Teamcast

Dr. Derek Donegan is an orthopedic trauma surgeon and Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a healthcare entrepreneur, co-founder of ORtelligence, and a national leader with the Orthopedic Trauma Association, where his work centers on well-being, moral injury, and advocacy.
Dan and Derek start with the distinction that elective joint replacement is planned, optimized, and predictable weeks out, while orthopedic trauma is a patient you've never met and can't prepare for. The two paths have the same training pipeline, same residency spots, but somewhere along the way some surgeons catch the "trauma bug" and start looking for chaos to organize instead of variables to eliminate.
From there they dig into what Derek calls his "Spidey sense", the signal that a case is turning before he could point to why, and his reputation for going quiet in the OR exactly when things get hardest. They use cognitive load theory to get at why that instinct resists being taught even when everyone in the room wants it taught.
This conversation was released in partnership with The Emergency Mind Podcast.
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Recorded in 2020 during Melbourne's COVID lockdowns, this episode opens on what that stretch demanded of a tactical policing workforce that couldn't pause: fatigue management, disrupted home lives, and the added risk of infection in a workplace that had to keep running. From there, host Harry Moffitt and Superintendent Peter Ward move into a conversation that holds up well beyond lockdown.
At the time of recording, Peter Ward was Divisional Commander of the Security Services Division at Victoria Police, overseeing the Special Operations Group (SOG), the Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT), the Bomb Response Unit, and the Protective Services Unit — a 30-year career that includes operator and team leader roles in the SOG, the Port Arthur arrest team in 1996, and training alongside the FBI and LAPD SWAT.
Harry and Peter trace his path from SOG selection through the "privilege of suffering" bond among the final survivors, to the career-defining feedback that leadership means bringing your people with you, not just chasing the task. They close on his current work modernizing selection, opening tactical policing to women, and confronting the mental health toll of the job head-on.
Book mentioned: Legacy by James Kerr.
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Diane Malaspina is a psychologist, performance coach, and longtime yoga teacher who specializes in stress and burnout recovery, nervous system regulation, and optimal performance. She coaches frontline medical professionals, military human performance psychologists, executives, and athletes, and has worked extensively with medical students and residents through Arena Labs.
In this conversation with Dan Dworkis, Diane makes the case for a strengths-based approach to burnout: instead of asking what's broken in the 65% of people who report burnout, look at what the 35% who don't are doing right. They cover reframing stress as a challenge rather than a threat, plus two of the fastest levers for shifting your nervous system in real time—sleep and breath.
This conversation was released in partnership with The Emergency Mind Podcast and originally aired on April 27, 2026.
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This week we're recasting Preston's conversation with Dr. Anna Simons from May 2023. Anna retired as a Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and an A.B. from Harvard College.
She is the author of Networks of Dissolution: Somalia Undone and The Company They Keep: Life Inside the U.S. Army Special Forces. She is also the co-author of The Sovereignty Solution: A Commonsense Approach to Global Security. Her fieldwork began in Somalia in the late 1980s, embedded with a Special Forces mobile training team, years before most Americans had heard of the country. This work marked the start of a career devoted to studying the ties that bind operators together and the forces that pull them apart.
Preston and Anna range widely: why assessment and selection should simulate the actual conditions operators will face rather than test for a generic standard; "warrior" branding and tribal emblems, and what it signals when a unit needs more mystique than its mission alone provides; the difference between interchangeability and neurodiversity, and why teams need both depending on whether the problem in front of them is technical or adaptive; and the concept of communitas.
Asked what advice she'd give the people responsible for assessing, selecting, and educating MCTs today, Anna recommends holding people to high standards and communicating your expectations. She also makes a book recommendation of her own: Chris Miller's Soldier Secretary, which she read cover to cover the day it was published in 2023.
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Sara (Mills) Kerr is a firefighter with Fire and Rescue New South Wales and a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle, researching the trustworthiness of AI-generated information in disaster and emergency management decision-making. Before the fire service, she worked as an e-commerce data analyst, until Australia's 2019/2020 Black Summer bushfires redirected her path. Instead of returning to her normal work, she entered the Emergency Services Academy.
Harry and Sara talk about what fourteen weeks at the Academy built in her, and what it didn't. They get into why "overthinking" is often mislabeled: vigilance is a protective mechanism, not a weakness, and only becomes a problem when it overwhelms rather than informs.
That gap between training and readiness eventually pointed Sara toward research into AI and disaster management, and eventually the PhD. AI, in her framing, is a cognitive aid that should enhance operator judgment, never replace it. She's also recruiting participants for that research - anyone using AI operationally in Australian disaster and emergency management, frontline or otherwise is invited to reach out to Harry for a connection: harry@missioncti.com.
Their conversation also covered how why diversity strengthens a team's shared operating picture, and Sara walks through her Inner Command framework she built out of her own early struggles and the framework's 5 C's: Calm, Control, Competence, Confidence, Courage.
Advice for Monday: weaponize your vigilance, and give yourself credit for what you do well.
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