What a Flat Tire Taught Me About Resilience

The announcement came casually over the intercom at my gate at the airport, almost absurdly so: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing a delay due to a flat tire."

There was a pause, the kind where you expect the follow-up to be simple: a quick fix, a short delay, someone somewhere swapping it out while we all checked email and pretended not to be annoyed.

But then came the second part: "We do not have a replacement tire available at this airport. One is being brought in from Detroit."

Grounded by a flat tire

Source: Linsey Godwin, AI-generated with Dall-E / OpenAI

I was sitting in Cleveland, and I laughed out loud, the kind of laugh that comes from something being so completely out of proportion that there is no other response. A commercial aircraft, an entire system of logistics and precision and scale, grounded by something I keep in the trunk of my Mini Cooper: a spare tire. Yet, they did not have one, and just like that, everything stopped.

As we sat there, the ripple effects started to become visible: missed connections, rebooked flights, frustrated gate agents trying to reassemble a schedule that had just unraveled because of one missing piece. The system had no margin for something as ordinary as a flat tire.

It would be easy to chalk this up as a fluke, but the longer I sat there, the more it felt like a signal.

We have built systems, and lives, that are optimized for efficiency. And in the process, we have quietly removed the very things that make them resilient.

The Tension Between Efficiency and Redundancy

In operations and systems theory, there has long been a tension between efficiency and redundancy. Redundancy looks wasteful on paper, showing up as extra inventory or capacity, none of which registers as productive output. So, we trim it, streamline it, and design for the ideal scenario rather than the inevitable disruption.

Nassim Taleb, professor and mathematical statistician at NYU, writes about this in his work on fragility and antifragility (2012). Systems that are overly optimized, he argues, become brittle, performing beautifully under expected conditions and failing dramatically when those conditions shift. A flat tire should not take down an entire airline, but in a system with no spare, it does.

The familiarity is what got me, because I have been living this way too. My calendar, like that flight schedule, is tightly packed, with meetings stacked next to each other, days that assume everything will go according to plan, personal energy budgeted in a way that leaves no room for the unexpected. And then something small happens: a conversation runs long, one of my kids needs more than I anticipated, an email lands that shifts the tone of the day. Suddenly, everything feels fractured because there was simply no room for any of it.

Building Margin

We tend to think resilience is about strength, about pushing through. But more often, it is simply about having margin.

Lazarus and Folkman's foundational work on stress and coping (1984) showed that people who have even small amounts of perceived control or flexibility handle disruptions better. What seems to matter as much as the size of the stressor is the capacity around it. When there is no buffer, even minor stressors can feel overwhelming. We see this in burnout, which is rarely caused by one catastrophic event. It is the accumulation of small, manageable demands in a system that has no room left to absorb them, until everything, even the ordinary, starts to feel like that flat tire.

Most of our systems, including our personal lives, are built around a single driving inquiry: how do we avoid failure? It is a reasonable question. It leads to risk mitigation, contingency planning, and tighter controls. But it also leads toward optimization without slack, toward eliminating anything that looks unnecessary.

Appreciative inquiry asks a different question, one that shifts the frame entirely: What allows systems to keep going, even when things break (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005)? That question assumes that breakdowns are part of the system and moves the focus toward capacity and resilience. It asks what we have in place when the flat tire happens: a buffer, a person who can adapt, a structure that can flex.

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When I think back to that moment at the airport, what stands out is the absence of a simple, expected backup. Tires go flat, and that is unremarkable. What is harder to explain is a system so optimized that it had no plan for it. And I cannot help but wonder where else we have done the same thing: in our organizations, where we reward efficiency and quietly penalize anything that looks like excess; in our leadership, where we celebrate productivity but rarely talk about recovery.

What if we realized that buffer time isn't waste? Those 15 minutes between meetings that look like dead time might be the reason you can actually focus in the next one. The evening you didn't schedule a call might be why you had something left for your kid when they needed to talk. The energy you didn't spend is the energy you have to give when life shows up beyond your calendar.

I'm not about to overhaul the airline industry, and I suspect my airline has already updated its tire protocols (I hope!). I've been thinking about my own margins, though, and where I'm running without a spare. The changes don't have to be dramatic to help build in some resilience. Here are four small things I've started doing:

1. Block the buffer. I block "buffer time" on my calendar the way I block actual meetings. If I don't protect it, someone else will claim it.
2. Guard the first hour. I keep my mornings clear when I can. Starting the day on my terms changes how I move through the rest of it.
3. Know your warning signs. I pay attention to the first sign I'm running on fumes—for me, it's snapping at small things—and treat it as information instead of something to push through.
4. Schedule like an athlete. They don't play back-to-back games at full intensity without recovery. A hard Monday gets a lighter Tuesday on purpose.

Somewhere, there's probably still an airplane waiting on a tire from Detroit. I'd rather not be the human equivalent, scheduled so tightly that one flat leaves me grounded.