I am writing this a few weeks before IMTEX, and I will be honest: I am feeling the pressure.
Our team has committed to showing a validated machine at the exhibition. Not a prototype that works on a good day. A machine we can stand behind. Every week, the list of open issues gets shorter, but the remaining ones get harder. I notice it in myself first. I read reports faster. I am quicker to accept a good result and slower to question it. On some evenings, the date on the calendar feels louder than the data on my screen.
That is the reason for this piece. When the pressure builds, I find myself going back to three books I have read over the years: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Massimo Pigliucci’s Think Like a Stoic and Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict. None of them is about machine tools or exhibitions. Yet each one has given me something practical to hold on to right now. Kahneman helps me notice when pressure is doing my thinking for me. The Stoics help me separate what I can control from what I cannot. Ripley reminds me that curiosity, not certainty, is what keeps a team out of trouble.
I am sharing what these ideas mean to me in this moment, for my team, who are carrying the same weight, and for anyone else working under a deadline that refuses to move.
Pressure changes how we think, not just how fast we work
Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes two modes of thinking. The fast mode is intuitive, automatic and confident. The slow mode is deliberate, effortful and careful. Under pressure, we lean almost entirely on the fast one.
That would be fine if the fast mode were humble. It is not. Kahneman points out that it builds a convincing story from whatever information happens to be in front of us, and rarely asks what is missing. He also describes the planning fallacy: our habit of underestimating how long tasks will take, even when we have been wrong in exactly the same way before.
Put those together and you get a familiar pattern. One good test result starts to feel like proof. A tolerance that was “nearly in” gets rounded up. The schedule assumes everything from here goes right.
The uncomfortable truth is that deadline pressure is precisely when our quick judgments feel most certain and are least reliable.
Calm is a discipline, not a personality trait
We often talk about calm people as if they were born that way. I do not think that is true. Calm is something we practise, and the Stoics gave us one of the most practical tools for it.
Epictetus taught that some things are within our control and some are not, and that much of our distress comes from mixing up the two. Massimo Pigliucci, in Think Like a Stoic, brings this idea into modern working life.
Apply it to a delivery deadline. We do not control the exhibition date. We do not control how a customer will react on the stand. What we do control is the quality of our process, the honesty of our test data and how we treat each other when results disappoint us.
Every hour spent worrying about the date is an hour taken away from the things we can actually change. Calm is not pretending the pressure is absent. It is choosing where to put our attention.
There is an old military saying I come back to often: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Rushing creates rework. Rework is the slowest thing in engineering.
Questions are our safety system
If calm keeps us steady, questions keep us honest.
In High Conflict, Amanda Ripley describes how people and groups get trapped in reactive loops, and how genuine curiosity is one of the few things that breaks them. When questions get asked and curiosity is present, the conversation opens up instead of hardening.
Engineering teams know this in a different form. In the Toyota Production System, any worker can pull the andon cord and stop the line when something looks wrong. Stopping costs time. Toyota decided long ago that shipping a hidden problem costs far more.
A question in a design review is our andon cord. “How do we know this?” “What would prove us wrong?” “What have we not tested yet?” These are not signs of doubt in the team. They are signs that the team takes the outcome seriously.
Psychologist Gary Klein offers a simple method for this, the premortem. Before a major milestone, imagine it has already failed. Then ask everyone to write down why. It is remarkable how quickly real risks surface when people are given permission to imagine failure instead of being asked to defend success.
Nobody asks hard questions in an unsafe room
All of this depends on one condition. Amy Edmondson, in The Fearless Organization, calls it psychological safety: a shared belief that it is safe to speak up, admit a mistake or raise a concern without being punished or embarrassed.
Under deadline pressure, safety is the first thing to erode. A frustrated sigh in a review, a “we don’t have time for this,” a raised eyebrow when someone reports a failed test. None of these are dramatic, but each one teaches the team that bad news is unwelcome. Then bad news stops arriving, and problems wait quietly until they are expensive.
This is where leaders matter most. When someone brings me a problem late in a program, my first response decides whether the next problem reaches me early or not at all.
What we will practise from here
Ideas only help if they change what we do on a Tuesday afternoon. So here is what our team will try between now and IMTEX, and what I would suggest to anyone facing a deadline of their own.
First, a ten-minute premortem before every validation milestone. Assume it failed. List the reasons. Act on the top two.
Second, one fixed question in every review: what would prove us wrong? If nobody can answer, we have not looked hard enough.
Third, a simple rule. A raised concern gets an answer, never just a reminder of the deadline.
And finally, a personal one. When I feel the pull to rush, I will pause long enough to ask whether I am deciding with evidence or with anxiety.
The date will come regardless. What we bring to it, a machine we believe in or one we merely hope works, is still in our hands.
All the best for upcoming milestones for all of you!
