If your CTO or VP of engineering or VP of ops can't make this change, your company likely has other problems.
I admit to inheriting a fairly smart-risk-accepting technical culture, but also worked to extend and cement that by holding regular blame-free post-mortems on production problems and reporting them weekly to our business operations meeting. Making failure and the analysis/correction thereof a regular part of company operations makes it normal, accepted, and less scary. We would also pretty regularly respond to asteroid-type production problems with "no preventative action intended; cost of prevention exceeds expected losses". (We held a view that there is [conceptual process] green tape and red tape; make sure if you're fixing problems with process that it's actually green tape and if fixing a problem required adding red tape to the system, we were very skeptical and tended to avoid adding that process/step/gate/check.)
Couple that mindset and transparency with a metrics-supported track record of making things better overall and management will support. I'm not sure our CEO ever saw any of that sausage-making, except for the very largest or most damaging problems and even then, it was mostly a courtesy message to him. He cared about the overall pace and metrics, not how many outages or bugs we had along the way.
I admit to inheriting a fairly smart-risk-accepting technical culture, but also worked to extend and cement that by holding regular blame-free post-mortems on production problems and reporting them weekly to our business operations meeting. Making failure and the analysis/correction thereof a regular part of company operations makes it normal, accepted, and less scary. We would also pretty regularly respond to asteroid-type production problems with "no preventative action intended; cost of prevention exceeds expected losses". (We held a view that there is [conceptual process] green tape and red tape; make sure if you're fixing problems with process that it's actually green tape and if fixing a problem required adding red tape to the system, we were very skeptical and tended to avoid adding that process/step/gate/check.)
Couple that mindset and transparency with a metrics-supported track record of making things better overall and management will support. I'm not sure our CEO ever saw any of that sausage-making, except for the very largest or most damaging problems and even then, it was mostly a courtesy message to him. He cared about the overall pace and metrics, not how many outages or bugs we had along the way.