Show Notes
Dr. Anna Simons: The Anthropology of Mission Critical Teams Dr. Anna Simons recently 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. Most recently she is the co-author of The Sovereignty Solution: A Commonsense Approach to Global Security. Simons' focus has been on conflict, intervention, and the military from an anthropological perspective. Her work examines ties that bind members of groups together as well as divides which drive groups apart.
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Dr. Jonpaul Nevin is Associate Professor in Human Performance and Health at Buckinghamshire New University and Programme Director of the Tactical Athlete Performance Centre. He joined the Royal Engineers as a sixteen-year-old apprentice, retrained as a physical training instructor, and served nearly fifteen years in the British Army. His last tour, Operation Herrick 10 in Helmand Province in 2009, led to Headley Court, where he went from watching casualties come home to rehabilitating them. He has asked ever since whether the army did everything it could to prepare its soldiers. Jonpaul and Harry talk how a staff sergeant’s paper on whether the British Army was fit to fight in Afghanistan became an undergraduate degree for physical training instructors, then the MSc in Human Performance Optimisation, and now a PhD pathway. They also cover why robustness comes before resilience, what cognitive load does to decisions, and why the fied needs doctrine without dogma. Jonpaul argues the people who have lived the work should lead it and provides advice about curiosity and the fundamentals. If you find value in this discussion, the best way to support our work and stay up to date on future episodes is to subscribe and leave us a quick rating or review. It helps us reach more people who need to hear these conversations.
Dr. Sharon M. Ravitch is a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education - and the person who chaired Preston's dissertation committee. In this conversation, originally released in January 2023, Sharon joins Preston to talk about communities of practice: historically, a craftsman's model (carpenters, ironworkers, silversmiths), and MCTI's model that describes instructor cadres — groups who build shared language and expertise around a particular kind of problem. Sharon reframes it as hybridized expertise because everyone in the room is already an expert of their own experience. New knowledge gets created when practitioners come together to examine what they do every day — not when it's handed down from the academy. From there the conversation moves through the significance of connection, reflection as a muscle that atrophies without white space in the curriculum (Viktor Frankl's "space between stimulus and response" comes up), and trading risk rather than mitigating it. We're posting this Recast now because it's part of the iterative process behind Preston's recent white paper, The Fourth Generation of Military Special Operations Selection & Assessment. Communities of practice is exactly the concept the paper builds on and then pushes past: where a community of practice is organized around a shared subject (psychologists as one community, instructor cadre as another), a community of praxis is what happens when distinct communities, i.e., academics, cadre, and leadership, stop working in parallel and work together toward a common outcome. You can hear Preston and Art Finch talk through that model directly in S6 Ep5. If you find value in this discussion, the best way to support our work and stay up to date on future episodes is to subscribe and leave us a quick rating or review. It helps us reach more people who need to hear these conversations.
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. If you found value in this discussion, the best way to support our work and stay up to date on future episodes is to subscribe and leave us a quick rating or review. It helps us reach more people who need to hear these conversations.
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. If you find value in this discussion, the best way to support our work and stay up to date on future episodes is to subscribe and leave us a quick rating or review. It helps us reach more people who need to hear these conversations.
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. If this conversation was useful, subscribe and leave a quick rating or review — it helps us reach the teams that need to hear these conversations most.