On New Year’s Eve, 1999, a man (who you’ve probably never heard of) named John Koskinen boarded a plane from Washington, D.C. to New York City.

He brought a handful of reporters with him, but here’s the crazy detail: He timed the flight to cross midnight at 30,000 feet.

This was the man President Clinton had appointed as the country’s Y2K “czar” — the person responsible for making sure that when the calendar flipped to January 1, 2000, the world’s computer systems didn’t collapse.

The fear was real and pervasive. People were stockpiling food, water, generators, and guns. News anchors were practically reading last rites. The concern was that early programmers had used two-digit year codes to save memory. When “00” rolled over, computers might read it as 1900. Nobody was entirely sure what that would break or to what extent. But everyone was scared that it might be the end of the world (cue all the crazy end times preachers).

Koskinen spent two years preparing and coordinating more than 30 federal agencies and overseeing what became a $100 billion fix across the U.S. private sector alone.

To prove his confidence in his team’s work he then got on a plane that would be in the air at midnight.

His message was simple and powerfully illustrated: if I wasn’t confident, I wouldn’t have taken this flight.

As we all know now, nothing happened. No blackouts, crashes, or chaos ensured. Midnight came and went, and the world woke up on January 1, 2000 completely fine.

And almost immediately, people started saying it was never a real problem.

The $100 billion fix was called a hoax. Y2K became a punchline. The programmers who had spent years quietly rewriting code got almost no recognition. One developer’s reward for a five-year project at his company? A free lunch and a pen.

“Better to be an anonymous success than a public failure.”

That line is from an IT director who was so worried about the optics of publicizing their Y2K preparations that they said nothing — for fear that any slip would become a headline.

So, let’s think about this dynamic for a second. If you do the work perfectly, nobody notices. But let something break? Everyone wants to know who was supposed to prevent it.

Those of us leading businesses think about this a lot. For me it’s in the context of marketing and client relationships.

The best digital marketing work I’ve seen — and the work I’m most proud of at Expio — often look pretty tame from the outside. Websites that don’t go down. Campaigns that stay healthy because someone is watching the data. Ad accounts that don’t get suspended because the right policies are in place. SEO that holds its ground because someone is paying attention to algorithm shifts before they become a crisis.

Clients don’t call to say “hey, great job, nothing went wrong this month.” And that’s fine, I don’t expect them to.

But the moment something does go wrong — the leads dry up, the rankings drop, the ad spend goes sideways — suddenly everyone wants to know who was supposed to be watching. That’s the Koskinen dynamic, and it shows up in every service relationship.

So What Does This Look Like in Practice?

Prevention is the most important-yet-undervalued service you can offer. Whether you’re a marketer, an operations person, a consultant, or a project manager — the work that keeps problems from happening is usually invisible to the people paying for it. That doesn’t make it less valuable, but it does create optics and perception issues.

Communicate the work even when nothing is broken. Koskinen didn’t just do the work — he got on a plane at midnight with reporters to make the invisible visible. Your clients need to understand what’s being done on their behalf, especially when everything is running smoothly. A monthly report, a quick update, a “here’s what we caught before it became a problem” note — these things matter.

The best clients understand prevention. The worst ones only notice when something fails. Part of your job is helping clients understand the difference between “nothing happened” and “nothing was done.” Those are very different things.

Don’t wait for the crisis to demonstrate your value. By then, you’re playing defense. The goal is to be so proactively useful that the conversation never gets to that point.

The next time you’re doing work that nobody seems to notice ask yourself a couple of questions:

Is the work actually preventing something from going wrong?

And am I doing enough to make the invisible visible to the people who need to see it?

You can’t always control whether people appreciate prevention. But you have enormous influence over whether they understand it. It’s one of the most underrated forms of leadership and client service that there is.

Comment with questions or approaches that have worked for you!

See you next Saturday.