Amazing comment by Chad on Invisible Gains and Invisible Losses --
I find this related to failure mode analysis from engineering. It's neither realistic nor economically optimal to put all your effort into avoiding failures. They're going to happen by imperfections of planning and execution, or come from sheer chance. Look at the trade-offs between prevention versus preparedness in the context of maximal output.
To bring this out of the clouds of abstraction, think of body maintenance. You don't have to be an athlete to be exposed to physical harm, but you basically have to be an athlete (of some form) to be prepared to best recover from an injury. This is what I think you picked up on as an "invisible gain", because it is a strategy of loss mitigation and insurance rather than an immediate improvement.
Contingency planning is a repeating motif throughout structural systems with quantifiable, important failure modes. Military training drills contingencies all down the chain. Avoid landmines; if someone walks over a landmine, freeze; if someone walks over a landmine but then you come under fire, run for cover, even if you hit more landmines.
It's easy to lose track of these sorts of things when the outcomes are fuzzy, hard to quantify, and far from extreme. Your energy level, creativity, productivity, output gets a little lower. You're a touch more abrasive. A little slower to recover. Thus why quantification, even if completely subjective, can be such an effective motivator for improvements. If you just rack up your sluggishness as a failure that you can avoid, you gain motivation to pay the boring, long-term preparedness cost. It's easy when thinking of something highly quantifiable or evident. Can you lift heavier weight? Did your design kill someone? (Possibly subjective) quantification also helps narrow down where to put your finite resources; in the end, you can only prepare for so much.
Re-read that a couple times. Read it slowly, think about it, then read it again. It's brilliant. Very important, and really brilliant.
Really, spend the time to read it super slowly and think about it. You might get some big gains for a few minutes of work. Thanks Chad. Great stuff.