Teamcast

Mission Critical Team Institute
  • 4.8 (101)
  • Social Sciences
  • Updated Semimonthly

Dr. Preston Cline, Dr. Dan Dworkis, Dr. Art Finch and Harry Moffit of the Mission Critical Team Institute share research and explore the questions vexing the most elite teams in the world, from Special Operations soldiers to Firefighters, from Trauma Medics to Professional Athletes, and from Astronauts to Tactical Law Enforcement.

  1. Jul 13

    S6 Ep14 A Better Approach to After-Action Reviews

    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. 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.

  2. Jun 29

    S6 Ep13 Christine Stead on Systems of Innovation in ECMO

    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.

  3. Jun 15

    S6 Ep12 The Neuroscience of Operator Development (Recast)

    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.

  4. Jun 1

    S6 Ep11 Marius Aleksa on Why Curiosity is Key for Human Performance

    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.

  5. May 18

    S6 Ep10 Character, Creativity, and the Machine

    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.

  6. May 4

    S6 Ep9 Denis Leary on Residue, Six Years On

    Six years ago this week, on May 7, 2020, we released our first Teamcast on Residue. In that episode, Preston shared a conversation with Coleman Ruiz on the psychological and emotional substance left behind after choosing the hard path. The episode, and the paper that grew out of it, traveled further than we expected. Eight operators have since told us that paper is the reason they are still here. In 2018, at a Wounded Warriors event in Alexandria, Tom Hardy introduced the idea of Residue to Preston. Preston then turned to FDNY Chief David Morkal, who pointed him toward Denis Leary. Denis's response became an essential part of MCTI's paper. Six years later, this is the first time Preston and Denis have actually talked in person. They get into what method actors and mission critical operators share, the difference between trauma and burden, dark humor as survival, the Clark Kent–at-the-barbecue experience, and why music does the work that nothing else quite does, as evidenced by Denis singing in the car on the way to the recording. Denis's response to our Monday morning question is in there, too. If this conversation is useful, the best way to support our work is to subscribe and leave a quick rating or review. It helps us reach the people who need to hear it most.

  7. Apr 20

    S6 Ep8 Adam Milano on Teamwork as Ensemble Art

    What do theater, crisis response, military service, and social work have in common? More than you might guess. Adam Milano, faculty at UNC's School of Social Work, a military veteran, and theater-trained performer, joins Dan Dworkis to discuss how high-performance teamwork under pressure looks a lot like ensemble art. In this episode: You can't turn off the human part — and you shouldn'tInvisible excellence: the best work goes unnoticedYour job is to make your teammates look brilliantYour third emergency today is someone else's first This conversation was released in partnership with The Emergency Mind Podcast and originally aired on February 16, 2026. If this conversation was useful, the best thing you can do is subscribe and leave a quick rating or review — it helps us reach the teams that need to hear these conversations most.

  8. Apr 6

    S6 Ep7 Coach, Don't Profess: Theory-to-Practice Transfer in Mental Performance

    Ceci Craft has worked inside two of the most demanding performance cultures in the world — Army Special Operations and Major League Baseball. She's currently the Philadelphia Phillies' Director of Mental Performance, Life Skills, and Education, leading a staff of seven coaches across their MLB affiliates and the organization's academy in the Dominican Republic. When she made the move from working with Operators to working in baseball, she thought she had her bearings -- "No one's being shot at, and no one's died, so I'm fine." -- It took her a while to recalibrate her perspective from the special ops world and to recognize that losses in the athletic world are different kinds of losses, but still real ones. Preston and Ceci dig into the gap between how mental performance practitioners are trained and what the job actually requires — the ethical conundrums no ethics course prepares you for, the difference between a clinical model built on client readiness and a performance context that operates on its own timeline, and why "coach, don't profess" is harder to practice than it sounds. They use imagery as a case study — exploring habituation, audience fit, and how to teach live skills more effectively. They examine what Ceci calls "healthy versus junk food confidence": the difference between confidence that holds up versus confidence that collapses under real pressure. And they close with one of the more honest conversations about identity and transition: what it actually costs to walk out of a high-performance tribe, and what helps. If this conversation is useful, the best way to support our work is to subscribe and leave a rating or review. It helps us reach the people who need these discussions.

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4.8
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About

Dr. Preston Cline, Dr. Dan Dworkis, Dr. Art Finch and Harry Moffit of the Mission Critical Team Institute share research and explore the questions vexing the most elite teams in the world, from Special Operations soldiers to Firefighters, from Trauma Medics to Professional Athletes, and from Astronauts to Tactical Law Enforcement.

Information

  • Creator
    Mission Critical Team Institute
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    77
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Mission Critical Team Institute
  • Show Website
    Teamcast

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