The short answer
Your team is cheering the fire and ignoring the person who never let it start. That is a broken feedback loop, not a people problem. The fix is to make prevention visible — name it, track it, talk about it in the same meetings where you celebrate the saves.
Your team rewards the firefight because it feels real. The drama is easy to see. Research on emergency dispatch systems shows that the quieter, earlier work — the call handled cleanly, the protocol followed before anyone panics — is what shapes outcomes downstream. But because nothing goes wrong, the credit disappears. The system looks fine, so nobody asks why.
Marcus Aurelius had a line for this: some people work with full understanding of what they are doing, and others work without knowing it. Both contribute. The dispatcher who keeps a caller calm, the analyst who spots a pattern before it becomes a crisis — they are working just as surely as the team that shows up when everything is already on fire. The problem is not that your quiet workers are doing less. It is that your culture has no language for what they do.
This week, try one thing: in your next team meeting, ask people to name one problem that did not happen — and who made sure it did not. Just the question changes the room. It tells people that prevention counts. Over time, if you want this to stick, build a short, regular habit of naming near-misses that were caught early. Make the invisible work visible, even briefly, and people will start doing more of it.