🦸 Hero Culture — The Lack of Systemic Transparency and Distributed Ownership

🪛 The Hero Engineer

In many tech companies, there’s always that one person who knows where the skeletons are buried. They’ve been there the longest, they know the hacks, and when system breaks, they swoop in like Batman.

At first, this looks admirable. The company praises them. They feel irreplaceable. But there’s a hidden cost: the entire system depends on them. Documentation suffers. Others stop learning. On-call rotations become anxiety machines. The systems scales in human dependency, not in robust architecture.

The Observability Engineering book calls this out. True observability isn’t about calling the hero. It’s about building systems where anyone — even a newcomer — can ask meaningful questions and understand system behavior. That’s real power.

🏛️ The Hero Politician: A National Pattern

Strangely, the same behavior appears in politics. A government proposes a deeply flawed or unpopular law. Public protests erupt. The president steps in, dramatically cancels or “fixes” the problem. Media frames them as responsive. The hero saves the day.

But what just happened? The system created chaos, then solved it — and took credit for it. This isn’t leadership, it’s control through managed dysfunction. It’s a lack of systemic thinking, transparency, and participatory decision-making.

🎡 Systemic Thinking as the Antidote

Whether in engineering or governance, the solution is the same: design systems that work without heroes. This means:

In tech: rich observability, clear documentation, onboarding-friendly design

In governance: citizen participation, transparent policies, strong institutions

The her narrative flatters individuals. But the system-centric approach empowers everyone.

✨ Final Thoughts

Real strength lies not in being the one who saves the day. It lies in designing systems where no one needs saving.