Intelligent Teams Podcast

Daniel Susser

We discuss how to help teams think better together by interviewing leaders from business and the sciences of mind intelligentteams.substack.com

  1. Playback Theatre and the Psychology of Groups with Amir Atzmon

    31 May

    Playback Theatre and the Psychology of Groups with Amir Atzmon

    Amir Atzmon is a playback theatre and improv artist, a somatic psychotherapist and a translator of psychoanalytic theory based out of Tel Aviv. I met Amir in December 2025 at a Jewish cultural festival and experienced some of the playful spaces he facilitates, and I wanted to share some of Amir’s experience and knowledge with my podcast audience. We discuss playback theatre, creating safe spaces for improvisation and play, and group trauma and dynamics. We opened up Amir’s treasure chest of practical knowledge about how to build safety and trust with groups. We spent a bit of time also talking about trauma in groups as it relates to Israeli society and the ongoing conflicts in the region. We recorded this episode in February before the most recent war in Iran, but I think much of the analysis still holds. I felt it was important to give space to that discussion given how Amir’s work is in Israel, and how much awful s**t is happening in and around Israel at the moment. I felt uncomfortable with the idea of just leaving it as ‘Amir’s from Israel, nothing notable about that right now’. So I name that in the episode and I hope you find Amir’s very human (and I think compassionate) thoughts interesting and insightful. I trust you’ll treat the discussion with the assumption of good faith as we tread complex and tricky territory. Its a banger of an episode and I hope you really enjoy it. Show notes: Wilfred Bion Experiences in Groups Peter Fonagy Epistemic Trust Peter Levine Somatic Experiencing Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

    59 min
  2. Love, Phenomenology, and Waymaking with Andrea Hiott

    24/01/2025

    Love, Phenomenology, and Waymaking with Andrea Hiott

    This week’s guest on the Intelligent Teams Podcast is Philosopher, Neuroscientist and Podcaster Andrea Hiott. Andrea is the host of the Love and Philosophy - Beyond Dichotomy podcast, where she interviews some of the worlds most eminent thinkers about mind, cognition and experience. Andrea is a researcher at Universität Heidelberg in Utrecht developing her philosophy of Waymaking. I stumbled across Andrea’s work about 6 months ago when researching for my own podcast and have been blown away at the way she integrates thinking and thinkers from across science, philosophy and the humanities. She connects love and poetry with hard science and thorny philosophical problems seamlessly and her curious and holistic way of seeing the world really shines through in this episode. It was really an honour to have Andrea on the podcast. We covered many topics including: * how Andrea became interested in philosophy and the mind * Phenomenology and embodied cognition * Dichotomies in different disciplines and moving beyond boundaries * Philosophy as a way of life and a living approach * Love at work, and why it is so difficult to talk about love * Religion, complexity, awe and connectedness * Workplaces as religions * Identifying as an individual or part of a community * Scrum and Agile at individual and team levels of analysis * Gibson, affordances and sports teams * Waymaking and being embodied in the world * Cultural scaffolding and extended mind If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to Intelligent Teams to receive interviews like this with special guests, as well as my writings bringing the sciences of mind into dialogue with practical wisdom. If you really really like this, you can also subscribe to Daniel’s Community of Practice, a short weekly micronewsletter with 3 thought provoking tidbits to get you started in your week. Get full access to Intelligent Teams at intelligentteams.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 17min

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We discuss how to help teams think better together by interviewing leaders from business and the sciences of mind intelligentteams.substack.com