During World War II, B-17 bombers kept belly-landing because pilots were pressing the wrong switch. On the face of things, it looked like pilot error. Then a young psychologist named Alphonse Chapanis observed that two switches—one for the landing flaps and the other for the landing gear—sat next to each other and looked the same. A pilot worn out by hours of combat could easily reach for the wrong one as he came in to land. So Chapanis fitted a small wheel to the gear lever and a flap-shaped wedge to the flap control.
The confusion largely disappeared.
Most of us aren’t flying bombers, but we do live in a world in which nothing feels settled. Technology, work, the economy, politics, and the institutions we once trusted are all shifting at once. This breeds exhaustion and burnout. When people struggle, we prescribe resilience training. When the news becomes unbearable, we suggest a digital detox.
In effect, we keep telling the pilots to be more careful. But what if the problem isn’t the pilots at all but the system around them? What if rather than people failing to adapt to the world we have built, the world we have built is failing to account for the people who must live in it?
Exhaustion Is a System Output
When one person gets burnout, it makes sense to send them to a doctor. But when exhaustion shows up across entire workforces, professions, and generations, it is time to look at system design. As burnout experts Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter point out, over 20 years of research suggests that working conditions are one of the most important factors in causing burnout.
If exhaustion were mainly an individual problem, we would expect individual fixes to show some effect. But a study that surveyed 46,336 workers in 233 UK organizations found that those who took part in resilience training, mindfulness programs, or well-being apps appeared no better off than those who didn't. Interventions at the systemic level, concluded the author, seemed more important for employee well-being than programs targeted at helping individuals cope. It is a snapshot, not a trial, but the pattern is striking.
Resilience, in other words, is something environments help produce. As the developmental psychologist Ann Masten says, resilience should be seen not as a personality trait but as a capacity that is produced by relationships, communities, and supportive systems. If your job demands 70-hour weeks with no end in sight, it does not matter how many resilience workshops you attend. You are going to burn out.
I wrote a book called Reinvent, so I don’t say this lightly: Reinvention has a cost. Reinventing ourselves to pursue a meaningful possibility can energize us. Being forced to reinvent again and again because the ground never stops moving wears us down. Change is inevitable. Making people feel perpetually destabilized is a design choice.
The Resilience Trap
Early research pioneered by Martin Seligman and Steven Maier showed that repeated exposure to outcomes we cannot influence undermines our motivation to act. Subsequent work sharpened this finding, showing that passivity is a default human response to prolonged adversity. Control, it turns out, is a behavior that must be learned.
Now think about what individual resilience training asks of an exhausted employee. It tells her that the answer to her struggles lies in her own hands. She is responsible for managing her stress, reframing her thinking, and building her mental toughness. In pursuit of these goals, she attends the right workshops, gets up each morning to do her prescribed meditation, and maintains her gratitude journal with both dedication and devotion.
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But when Monday morning comes, the workload is the same, the deadlines are the same, and the next reorganization is already on its way.
She has made the effort demanded of her, and yet nothing has changed. Then it happens again, and again, and again. Each round or reinvention denies her the one experience that might build the sense that she is truly in control of her situation: effort that pays off.
So she stops trying. She stops speaking up, stops suggesting fixes, and silently disengages from the practices demanded of a “good” employee. Her managers see this and call it apathy. They may even prescribe more resilience training.
Building Real Resilience
If that story sounds familiar—if you are the one feeling exhausted—the question to ask is not “What is wrong with me?” but rather “What are the conditions that keep producing this situation?” That question won’t change the conditions by itself, but it does lift the self-blame that tends to come with the feeling that events are slipping outside one’s own control. The next critical step is to make distinctions between information and influence, recognizing that awareness is not the same thing as agency.
Because the problem is systemic, the solution has to be too. Much of what exhausts people today was designed into existence, which means it is not immutable; it can be fixed by intentional redesign. Here are four changes leaders can make now.
- Involve people before decisions, not after. Communication after a decision is not the same as participation before it. When people help shape a change, their effort influences the outcome, which is exactly the experience that builds a sense of control.
- Close the loop. When someone raises a problem, act on it immediately when you can, and tell them what changed because they spoke up. Even a small fix shows people, in the plainest possible way, that their effort makes a difference. That is the experience the resilience trap takes away.
- Pair every new demand with a new resource. If a team is asked to take on more, it should also get something: time, people, training, or permission to stop doing something else. As the job demands-resources model shows, exhaustion grows when demands outpace resources. A demand without a resource is just a heavier load.
- Measure the conditions, not just the mood. Engagement scores tell you that people have checked out, but not why. Track the things that wear people down: workload, the pace of change, how often people get a say in decisions that affect them. That way, you are inspecting the cockpit instead of blaming the pilot.
A World Worth Adapting To
Those B-17 pilots needed better switches, not more grit.
To be clear, individual traits matter. They help us face the hardships no one can prevent. But strength of character should never become a way of making people carry the hardships we could prevent.
For years, we have asked people to adapt to the systems we build. It is time to build systems that adapt to people.