A falling cat is the best resilience leadership model I know.
You have probably seen the famous photo montage — five frames, one tumble, a perfect landing. The cat begins upside down, mid-air, with everything working against it. Frame by frame, it rotates, extends, gathers itself, and touches down exactly where it intended: feet first, composed, already scanning for what comes next.
Watch closely and you’ll see three disciplines at work.
The cat accepts the situation. Gravity has won this round, and the cat treats that as a fact to work with. Every gram of energy goes into the landing rather than the protest. Resilience starts here, with seeing reality clearly and early.
It knows where it wants to land. Feet down, ground below — a fixed point of orientation that gives every twist its purpose. That’s what vision does for a leader in freefall. When the fall is chaotic, the destination is what keeps the movement coherent.
It has the agility to get there. Mid-air, the cat improvises with the only tool available: itself. Spine, tail, instinct, timing. Agility is what converts acceptance and vision into an actual landing.
Where the framework comes from
This picture has an intellectual backbone. Diane Coutu, then a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, described the same three traits in her classic article “How Resilience Works” (May 2002). She wrote it in the aftermath of 9/11 and a recession, when the world was urgently asking why some people and companies bounce back while others break.
Her answer has aged remarkably well. Resilient people, she found, face reality staunchly, refusing the comfort of denial. They hold a deep sense of meaning and direction, often anchored in strongly held values — here she drew on Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor whose Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) showed how purpose carries people through the very worst. And they improvise with whatever is at hand, a talent the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage (1962): building solutions from the materials you actually have, instead of waiting for the tools you wish you had.
Her sharpest point, and the one I return to most often: true resilience requires all three together. Acceptance without vision becomes fatalism. Vision without acceptance becomes wishful thinking. Agility without either is just flailing in mid-air.
The year the floor gave way
Last year I got to test all of this in real life.
I was leading a product organization in a large pharmaceutical company, and we were heading into a very bumpy ride. A major layoff round was building on the horizon — the kind everyone can feel coming long before anything is announced. Uncertainty has a way of doing damage before any decision is made: focus scatters, corridor conversations multiply, and good people start bracing instead of building.
So at our team offsite, I introduced the full team to the principles of resilient (self-)leadership. We walked through the falling cat together: accept the situation, hold your vision, stay agile. And I told them a personal story I had never shared with a team before — the story of my Plan B envelope.
Years earlier, in a very volatile chapter of my own life, I had sat down and written out my Plan B. What I would do if the current path collapsed. Where I could go, what I could live on, which version of my future I could still be proud of. I sealed it in an envelope, and just knowing it existed changed how I carried myself. The envelope turned an unspeakable fear into a concrete scenario with concrete steps. I could face the fall, because I had already imagined the landing. That, I told the team, is resilient self-leadership in its most practical form: you accept that the fall is possible, you define where you want to land, and you prepare yourself to twist when the moment comes.
A few weeks after that offsite, the moment came. The team got hammered. In a mass layoff, we were reduced by fifty to sixty percent.
A cut of that magnitude could have swept big parts of the team off their feet — and in many organizations, it does. What I witnessed instead moved me deeply. People grieved, of course; acceptance includes grief. But they stayed sane, optimistic, and anchored through the change. Those who stayed found their footing in a massively changed company and kept building. Those who moved on left with their heads high and their direction intact, treating the fall as a mid-air moment rather than the end of the story. Several told me afterwards that the offsite conversation, and the image of that envelope, was what they held onto in the hardest weeks.
The principles worked because they were in place before the fall. A righting reflex is trained in advance; mid-air is a terrible time to start learning.
The fall is the training
Here is the part we tend to forget: the tumble itself is the training. A righting reflex only develops through falling. The rumblings, the restructurings, the stumbles in our careers — these are where the instinct, humility, and composure of real leadership get built. Every rough landing teaches the next twist.
In a world that keeps pulling the ground out from under us, we are all in mid-air more often than we would like. So keep the picture close. Accept the situation. Know where you want to land. Stay agile enough to twist on the way down.
And maybe write your own Plan B envelope while the ground still feels solid. You may never open it. Its real work is done the day you seal it.
The cat makes peace with gravity. Then it learns to land.
So can we.
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