The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
Interviews, stories and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Being an effective leader in a corporate or public crisis situation requires knowledge, tenacity, and influencing skills. Unfortunately, most of us don't get much training or real experience dealing with crisis situations. On this podcast, we will talk with people who have lived through major crisis events and we will tap their experience and stories from the front lines of crisis management.
Your host, Tom Mueller, is a veteran crisis manager and trainer with more than 30 years in the corporate communications and crisis fields. Tom currently works as an executive coach and crisis trainer with WPNT Communications, and as a contract public information officer and trainer through his personal company, Tom Mueller Communications LLC.
Your co-host, Marc Mullen, has over 20 years of experience as a communication strategist. He provides subject matter expertise in a number of communication specializations, including crisis communication plan development, response and recovery communications, emergency notifications and communications, organizational reviews, and after-action reports. He blogs at Blog | Marc Mullen
Our goal is to help you grow your knowledge and awareness so you can be better prepared to lead should a major crisis threaten your organization.
Music credit: Special thanks to Nick Longoria from Austin, Texas for creating the theme music for the podcast.
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The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
EP91 Stranded in Antarctica Part 2 - a medevac crisis, reintegration frustrations
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
A doctor walks into the station leader’s office in Antarctica and asks a question no one wants to answer during a pandemic: “How would we evacuate someone right now?” With flights effectively off the table, scarce ships in the region, and weather as the ultimate gatekeeper, David Knoff faces a leadership test that turns crisis theory into cold, hard logistics.
We talk through the Christmas Eve 2020 medevac that required international coordination from China, the USA, and Australia; runway construction, and contingency plans for everything from aircraft issues to overland rescue access. David breaks down what actually kept the team steady: a shared purpose everyone could understand, a deliberate decision to put key people on rest so they could peak when it mattered, and a practical approach he calls “delegating the worry.” Instead of one overwhelmed leader carrying every fear, clear roles and ownership turn anxiety into action.
We also zoom out to the systems that make a response like this possible. David explains how monthly incident management drills create muscle memory, including training for secondary roles when the leader or doctor is off station. Then we shift to the human side: repatriation back to Australia after 18 months away, the culture shock of COVID-era airports and rules, and the quiet burnout that can hit when you’re finally “off duty” after a long stretch of responsibility.
Along the way, we discuss David’s book 537 Days of Winter, why writing it was cathartic and unflinching, what he’s watching (yes, Alone), and how he’s researching his next leadership-focused book on operating in extreme environments. If you lead teams through uncertainty, you’ll leave with concrete lessons on crisis leadership, incident management, resilience, and recovery. Subscribe, share this with a leader who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.
Find David's book and connect with him via LinkedIn or his website, David.Knoff.com
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We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Welcome Back And Set The Scene
Tom MuellerHi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. I'm Tom Mueller. On our episode today, we're continuing our conversation with David Knoff, who was leading an expedition into Antarctica when the COVID pandemic struck. David's written a book about his adventures called 537 Days of Winter, and he joins us on the podcast to share some stories from his experience leading that team. Let's rejoin the conversation now.
The Christmas Eve Medevac Trigger
Tom MuellerDavid, I know you had some um some particular incidents came up. There was an incident uh involving a Medevac um that um that went on. And can you share a few details about that? And what are your kind of your leadership takeaways from that?
David KnoffYeah, uh so just on the eve of Christmas 2020, so we'd been there just over 12 months and we still had a while to go. We had um, you know, and it's one of those quite common in a crisis. If when you've got one crisis and there's one problem, it's often there's gonna be more. Uh it's never, it's rarely that simple of like, oh, we've got this one problem. Sure enough, you're gonna have more. So um at one point the the doctor walked into my office and just said, hey, how would um how would we evacuate someone at the moment if we if we had an issue? And I'm like, almost impossible, mate. There's there's no you know, talked about earlier, there's no flights available, we don't have any aircraft down here, uh, there's not any, there's not many ships in the area this year. So, you know, there's there's almost no way if you've got a problem with a patient, you're probably gonna have to treat them and we'll we'll have to look at. And I said, but hypothetically, there is a Chinese icebreaker in the region, um, and then there's an American aircraft about 5,000 Ks away at their big station at McMurdo. Um, we have MOUs with those nations that in an in an extremist uh medical situation we may be able to get some of their aviation assets or ships and stuff. Um, but yeah, it's gonna need a high level of approval from two pretty complicated nations who are dealing with their own problems. And I kind of stared at the doctor for a bit longer, and he stared back at me, and I just went, uh, it's not a hypothetical, is it? What do you got? And he went, Look, I can't give you the details, but do your things, call call Xi Jinping, call Trump and get us. I need a helicopter, we need to get this guy out of here. And I'm like, fuck's sake, like pardon my French there. And I'm just like, oh, well, what do I how do I do this? So call up the um the operations manager back in Australia and get one back on him for extending us and say, hey, uh, got a medical situation, they've got to get uh a patient out of here. Um from what I and I had a good understanding of of what assets were in the region that the nations share all that for these reasons. So came up with a pretty quick plan to say I need a Chinese helicopter, I'll need two flights, uh, at least two flights over a one-week period. I need to send a bunch of people inland to build a runway. Um, so that's five people, one flight inland, one week, build the runway, and then a week later I'll need another flight of the helicopter to take the patient and a chaperone up to the airfield. I need the aircraft across from McMurdo to be staged and move across, and I'll need an intercontinental flight from our international airline airfield, which is another 1500 kilometers away, and I need a flight in between these, and I need this, I need that, and I need all these sort of things, and I need everyone to stop and just just make this medical evacuation happen. And it all has to happen on the 24th of December uh 2020. And and the whole thing, you just look at it and you go, Oh, I've got no chance. Uh oh, and we needed favorable weather conditions then at about five different Antarctic locations uh across an area the size of kind of continental United States. Kind of you're talking about I need good weather in San Francisco and New York and Dallas on the same day for the same like 12-hour window, and you go, can't happen, but you know, it's you know, you might get and if and fog at one of those locations would scrub the whole thing. Right. So we had and we had about two weeks to to plan in the run-up to
Purpose And Rest As Strategy
David KnoffChristmas. But the key lessons out of it, one, it was strangely, it gave us a lot of purpose. So we we all knew the the patient, we knew the details of the issue, so we were able to be like, okay, we get it, he's he's got to go back to Australia for treatment. We just couldn't treat it on the station. Um, and so they're like, okay, cool, everyone understands we've got this common purpose, and then we uh had that to like it gave us okay, well, let's go do that. But strangely, because it was gonna be a two-week operation, one of the first things I did was put a number of people on rest and say, Hey, we're uh we're gonna have to peak on the 24th of December at like 3 a.m. was actually when the the flights happened. Uh the kind of key moment was you know 3 a.m. And so yeah, we'd got a peak then. So at this point here, two weeks before that, I actually need a few of you to go and just relax, just rest. We're gonna deal with, we're gonna come up with the plan. It's gonna stress me and a few others out. But for the people that are gonna have to go and build that runway, go and rest because you're gonna work flat out for a few days to build the runway in the middle of nowhere. So weird thing to do is your first orders after uh a critical event to tell people to go rest.
Delegating Worry And Managing Risk
David KnoffUm, the second one I came up with, or the second key strategy, became kind of delegating the worry, is one term for it, or making sure that if if you're coming into my office saying, Oh my god, I don't know about this, to say, that's okay, Tom. I need you to focus on your role in the the problem of say it's and a lot of it was around the logistics of of doing these aviation issues, and then what happens if if we have a downed aircraft involved in the program, how do we get an overland party to the crash site and all these random contingencies that you hope aren't gonna happen, but you go, Oh, well, we have to have a plan for that because we don't have one aircraft. We always we normally fly the helicopters in tandem, so that if one crashes, the second one lands at the crash site, etc. Um, but we didn't have that for this, so we're like, okay, we're saying we have to have overland access to any flight routes and all these sort of random things, but that's too much for one person on the station to manage. So you go, well, let's get a team back in Australia to come up with that plan. So then they called other people in to work on a plan to come up with these contingencies. So you're like, all right, I need you to focus on this part of it. I've got another team back in Australia that's going to come up with this contingency. We had another team back in Australia who were looking at, and this was because normally we don't put Australians on foreign aircraft. Um, so we're like, okay, so we have to have an Australian team back in Australia going through the Chinese flight proje uh procedures and their say their maintenance records of their helicopters and stuff. So to to kind of approve. And I'm I saw that problem, and I'm like, oh my god, how the hell am I gonna go through and make sure that their aircraft are serviceable to put people on? And then they're like, no, no, no, we'll get someone in Australia. I'm like, thank, thank you for that. So they had someone that went through the went through those with the the and the again the Chinese Antarctic program were super helpful and they they talked them through. And um, same with the the American Antarctic program or NS National Science Foundation, um, super helpful with it all to make sure that all of that was transparent and everyone was happy that um the way that we weren't taking additional risks. I think as as risky and as bold as it was as a complicated logistical medical evacuation from Antarctica, so many of the risks were then managed and understood to just make sure that we're not putting more lives at risk, we're not taking additional risks because the last thing we need now is to end up with a downed aircraft or damaged aircraft that's everyone's safe, but we've got a broken uh wheel strut in the middle of Antarctica when we just don't have the amount of um redundant aircraft that we normally would to deal with it. But thankfully it it all went off like a uh like a Swiss clock. And uh on Christmas Eve 2020, we were able to evacuate our our patient back to Australia, and the silver lining and the whole thing was that that character Fred that I talked about, we were able to put him on the flight uh as the medical chaperone, which meant that it sort of solved that problem uh as well. So by the the end of that, we we sat down for Christmas the next day, and there was now just 22 of us for the station to see at home to the
Incident Management Drills Pay Off
David Knoffend.
Tom MuellerYeah, it's an amazing story, and the the amount of logistics uh is just mind-boggling there. So there's a lot of details there. Did you set up uh you know an incident management team structure to help deal with all of that?
David KnoffYeah, good question. Sorry, I missed over that. So one of the things that way back at the start, uh you know, before we even leave Australia, we set all of those structures up so we all know what our roles are in the incident management team. And then throughout the year, every month, we do an incident management drill. And we do everything from a fire on the station to lost expeditioners to vehicles falling through sea ice uh to aircraft emergencies or ship like maritime emergencies. So the incident structure remains the same. And then we'd even, because we've been there so long, we'd even had the chance to exercise that with secondary roles. So we'd we'd do trigger an exercise, but I'm off station. So myself and the doctor would often we we'd go, okay, well, but the doctor and Dave are out on a they're they're looking at some retrieving some penguin cameras, uh, which we have scattered around Antarctica to just take time-lapse photos of all the penguin rookeries. So it's like, oh, Dave and the doctor have gone out to do that whilst someone's you know fallen off a ladder and cracked their head open on station. Go. And then the deputy station leader has to step up or the the the the highly trained, like whoever's been done the most first aid training steps up to be like, oh, well, I'll do the first aid until we can get the doctor back on station. And these sorts of drills. So when it came to the actual medical emergency and you trigger the incident management team, everyone already knows their core roles and they know that they're sub-teams. We made a few little adjustments here and there, but um essentially everyone just goes, All right, yep, that's we know the drill, we know what our roles are, and off we go.
Tom MuellerYeah, cool. Well, it's just another great example of how having that structure in place and you know, exercising against it uh gets everybody in position where they can actually lead in a crisis, right?
David KnoffSo yeah, absolutely. I think I mean giving everyone a role uh is so important as well. In no matter what that role is, uh, you don't want to have anyone that that's sort of and in like I said before, even telling people their role is I need you to rest because I'm gonna need you in three days. And so I want you to just make sure you're well fed, well rested, like pack your gear so that you can you're sort of ready for anything. But um, don't come to all the meetings, just relax because in three days I'm gonna give you a job and you're gonna and they'll be like, okay, great, that's my job. My job is to be well rested on three days' notice to move, and and I'll go from there. Right.
Tom MuellerBecause I have to go out and build a a runway for an aircraft, which I've never seen that in an operations response plan. But in Antarctica, it's pretty common, huh?
David KnoffCorrect, yeah.
Tom MuellerOkay.
Writing 537 Days Of Winter
Tom MuellerIt is literally a different world down there. Uh hey, in a minute, I want to get your thoughts just on the whole repatriation thing where you got back to the mainland and and how that felt and went. Um, but uh I do just want to you know plug the book uh a little bit here uh because that's what we're what you're up to here. Five the book's entitled 537 Days of Winter. And um just going through the praises and and this conversation, it's just a fascinating book. Um tell us what was the uh sort of most interesting thing about pulling that all together for you?
David KnoffYeah, that was uh it was a strange twist. Like so I I got back and uh a number of people had had sort of said, Hey, you should you should write a book one day, that'll be an interesting story of what had happened to you. And I said, What do you mean, one day? Let's I'll do it now. Um, because I came back and then we went into a number of lockdowns. Melbourne was the most locked down city in the world. So I came back and had these kind of rolling lockdowns. I'm like, oh, write the book. And I'd been lucky enough, and you'd see in one of the pictures here, this uh news article, one of these was in the New York Times. So the fact that um we'd been stuck there for that long and everyone was dealing with isolation and lockdowns and all these random things, the Antarctic programs had got quite a lot of press globally, and certainly within Australia, my uh myself and the team had had had a few news articles and some interviews and things that have been done. So I had enough going on to sort of go to a couple of publishers and say, hey, would um you'd be keen on a book? And they jumped on it. And so it was just this I'm like, oh great, awesome. So sure enough, had a had a book ready to go. And the process then became really cathartic to to go through it from start to finish and and you start with just okay, well, what happened? But then adding in the human emotion and the story to it. And I was really uh it was really helpful. So a number of the other key characters in the story, uh, from my deputy station leader to the doctor to a few other of the technical experts on the station, from the head, the head carpenter uh and tradey and then the the head plumber and a few others helped proof the story to make sure that it I think when I when I told the TM like, hey, I'm gonna write a book about our year, uh, very mixed responses. Some of them are like, no, no freaking way, do you know I don't want you to do that? And and they were a bit protective, like, well, it's our story. I think I finished the line with in the book saying, yeah, there's there's 24 versions of this story. This is this is mine. But it's rounded out by I was really keen to not make sure, to make sure it's not just, hey, this is my story, here's here's all the great decisions I made, and here's everything I got right. It's actually the opposite. Uh, there's a lot about mistakes I made, uh, low points in my own mental health, my own journey, um, times where I did make the wrong decision and regretted it and couldn't recover immediately, had to wait to the opportune moment later on to kind of build trust again or get respect back over a low point, and and those relationships with ships with different members of the team and how they kind of ebb and flow over the year. That was a key point to make sure that that book really captures that. And it's it's the other factor to it is what I I love this now on the certainly on the speaking circuit, or when I tell the story, you can see it in people's eyes. When I say, like, okay, I'm gonna take you back to October 2019 or Christmas 2019, the last Christmas before COVID. Most people can remember it straight away, and then you go, okay, let's go, let's look at my and each chapter of the book starts with the the date and the time and the temperatures and different things. But you go, okay, March 2020, where were you? And people will be like, oh man, I was here. And I and then there was the first time I was trying to get, I was trying to fly home from here to there, and I couldn't get there because the flights were changed, and and like people just remember it so well. So it's this great historical snapshot of where where were you when when 2020 was evolving, but also you can look at like well, what was happening at the other end of the earth um while we were sitting there watching all this on the news or hearing it from friends and family, trying to understand what kind of world are we gonna come back to when we eventually do get home.
Tom MuellerYeah. Well, it's crazy. So much drama in here, but uh it's gotta be a fascinating read. I know that. Well, just last second last question here.
Repatriation Shock And Hidden Trauma
Tom MuellerUm the repatriation, getting back to the mainland and all that, it it would have been accompanied by a sense of relief and joy that we're home. Is that what you felt, or did it just feel like going from you know one box into another?
David KnoffYeah, it was it was harder than we would have expected. Um we came back to Australia kind of April 2021, so you know, 18 months after we'd left Australia, and in a lot of ways it was sort of time travel from October 2019 to April 2021. We really struggled adjusting to all the random COVID things. Now we'd been briefed on them and we had an understanding of it, but we struggled to understand. And the first thing we did when we got home was get off the boat, have a night out, um, and then go to an airport to fly home. And airports during COVID, and we just didn't know how to do it. And most of us had a pretty traumatic experience trying to get through it. Um, especially when you like because we don't call them TSA here, but for you American listeners, like the TSA, they don't like to have a conversation that's on rational terms. There's their way or there's anything. So when we in front of the airport and they're like, Okay, sir, you you know, you've got to show me your covet app with your thing, and I'm like, I don't know what that is. They look at you as a kind of you're an objectionist or you're an anti-vaxxer and you're now a problem. Yeah, and you're just going like, mate, I just don't, I don't know. I I don't know what to do. You tell me, and I'm trying I'm trying to comply, but and so most of us had a weird experience with that. And I've been in Antarctica for a year and a half, and they're like, bullshit. You know, and sorry, I was worried again. But um, so that was that was really challenging. And the second part was then when I finally got home back to Melbourne and was trying to uh I wanted to just hide, and and my friends and others are like, no, because they were just coming out of a lockdown. So everyone's like, oh, let's party, let's do this, let's go surfing, all this, all this stuff. I'm like, oh, I just want to sleep for like a week and not talk to anyone. It was you know the first chance in a year and a half to not be in charge of a group of people. And I'm like, I just want to do my own thing, uh, do some like really basic tasks, do some carpentry, do some, read a book, like just not have to deal with people for a bit. And that was hard because everyone was kind of at me to like, I come and party, let's do this and let's go for a run, let's do all this different stuff. But the the other part that I then started to unpack was that the trauma that people had been through in their own world back here with COVID, in some ways was harder than what we'd been through in Antarctica because I talked about it earlier. We were prepared. We knew we were going into an Antarctic winter, we knew it would be a tough year. Now it was tougher than expected, but we had been screened and trained and we'd run incident management drills, like we knew what was gonna happen. So when anything happened, we're kind of ready for it. Whereas, as everyone found out in 2020, the average household or business was not prepared for COVID. So that shock is a hundredfold because they're not, they don't have any systems in place, they haven't mentally prepared for the worst-case scenarios. So when they get hit with lockdowns and freight problems and travel restrictions, they just go, Oh my god. And a lot of people were really rattled by it and and scarred. So that was a hard one to understand. How as difficult as our situation had been, there was people back home who had a tougher uh experience.
Tom MuellerYeah, that's just uh it's wild. Of course, we we've all seen that, right? And and it was craziness.
No Masks On Station Plus Better Morale
Tom MuellerHey, did you have masks uh on the station? Was everybody masked up down there, or were you kind of isolated and no need for it?
David KnoffNo, we didn't need it. So, and even when we we came home, so the vessel that picked us up, it had been at sea for two weeks already. So by the time the vessel got to us and we went home, uh, and they'd quarantined before they even got on the vessel and everything. So we were quite protected. I don't think I had to wear a mask until I got back to Melbourne, uh, which yeah, it was was fine. But it was uh that was one of the the positives of it was that we were protected from COVID. So we just got on with our lives and and did the work that we had to do. Yeah. Um, and it by the end, there was the the other strange silver lining that after 18 months on the station, we were getting that efficient with work, you know, we dropped it down to about a six-hour workday because everyone knew their job backwards. You you you could cross-skill people and we could focus on like, all right, well, let's enjoy our last couple of months in Antarctica, let's get outdoors, let's explore, let's let's visit places you haven't been around the area. We we had a 400 square kilometer operating area, get out and about and enjoy it, go hiking, go, you know, snowshoeing, whatever you haven't done, go and do it because you've got time. And we're able to change the the work program to make sure that um people got the most out of that experience. Because for a lot of the group, it's it might be their only time they ever go to Antarctica and you go, Do you want to sit here complaining about it that you're supposed to have been home six months ago, or go outside and go for your last hike in Antarctica because you'll you may not get back here. And strangely though, I think about half the group, um myself included, did go back within the the year or two afterwards, but um a lot of the group haven't had the chance.
Tom MuellerYeah. Well, I love that approach to it. It's uh you know, scale back the workday, give people more time to go explore and do things, um, which I'm sure helped morale immensely, right? Giving people that freedom and flexibility. Well awesome. Absolutely. Hey, last question
Alone, Reading, And The Next Book
Tom Muellerfor you. This is kind of a quirky one, but I'm just curious. Um, you know, what are you reading these days? And I want to ask you if you've got a favorite TV show that you're watching.
David KnoffI mean, this is gonna be so obvious. My my favorite TV show is Alone. Um, so the the survival show. I've been watching that like all the different seasons, and uh I don't know if the yeah, I toy with the idea of going on it, but like I'm like, yeah, but I've done all these different crazy things, but I like, can I you know build build fire if I lose my ferro rod? I'm like, I don't know, man. Uh not good at those like real basic core skills of like, I don't know how to gut a moose. Um watch watch some of those dudes on there that have yeah, they're like, I spent a year trapping wildebeests in Siberia. I'm like, oh far out, man. I don't I don't spent a lot of time in pretty crazy isolated locations, but we've always had you know helicopters and food and food and water and water and this sort of stuff. So I'm like, I don't know how I'd go, but I love that show and I love watching their journeys and I love how much they they often know. They're like, I bet you're sitting there watching this, going, what an idiot. And you'd be like, yep, but um, you've got to make those mistakes because I've been tired, cold, hungry, isolated, alone. You make mistakes and you you have to you look back and you go, oh my god, what a what an idiot. I can't believe I did that. But you go, yeah, I was that that was tired, hungry, wet, alone me that that made that stupid decision and let that fish go or whatever it is. So I love that show. Um, what am I reading? I'm reading a lot of uh leadership and management books. So I'm working on my second book at the moment, that's gonna be based around uh operating in extreme environments and and operating at the edge of uh of your comfort zones of how do you go out and you know do crazy things, but how do you make sure you maintain high performance and how do you plan for the unexpected and uncertainty? So I'm reading a lot of books on that at the moment as as comparative analysis to see who else has written about this stuff so I can uh find my niche in the market to make sure that my my second book fills a gap that isn't there.
Where To Buy The Book And Connect
Tom MuellerWell, David, can congratulations on the book. Again, it's 537 Days of Winter. Uh tell us can we find it on Amazon as well as bookstores?
David KnoffYeah, so it's in bookstores in Australia and New Zealand in physical copies if you're if you're down under, um, but you can certainly get it on Amazon uh and Kindle and Audiobook as well, so you can get get copies in in various different ways. Um yeah, if you're if you're down under, uh you'll get you can grab your physical copy of the bookstores much easier. And I'm trying to work on the US distribution at the moment, uh trying to work on the film deal as well. So if any of your listeners are film producers uh or um want to get in touch with that, just head to my website, davidnoff.com, and and happy to have a chat.
Tom MuellerOkay. And we'll include those uh references in the show notes here with the website and uh and that. All right, David, thank you again for being with us. Really appreciate your time. That's gonna do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. Hey, if you'd like to drop us an email, you can reach me at Tom at Leadinginacrisis.com. And uh we'll look forward to seeing you again soon on another episode. Take care.
