Teamcast

A few years ago, senior FBI SWAT team leader Matt Hoffman called Preston after a fatal operation. To assist the team in working through the loss, Preston and Matt used a process that went beyond the standard after-action review by incorporating narrative inquiry. The goal was to let a fractured team's story come back together before anyone examined what went wrong, rather than extracting lessons first.
Later, Preston worked with Matt and Dr. Angus Fletcher — Professor and Director of the Leadership Initiative at Ohio State's Fisher College of Business — to write up what they learned. Their paper, "A Better Approach to After-Action Reviews," was published in Harvard Business Review.
This summer Matt and Angus joined Preston to discuss Angus's research, why traditional AARs work when they're done right, and narrative competence over narrative allegiance.
The three of them dig into why a story lands in the brain differently than a data point does, why the breakfast that follows a hard AAR isn't a throwaway ritual but an active repair, and why naming the discomfort in the room, not necessarily fixing it, is often the whole job of a leader. Advice for Monday: stop chasing lessons learned first. Get the full story. The lessons will surface on their own.
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Christine Stead is the CEO of ELSO: the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization. ELSO is the premier global nonprofit for ECMO and ECLS, connecting providers, researchers, and regulatory agencies across 66 countries and nearly 800 contributing centers worldwide.
Earlier this year, Dan's conversation with Thomas Preston explored trust and communication at the bedside. They discussed what it takes for a single ECMO team to function in a single room under pressure. On this Teamcast, released in collaboration with The Emergency Mind Podcast, Christine joins Dan to talk about how ELSO held the field together during COVID: a live registry built in weeks, a global capacity map, real-time coordination running patient-by-patient across time zones. Getting information out mattered more than getting it perfect, because withholding it presented a different kind of risk.
They also get into ELSO's founding philosophy, the systems-of-systems challenge in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and an upcoming center certification program that has been two years in the making. If you find this episode useful, the best way to support the work is to subscribe and leave a quick rating or review.

This conversation originally aired December 6, 2022.
Dr. Michael Platt is a Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and holds joint appointments at the Perelman School of Medicine, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the Wharton School. He is the founder of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative and the author of The Leader's Brain.
Preston and Michael work through the neuroscience underneath three questions: Why do emotional interventions sometimes produce learning, and sometimes just produce resentment? What does it actually mean to have a "social brain," and what happens to it when you cut people off from each other? And what are the neurological precursors to the thing teams call flow?
Listen to learn the marble metaphor for habit and development, the default mode network as a muscle that atrophies without boredom, the role of synchrony in what rowers call "swing," and a standing challenge to the introverts in the audience (go talk to your neighbors).
Michael's closing recommendations are three things most likely to keep your brain and your team's brains healthy under pressure.

We're continuing our conversation on human performance by asking why some performers keep improving under pressure while others hit a ceiling. One of the most powerful answers is curiosity. In this Teamcast, released in partnership with The Emergency Mind Podcast, Dan talks with Marius Aleksa, a performance advisor who has coached elite performers across professional baseball, special operations, medicine, and high-level athletics. Together, they explore how curiosity helps people recognize their strengths, uncover hidden leverage points, and build the kind of solid foundation that supports growth at the edge of their ability.

Andy Walshe has spent his career at the frontier of human performance, from Australia's post-Sydney Games high-performance system, through a decade at Red Bull, to his current work with Liminal Collective across elite sport, government programs, and executive development. His assessment of where the field actually stands: about a ten out of a hundred.
Harry and Andy dig into what that means. They cover the challenge of building operator-centered performance programs inside organizations still stuck on the basics; why character and creativity are the two most important elements most programs underweight; and how the rise of AI is forcing a reckoning with what makes humans irreplaceable. Andy's term for it is Imagineering: the capacity to generate the questions worth asking, not just consume the answers the machine provides.
They close on the cognitive warrior as the emerging frontier: why cyber and analyst communities, starting from scratch, may end up leading the DOD in human performance, and what Monday could look like for anyone building high performance programming.
If you find value in this discussion, the best way to support our work is to subscribe and leave a quick rating or review — it helps us reach the teams that need to hear these conversations most.