Good Citizen Syndrome is what happens when engineering leaders—often unwittingly—confuse good reliable engineers with good reliability engineering.

Skilled engineers who care about reliability constantly step in to fill gaps in process and standards. They’re Good Citizens. While this can be a sign of a mature organization, latent conditions persist when leadership mistakes this vigilance for sustainable systemic health.

In his book about organizational culture, Karl Weick calls reliability a “dynamic non-event;” a phrase which underscores the false sense of safety good reliability can cause.

Reliability is dynamic in the sense that it is an ongoing condition in which problems are momentarily under control due to compensating changes in components… Operators see nothing and seeing nothing, presume that nothing is happening.¹

When reliability engineering² is done well, nothing bad happens. When nothing bad happens, it looks like nothing is being done at all. But it takes a lot of work to make nothing happen!