Issue #7
Every crisis has a moment when it could have been stopped before the harm began. The UK Post Office scandal had dozens of those moments. They were missed one after another.
Over the past six months, we’ve traced the full arc of this crisis: truth ignored, silence engineered, power misused, systems protected at human cost, accountability dressed up as theatre, and repentance delayed for decades. Now comes the harder question. How do we prevent this from happening again?
Prevention starts with two questions. Who is included in the system? And what does the system reward? When either is wrong, failure becomes more likely. When both are wrong, failure becomes inevitable.
First: the missing stakeholders.
Sub-postmasters were the people most affected by Horizon. Their livelihoods, reputations, and freedom were at risk. And yet they had no voice in the systems that governed them. They were stakeholders in name, not in design. That is symbolism.
This pattern is not unique to one scandal. It shows up quietly in boardrooms, charities, churches, and government departments. The affected group is acknowledged in the report but absent from the decision. Named, but not heard.
Second: the misaligned incentives.
Fujitsu was rewarded for uptime, not accuracy. Post Office executives were measured on efficiency, not fairness. The government was incentivized to avoid disruption, not to surface problems. No one in the chain was rewarded for looking closer.
Most systemic failures come from misaligned design. The system does not need active malice to fail. It only needs to reward the wrong things. Over time, even responsible people do what is rewarded and avoid what is punished, because people follow incentives more than principles.
This is why integrity alone is not enough. Design determines whether it survives under pressure.
Scripture offers a corrective lens in 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul describes the body as composed of many parts, each necessary for the health of the whole. “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it.”
When leaders exclude those most affected, they are not just making a structural mistake; they are rejecting a God-given safeguard against blind spots and injustice. An organization that ignores the people it serves is not a functioning body. It’s a hierarchy protecting its own head.
Prevention begins when leaders have the courage to expand the table and the humility to share real decision-making authority with those who bear the real costs.
So what can you do?
Ask:
- Who is affected by your most important decisions but absent from making them?
- What does your reward structure actually incentivize: looking right, or doing right?
Act:
Map one decision this month. List everyone affected. Note who was missing. Then bring one of those voices in with genuine influence. Let their perspectives challenge your assumptions.
Model:
Redesign one incentive to reward what you actually value. Then tell your team why.
Prevention is built through alignment between who is heard and what is rewarded. Get those right, and your system will surface truth early, correct course quickly, and protect the people it’s meant to serve.
(Read the entire UK Post Office Scandal series here.)
Trev left the above comment which says anonymous
Mun Wai, this is such an important framing—especially your focus on identifying the right actors and genuinely listening to those with lived and technical insight.
What stands out is how often failure isn’t just about who is missing, but what the system quietly rewards. Misaligned incentives don’t just distort outcomes—they reshape behaviour. Over time, they train people to believe the company line, think within approved boundaries, feel unsafe to speak, and act compliantly.
That’s why prevention isn’t only structural—it’s epistemic. It requires a deliberate redesign of how organisations know what they know.
Re-engineered well, those same dynamics can shift: people believe in psychological safety, think critically and collaboratively, feel heard, and act with integrity and courage. That’s when systems begin to surface truth early rather than suppress it.
Getting both elements right—who is included and what is rewarded—is what turns insight into protection, and intention into accountability.
You’ve captured something really important here: systems don’t just shape outcomes, they shape perception, behavior, and even what people believe is safe or possible to think.
Your point that prevention is “epistemic” is especially powerful. Organizations often assume they have a truth problem when they actually have a knowing problem. The system quietly teaches people what can be questioned, what gets ignored, and what becomes too risky to see.
And you’re right, incentives don’t merely influence conduct. Over time, they normalize certain ways of thinking and silence others. That’s why psychological safety is not a “culture initiative”; it’s a safeguard against institutional blindness.
I also appreciate your emphasis on lived and technical insight together. One without the other creates distortion. Technical expertise without lived experience becomes abstraction. Lived experience without technical rigor can miss systemic complexity. Stewardship requires both at the table.
That’s when organizations become capable of surfacing truth early enough to change course before harm compounds.