Dr. Katie Pritchett 

When Strategy Meets Stress: The Organizational Nervous System at Work

Culturati: LIVE

Transformation fails because under pressure, organizations behave like nervous systems and snap back to the familiar, despite the strategy.

In this Culturati: LIVE session, Dr. Katie Pritchett introduces the Organizational Nervous System lens: a practical, neuroscience-grounded way to understand culture as a collective threat- response system shaped by leadership behavior, decision-making, and reward structures under pressure. This lens helps leaders see what traditional change models often miss: how stress, uncertainty, and identity threat directly affect decision quality, speed, and durability.As AI accelerates work, it also amplifies core neurological threats:<ul><li>Identity: “What is my value now?”</li><li>Capability: “Am I still competent?”</li><li>Uncertainty: “What happens next?”</li></ul>When these threats go unaddressed, leaders and teams default into protective patterns such as control, avoidance, urgency addiction, perfectionism, and burnout disguised as performance. These patterns may feel productive in the short term, but they quietly degrade trust, judgment, and innovation.Dr. Pritchett is a leadership professor, researcher, and transformation coach who helps leaders translate insight into behavior change that holds under real-world pressure. In this session, leaders will learn to read their organization’s default stress reflex and reset toward a future-state culture by building the two capabilities that determine whether change holds:<ul><li>Regulation: the ability to stabilize cognition and behavior in moments of heat</li><li>Capacity: the ability to tolerate tension, ambiguity, and reinvention without collapse</li></ul>The outcome is not “more feelings at work.” It is a culture that can stay regulated while stretched, able to hold hard conversations, make better decisions faster, retain top talent, and sustain innovation under pressure. <h4>KEY TAKEAWAYS</h4>1. Culture is your organization’s stress behavior. Under pressure, systems do not rise to intention—they revert to familiar neurological patterns unless capacity is deliberately built.2. AI is an identity disruptor, not just a workflow tool. When leaders fail to address the threat response that AI triggers, protection patterns like control, avoidance, and urgency quietly undermine trust and innovation.3. Regulation and capacity are distinct leadership capabilities. Regulation stabilizes the system in moments of heat. Capacity reduces false alarms and expands tolerance so the system does not ignite as often or as destructively.4. What gets rewarded becomes the cultural reflex. Many organizations unintentionally reinforce overcommitment, people-pleasing, and urgency because it “works,” until it exhausts their highest performers.5. The middle is the leverage point. Middle managers carry the highest cognitive and emotional load during change. Strengthening their nervous system capacity is one of the fastest ways to shift culture at scale.

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

When Strategy Meets Stress: The Organizational Nervous System at Work

More events from Culturati: LIVE

Discover more events from Culturati: LIVE, from Business to other experiences you might love.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.

When Strategy Meets Stress: The Organizational Nervous System at Work

More events from Culturati: LIVE

Discover more events from Culturati: LIVE, from Business to other experiences you might love.

You might also like...

Browse more events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.