Capacity Under Pressure

Make better high-stakes decisions in uncertainty by developing the 3 agilities (emotional, cognitive, and navigational) needed to lead when no clear answers exist.
Today's leaders face a difficult challenge: They must make high-stakes decisions before they have enough information to know whether those choices will succeed.
Organizations operate in a BANI world, one that is brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and increasingly difficult to predict. Yet many leaders continue to make strategic decisions using mental models built for a more stable era.
This book reveals why leaders often narrow their options under pressure, mistake activity for impact, and seek certainty when ambiguity demands something different. Executive coach Karin Blair shows that the quality of strategic decisions depends less on what leaders know and more on what they can hold without reacting, oversimplifying, or forcing premature resolution.
Through a powerful framework built around 3 interconnected agilities, readers learn how to

Filled with practical leadership insights and real-world examples, this book helps leaders expand their decision field, choose coherence over relief, and create strategies that compound into meaningful long-term impact.

Karin Blair is an executive coach, strategic advisor, and founder of Evoking Insights, a coaching and consulting firm serving senior leaders in biotechnology, technology, and other high-growth industries. She is an adjunct coach with both the Hudson Institute of Coaching and the Center for Creative Leadership and creator of The Game Changer Series, a LinkedIn interview platform exploring the realities of strategic leadership. Blair brings decades of executive and consulting experience and holds a professional certified coach credential through the International Coaching Federation. Her work focuses on helping leaders navigate complexity, uncertainty, and transformational change.