Most leadership advice assumes that under pressure, people simply need to work harder or perform better.
But pressure does something more fundamental.
It reshapes human capacity — narrowing attention, judgment, voice, and decision-making in ways leaders rarely see.
My work studies what happens to organizations when pressure becomes sustained — and how leaders can build systems that expand human capacity instead of quietly eroding it.
The three capacity states
Before labeling someone as difficult, disengaged, or dramatic — ask which of these three states you are looking at.
Intensity
Urgency, impatience, interrupting, scanning for risk. Often praised as high drive. It is vigilance — a nervous system that has not received the signal that the threat has passed.
Distraction
Sudden silence, unexpected emotion, losing a train of thought mid-presentation. They were not checked out. They were pulled somewhere else entirely.
Disengagement
The contributor who stopped raising risks. Who agrees out loud and disappears afterward. Who used to push back and now just nods. A person who learned that speaking up costs more than it returns.
About
My name is Lisa Jones Christensen.
I’m an organizational psychologist and entrepreneurship professor studying what happens to people and performance when pressure doesn’t let up.
I work with leaders and founders in high-stakes environments to help them understand what’s driving behavior beneath the surface—so they can lead with more clarity, steadiness, and impact.
