Unlike a teenage child, management has the unfortunate effect of being made up of people who can leave the company, forget past experience, etc. So you do kind of have to treat them like a child who needs continuous feedback and signals.

For a more broad example than IT cost center stuff, you can look at how some large companies go through cycles of arrogance with their customer bases, launch a product that fails, and then are humbled enough to try and pivot and earn good will back. Microsoft is always somewhere in this cycle for instance. The organization can never really learn this lesson permanently and will "regress" from time to time based on financial pressure or greed or some other impulse.