Pressure. (Part 2).

Where pressure stops being an event and becomes a condition.

The LAS story took us back to a strained but relatively steady world. Work was demanding, but the environment had familiarity—tools changed slowly, routines held shape, judgement built over time in systems that largely stayed put.

Modern work offers no such ground. Even in organisations that describe themselves as stable, surroundings rarely settle. Structures, reporting lines, and priorities shift constantly. Systems launch, update, and are replaced with unprecedented frequency. New tools, platforms, apps, dashboards, and processes arrive with little ceremony and vanish just as quickly. What was agreed last quarter is quietly revisited this one.

The phrase “the way we do things around here” becomes harder to say with confidence.

The kind of change we explored at LAS came as a shock. Today, it would barely register as unusual. Unsettled has become the operating rhythm of contemporary organisations. The work itself may not change dramatically from week to week, but almost everything around it does, leaving people operating in a landscape where very little holds its shape for long.

You might hear this described as “a lot of change”, or as some form of change fatigue. But that language doesn’t quite fit. Nor is this volatility in the traditional sense. Volatility is visible. It announces itself as risk and demands a response. What most organisations have created looks different. Its effects are significant, but quieter and slower, and rarely trace back to any single decision. They accumulate.

What I’m describing is a more permanent form of instability — one we saw clearly through the lens of Harkn — produced not by crisis but by design. It is the by-product of how modern organisations pursue responsiveness, efficiency, and optionality, redesigning structures and refreshing priorities before they have time to settle, so that little stays in place long enough to feel secure.

From inside the organisation, what makes this so difficult isn’t volume alone. It’s speed, opacity, and lack of participation — the sense that decisions are happening around you, and landing on you, rather than being arrived at with you. Each update carries a background question about relevance, headcount, or security. It’s not just movement, but movement laced with threat.

There is also a fundamental asymmetry in how this is experienced. From the top, change feels ordered and intentional, because it is being initiated rather than received — a sequence of discrete actions. From elsewhere, it begins to feel more like the weather: something to be watched closely and endured. No single shift is unreasonable. Taken together, they become exhausting.

The question, then, is why the prolonged effects of pressure, and their causes, remain so difficult to recognise as harm.

This wasn’t because leaders were unaware of burnout or indifferent to wellbeing. The language was familiar. The research was widely cited. Most organisations could point to examples of unhealthy work when they saw them.

The difficulty was that what they were hearing about did not match what they were seeing in their own organisation.

From the inside, everything looked just as expected. The work was demanding, change was ongoing, expectations were high — but this was how things worked here. The organisation was delivering. Stuff was getting done. People turned up and got on with it.

So when signs of strain appeared, they did not register as evidence of a systemic problem. They registered as exceptions.

If there were something fundamentally wrong with the way work was organised, it would be visible at scale. It would be obvious. It would show up everywhere. And because it didn’t look like that, the conclusion felt safe: whatever was happening must be happening at the margins.

Which is where attention turned.

When someone struggled, the explanation rarely began with the conditions around them. In most cases, those conditions weren’t considered at all. Attention narrowed instead to the person — their robustness, their resilience, their judgement, their capacity to cope.

The underlying assumption was simple and largely unspoken: if others were managing, then the problem could not lie with the work. It must lie with the individual.

That assumption fitted neatly with how organisations already understand performance and potential. Capability is personal. Strength is personal. When something falters, the instinctive question is not what has changed in the system, but whether this person is right for it.

And once that frame is in place, the response follows almost automatically.

There is an older pattern here.

In 1835, Charles Priestley was a nineteen-year-old employed by a butcher named Thomas Fowler in the market town of Market Deeping. One morning, Priestley was ordered to accompany a wagon heavily laden with mutton to market. From the outset, the load was visibly excessive. When the horses refused to move, the driver protested that the wagon was dangerous. Fowler dismissed the concern, calling him “a damned fool”.

Priestley said nothing.

The wagon was eventually forced into motion and set off late. Not far into the journey, the front axle cracked and gave way. The cart overturned. The driver escaped serious injury. Priestley did not. Around two hundred kilos of mutton fell onto him, breaking his thigh and dislocating his shoulder.

Priestley was taken to the nearest public lodging, where he lay for nineteen weeks. Unable to work and burdened with the cost of his care, he took the unusual step of suing Fowler for compensation. The jury found in his favour. For the first time, a court accepted that an employer might owe an employee a duty of care.

But the recognition was limited.

On appeal, the judgement was narrowed. While the injury itself was not disputed, responsibility was. The court concluded that an employer could not reasonably be expected to provide a safer working environment than the employee provided for himself.

It was only the beginning.

What followed Priestley was not a sudden awakening. The idea that employers might bear responsibility for harm done at work had entered the legal conversation, but only just. It was tentative, narrow, and heavily qualified. Injury could be acknowledged without the conditions that produced it being seriously questioned. Responsibility was recognised in principle while still being resisted in practice.

For decades, physical harm at work continued to be understood as something that happened to people rather than something produced by the work itself or by the way work was organised. Accidents were regrettable but expected. Injury was unfortunate but familiar. Even where harm became impossible to ignore — most notably in the case of children — it was treated as an exceptional abuse rather than as evidence of a deeper problem with how work itself was structured. Risk remained understood as part of the bargain of employment, unevenly distributed, poorly measured, and often borne by those with the least power to refuse it.

Where responsibility did expand, it did so slowly and under pressure. Certain dangers were addressed while others were normalised. Improvements tended to follow moments of public outrage, inquiry, and visible loss rather than quiet understanding. Each step prompted resistance: employers argued about cost and feasibility, regulators struggled to define the limits of duty, and courts drew careful boundaries around how much harm could legitimately be attributed to the work itself.

What this period reveals, in retrospect, is not indifference but difficulty. Physical harm was real, visible, and often undeniable — and still it took decades to move from seeing injury as individual misfortune to understanding it as a systemic outcome. Responsibility expanded not because organisations suddenly became more enlightened, but because it became harder to maintain the idea that harm could be separated from the conditions that made it likely.

By the early twentieth century, that tension was still unresolved.

And then, in 1911, it became impossible to ignore.

On 25 March of that year, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. The factory occupied the upper floors of a ten-storey building and employed hundreds of young women and girls, many of them recent immigrants, working long hours sewing garments at speed.

When the fire spread, workers tried to leave. Many found they could not. Some exits were locked — a common practice at the time — the stairwells filled with smoke, and the fire escape failed under the weight of people trying to use it. As options disappeared, some chose to jump rather than remain trapped in spaces designed to maximise output, not escape from.

By the time the fire was extinguished, 146 workers were dead.

In the days that followed, it became harder to contain the story as a tragic accident affecting a small number of individuals. Funerals drew large crowds. Newspapers published the names and ages of the dead. Attention shifted from the fact that a fire had occurred to the conditions in which people had been working when it did.

Locked doors, blocked exits, and overcrowded floors were no longer incidental details. They were examined as causes. Investigations and hearings followed. Responsibility was contested, defences were offered, and efforts were made to limit how far the implications should reach. But something had changed.

What the Triangle fire marked was not the end of an argument, but a change in where responsibility could be meaningfully questioned. After that point, it became harder to discuss physical harm at work without also discussing the conditions under which people worked. Injury was no longer understood only as something that happened to individuals, but increasingly as something shaped by the environments they were placed in.

That shift did not resolve the question of responsibility, nor did it arrive all at once. It unfolded unevenly, through resistance and partial reform. But the direction of travel was clear — at least when it came to physical injury.

Psychological harm has not followed the same path as physical injury—not because it is less real, but because it is harder to locate. It accumulates quietly, appears unevenly, and is often felt long before it is declared or collectively agreed upon.

When its effects first became visible, responsibility could not move upstream as it eventually did for physical risks. It settled where it always does when harm resists clear attribution: on the individual.

This is where the idea of individualised wellbeing interventions enters the picture. With the effects of pressure being read as a personal issue, the response followed a familiar pattern. If harm showed up in individuals, it could be addressed there — through support that avoided reopening harder questions about pace, stability, or expectations. Organisations could act quickly and visibly, in ways that felt proportionate to what they believed they were dealing with.

At first, this looked like care: stress management, resilience training, access to counselling. Over time, it grew into a substantial industry of roles, budgets, platforms, and programmes designed to help people cope better with what they were carrying. And for some people, some of the time, it genuinely helped.

But placement mattered. These interventions sat around the edges of work rather than at its centre. They addressed how people were feeling without asking why those feelings were becoming so widespread. The conditions producing the need for constant coping were left largely intact.

Over time, the limits of this approach became harder to ignore. Despite the growth of workplace wellbeing initiatives, burnout did not recede. Exhaustion remained widespread. The need for coping intensified rather than diminished.

When outcomes were examined more closely, the picture sharpened. Large-scale analyses, including work by William Fleming, found that most individual-level interventions produced little or no sustained improvement in overall wellbeing. In some cases, outcomes worsened — not because people rejected support, but because the conditions shaping their experience of work had not meaningfully changed.

This was not evidence that wellbeing had been a mistake. It was evidence of where it sat in the journey.

When harm is difficult to see, responsibility settles where it is easiest to hold. With psychosocial strain, that place was always going to be the individual. What these interventions revealed, slowly and often uncomfortably, was that improving coping without altering conditions could only ever take things so far.

In that sense, workplace wellbeing today looks less like a failed idea and more like an early one — an attempt to respond to harm before organisations had reliable ways of recognising how that harm was forming, or where responsibility might ultimately need to sit.

We may not yet have a Triangle moment for psychosocial risk. But we are no longer at Priestley.

In a few places, responsibility is beginning to edge upstream. Australia offers one of the clearest current examples, where psychological harm is increasingly being treated as a workplace health and safety issue rather than as an adjunct to wellbeing. Under guidance from Safe Work Australia, employers are being asked to identify and control psychosocial risks in much the same way they would physical ones.

This is a significant re-orientation. It shifts attention away from how individuals cope and back towards the conditions they are exposed to — reframing mental strain not as a private failing, but as something work itself can produce.

The limitations are already apparent. Psychosocial harm resists neat measurement, manifests slowly, and varies by context. Applying traditional safety logic risks oversimplifying something that is relational and cumulative.

And yet, the direction matters. What is unfolding is not a finished solution, but a necessary pivot — away from treating mental health as a marginal, individual concern, and towards recognising that the structure, pace, and governance of work can themselves be sources of harm.

Seen this way, the current moment resembles earlier phases in the history of workplace safety: not resolution, but the contested emergence of upstream responsibility, when individual explanations no longer suffice and systemic ones begin to take hold.

Which brings us back to the problem at the centre of this chapter. Pressure is not invisible because it is absent. It is invisible because the signals it produces remain poorly understood. Until organisations learn to see those signals earlier — and more clearly — responsibility will continue to arrive too late.

That is the signal problem.

By this point, pressure itself is no longer the question. The question is why its effects remain so difficult for organisations to see.

Part of the answer lies in power. Hierarchy shapes what can be said, to whom, and at what cost. Senior leaders are structurally distant from lived experience, and information travels upwards selectively, filtered by judgement, caution, and self-protection. The closer something gets to the top, the more sanitised it tends to become. What survives the journey is rarely how work feels; it is how work can safely be described.

This is not because people are dishonest. It is because truth carries risk.

Most people learn early in their working lives that speaking openly about strain is consequential. It changes how you are perceived. It alters what you are trusted with. It shapes assumptions about your judgement, resilience, and future. Even in organisations that talk openly about wellbeing, those risks do not disappear. They simply become harder to read.

So people wait. They wait until they are sure. They wait until the cost of speaking feels lower than the cost of staying silent. And often, by the time that moment arrives, the damage is already done.

Much of the work of coping happens out of sight. People hide what they are feeling and perform what they believe is expected of them. They contain uncertainty. They manage emotion privately. They present steadiness even when it requires considerable effort. We call it professionalism.

And even where leaders believe they can “read the room”, we are far worse at reading one another than we like to think. In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell explores why we routinely mistake outward behaviour for inner state — reading composure as confidence, familiarity as understanding, and performance as capacity. His point is not that people are deceptive, but that we assume transparency where none exists.

Even in close relationships, we misread what others are carrying. If we could reliably communicate our inner state through expression and body language alone, we would all be accomplished actors. Most of the signals we give off are unintended or ambiguous. In workplaces shaped by hierarchy, incentives, and risk, those misreads are amplified.

A senior executive once described a moment that brought this home for him. One of his direct reports had been in the midst of a profound personal crisis for nearly three months. No one had noticed — not even close colleagues. More striking still, this person had also not been doing their job during that period. And still, no one had noticed.

Naming someone else’s struggle carries its own risks. You might be wrong. You might embarrass them. You might invite scrutiny they did not choose and cannot undo. In environments where capability and resilience are constantly being assessed, silence often becomes a form of protection — for the person struggling, and for the person who sees it.

The formal mechanisms organisations rely on offer little correction. Absence, for example, translates pressure into a language the organisation is willing to hear — illness, fatigue, something temporary and individual. In practice, it often marks the point at which accumulated strain has finally tipped beyond what can be managed. The illness is rarely the cause. It is the permission.

Leaders at an NHS trust once described a familiar winter pattern. People called in sick on the days when it became too much. Not because they were incapacitated, but because minor symptoms were enough to make the strain unmanageable. From the system’s perspective, nothing appeared amiss. From the person’s, absence was the only legitimate pause available.

Attrition arrives later still, and is more misleading than it appears. We like to believe that if work were truly harmful, people would leave. In reality, leaving is rarely an early response. People endure. They adapt. They stay not because conditions are acceptable, but because the alternatives feel riskier.

This is where what came to be called quiet quitting fits more accurately. When people stop going beyond the formal boundaries of their role — stop absorbing extra work, stop compensating for gaps, stop offering unpaid effort — it is often read as disengagement. More often, it is the last remaining way to stay.

Because this still looks like compliance — deadlines met, roles fulfilled — it reassures organisations that nothing fundamental is wrong. In reality, it marks the point at which the human buffer the system depends on has begun to fray.

By the time attrition rises to a level that attracts attention, pressure has already done its work. What appears as a sudden wave of departures is more often the delayed release of strain that has been building for months or years.

The signal problem, then, is less a failure of care than a failure of legibility. Organisations are listening through channels that were never designed to carry strain. And changing those channels would mean confronting what that strain reveals — about workload, expectations, and the conditions under which work is being done.

That is why the signals remain faint. Not because they are not there, but because hearing them clearly would require action that most organisations are not yet ready to take.

What we learned through Harkn was that pressure could be made visible as it unfolded. But doing so surfaced implications that many organisations were not prepared to confront.

It wasn’t a matter of sharper questions or smarter measurement. It came from continuity — from the simple fact that people were invited, routinely and without consequence, to share how they were doing. Over time, that created texture: a sense of how the organisation tended to feel, and how that feeling shifted.

Harkn was never designed as a wellbeing tool. It began as a way of understanding morale — how people felt about the organisation and their work. But very quickly, something else became apparent. When people were given a way to speak without fear of personal consequence, they didn’t limit themselves to engagement or sentiment. They spoke about their lives. And inevitably, that included strain.

Anonymity mattered — not as a gimmick, but as protection. Even in organisations that described themselves as open, people were cautious about being identifiable when talking about difficulty. Removing that risk changed what could be said, and how honestly it could be said.

The social nature of the check-in mattered too. When someone shared that they were struggling — publicly but anonymously — the response was often immediate and human. Simple acknowledgements. Recognition. A sense of being seen. People weren’t reporting into a system; they were sharing into a space. And that distinction mattered.

The most powerful learning, though, didn’t come from any single comment. It came from patterns that only became visible over time.

The same continuity that allowed us to see what was ‘normal’ for the organisation also revealed what was usual for each person. And once that baseline existed, meaningful variation became visible — sometimes through dramatic shifts, but just as often through slow, almost imperceptible changes that meant nothing on any single day and everything in sequence.

Being able to see those patterns meant we could often recognise someone struggling weeks before they were ready to name it themselves. That early insight mattered. Because at that point, action could still be gentle and human. No escalation. No intervention. No diagnosis. Just an opening — a message that said: Are you okay? Do you need anything? alongside the reassurance that identity would remain protected, even in reply.

What mattered here was not the product, but the conditions it created: safety, continuity, and a way of making strain visible before it hardened into something else. It allowed people to be seen while they were still coping, rather than after they had reached a breaking point.

And this is where things begin to change. Because once you know, you can no longer claim that you didn’t. Seeing earlier means being accountable earlier — not just for how people feel, but for the conditions they are working in.

This is not an argument for blame. Most leaders inherit these conditions rather than create them.

But it does make something harder to avoid.

The problem is no longer whether the effects of pressure can be recognised in time. We have seen that they can. The question is what organisations are willing to do once recognising them makes inaction indefensible.

Because at that point, listening stops being benign.

And becomes consequential.