planning. When they finally fail, the cascade is catastrophic.
Business Application of The Reliability Paradox
We protect what's broken and ignore what works - until it breaks. SQLite has ~3 developers supporting billions of devices. The engineer who understands legacy systems, the spreadsheet every forecast depends on, the institutional customer driving product roadmaps - these invisible keystones are fragile because no one prepared for loss of something that never failed.