When it falls apart, don’t just clean up. Ask what broke first.

Cleaning up restores the surface and leaves the cause running. Most failures have a first domino, usually something small and boring that happened well before the visible collapse, and the mess at the end is just the loudest part. If you only ever handle the loud part, you will handle it again next month.

After the next thing goes wrong, give it ten minutes before you move on. Walk the sequence backward and find the earliest point where a different choice would have changed the ending. Fix that one, not the wreckage.