This is admittedly a mostly hypothetical question as I am not yet a manager, merely a technical lead, so if you don't want to waste time on a theoretical question, this is your warning. 

Whether it be IT or pandemics, the incentives in life strongly skew towards slaying dragons rather than keeping them away. 

The IT guy who keeps the system forever running is forgotten by management.People wonder why they have him around as "he doesn't do much." The IT guy who lets the system fail and then works 18 hours straight to fix it is considered a hero and rewarded. 

In China, officials took a lot of steps to downplay the virus and hoped that it would go away for fear of it impacting their performance indicators. 

Admittedly in my own career a couple years ago, I identified a bug one evening in a release and let it fail in production overnight instead of fixing it immediately as I wasn't going to stay late and have nobody know. We don't have an on call rotation as we assumed that things wouldn't fail in prod. I noticed it and went in early to fix it. The director of the department gave me a $2000 bonus for coming in so early to fix it. Had I stayed late to fix it, the company would have saved many thousands of dollars, but I would have gotten nothing. 

Management at my current company couldn't be bothered to put together a work from home plan until last week when the city panickly ordered offices to close. Now we all use our personal laptops to remote in and access sensitive data as it never occurred to anyone that we should be prepared for that eventuality. I got hero points for showing people how to use remote desktop from their personal machines. Had I done that before the pandemic (I had no reason to as we shouldn't be accessing medical data on personal machines), I would have gotten no credit for it despite potentially saving two days of work time. 

I am someone who aspires to management, but I cannot think of an incentive structure which encourages preparation over save the day heroics. I myself have a resume filled with save the day heroics. 

I could see micromanagement being an option, where you demand a contingency plan for everything, but that seems very inefficient. 

How could one reward preventing harm rather than mitigating existing harm?