Business
When an institution does its job well, people stop worrying about the danger it guards against. Then they grow indifferent or even scornful toward it. What exists in government is usually there for a good reason, and public disdain can be a sign it has been working, not failing.
A handover of power can put people with no idea how a system works in charge of it. They skip the handover, are surprised by what their own departments do, and lack anyone who knows the work. Critical functions like tracking nuclear material can then go unstaffed and unwatched.
The most dangerous risks are the ones nobody pictures. Because no one imagines them, no one attends to them, and because no one attends to them, they are the ones that end up mattering most.
If your goal is quick gains with no regard for long-term cost, it pays not to learn what those costs are. Not understanding hard problems also keeps you personally free of blame for them. Knowledge makes life messier, so some leaders choose not to know, down to throwing away the briefings prepared for them.
People have little idea how much their daily lives rely on public agencies. They don't know which department runs weather forecasting or what keeps their food supply safe. Governments do little to fix this, so the public cannot value what it cannot see.
Government produces hundreds of important successes, but they go unreported because nothing dramatic happened. Without these stories, the public sees only failures and waste. The people behind the work stay unsung, though many are there for deep reasons and are badly needed.
Bad management rarely causes an instant visible disaster. Its real cost is the innovation that never happens and the knowledge never created, because no one keeps laying the groundwork. The losses are absences, so they are easy to overlook.
Some public services shouldn't be handed to private firms whose income grows when things go wrong. A private weather company profits from fear of catastrophe in a way a public forecaster does not. Who pays for a service shapes whether it calms danger or sells it.
Leaders who don't care about facts can let public data decay or be distorted. Once the data is bad, serious harm can spread through a society without anyone noticing. Trustworthy measurement is an early-warning system, and losing it blinds everyone at once.