Short-Termism

Definition: When immediate reward beats long-term survivability—resilience is traded for speed and optics.

Why it matters: Civilizations and organizations collapse by deferring maintenance.

Quick Diagnostic

• Resilience investments are perpetually delayed.
• Future costs are externalized.
• Technical/institutional debt grows.
  Cost of delay: fragility becomes the default state.

Problem

When near-term wins dominate, systems mortgage the future. Over time, accumulated debt turns shocks into collapse.

Mechanism

Short-term reward → deferred maintenance → debt accumulation → fragility → crisis

Early Indicators

• Chronic underinvestment in infrastructure/controls.
• “We’ll fix it later” culture.
• Frequent emergency work.
• Talent churn in maintenance roles.
• Rising incident rate tied to aging systems.

Examples

• Civilizational: infrastructure decay and institutional trust erosion.
• Institutional: unfunded mandates and political cycles.
• Org: technical debt and safety debt.

Control Opportunity

Design

• Protected budgets for resilience/maintenance.
• Long-term scorecards + governance veto for unsafe tradeoffs.
• Debt registers with mandatory paydown.
• Incentives that reward durability (not just throughput).
• Scenario drills that price future risk today.

Measurement

• Debt load index (tech, safety, governance).
• Ratio of preventative to reactive work.
• Incident correlation with deferred maintenance.
• Long-term KPI variance.

Failure mode if missing
You optimize for survival this quarter and lose the decade.

Core Question

Who pays later for today’s gains?

Maps to Patterns

Incentives Outrunning Safeguards • Exception Drift • Crisis as Audit • Dependency Trap

Related Problems

Incentive Drift • Exception Normalization • Complexity Overload

Routing

Hub • Drift • Controls (Social) • Daily Brief • Field Notes