I'm giving John a +1 here. He's got an excellent point: For all the number-crunching and rules that try to cover every eventuality, SR is an extremely story-driven game, and even running a published scenario can result in sessions where a lot gets accomplished with very little die-rolling.
Character creation backs this up, especially when you get to knowledge skills and contacts: if you haven't gotten into your character's head by this point, you pretty much need to do it to fill out these parts. The Karma award system does this too; you don't get Karma based on how many kills you get, or how much loot you gained. It's all about doing the job, roleplaying well, and pulling some seat-of-your-pants heroics when (not if) things don't go as planned.
Unless a mission specifically calls for eliminating targets, it's generally agreed that the most successful runs are those in which the defensive side (read: corpsec, IC, etc.) never realize the runners were doing anything suspicious. Sure, firefights are always fun to play out, but if the team can look back on a run and realize they never even raised an alarm, it's hard to say they didn't do a good job.