Software related anecdote: I left a team that at one point, where an unforeseen occurrence, think something like 1 in a million happened, taking our production systems offline. Our decision makers became so risk averse to change for fear of another similar event that we completely stopped innovating and spent three years wrapping ourselves up in tape and saran wrap to protect ourselves from getting hurt again because "risk". The thing that took us down required a pretty trivial version upgrade and we never saw it again, even when creating deliberate conditions for the bug.

I ended up leaving the company, I couldn't spend another year mitigating other people's terror, the word "risk" became a trigger word, other engineers started leaving in droves and eventually, they shut down months later.