In this episode, I chat to David Knoff, Antarctic Expedition Leader and author of 537 Days of Winter, on high-stakes risk and crisis management, and being adaptable around your mission.

David brings over 15 years of experience and expertise in diplomacy, conflict resolution, resilience and remote leadership in some of the world's most challenging environments, where he has faced extreme adversity head-on.

From serving as a young Platoon Commander in the Solomon Islands to a pivotal diplomatic posting in Pakistan during a period of intense regional conflict, David’s journey has been shaped by moments that demand empathy, adaptability, and strength in uncertainty.

David took a sabbatical as a photographer in Turkey, capturing the Dastories of refugees escaping the Syrian conflict, before working in high-stakes environments to contribute to the international fight against ISIS.

More recently, he led Australia’s Davis Research Station in Antarctica, navigating the isolation of COVID-19 and an extended mission in one of the harshest environments on earth. Off the back of that, he has just released a book called 537 Days of Winter, and he discusses in the episode the harrowing life and death story that inspired it.

In today’s Masterclass we will share:

✅ Being comfortable with uncertainty and not being under control

✅ His anecdotal evidence on human response mechanisms to fear and threat

✅ How to factor in risk and crisis management in strategic planning, and balancing this process with instinctive action, and

✅ Being adaptable around your mission, in particular his experiences during the COVID-induced extended mission where they were stranded in the Antarctic.

Connecting with David Knoff

You can connect with David via LinkedIn or Facebook and E-mail.

Books and resources

• David Knoff – 537 Days of Winter
• Alfred Lansing – Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage

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“One of the big lessons anyone can take out of COVID was that everyone was forced to live in a world that was out of control and you just had to adapt and respond.”

On learning from the masters of voyaging

• Shackleton's just up there on the pedestal of Antarctic leaders and everyone who goes to Antarctica in a leadership role or any role would have read Endurance and the story of Shackleton and is familiar with it. We always discussed Scott and Shackleton and Amundsen and all the heroes. But rereading his book, when I'm sitting there in a moment where I've got a member of my team or in the most ridiculous scenario you could ever imagine, you're stuck in an Antarctic station, it's not quite as bad as it was a hundred years ago.
• If you take an expedition that everyone's signed up for, the minute you change the goalposts, even though it was already ridiculous, you're now changing it to be more ridiculous, it’s almost like now there are no goalposts.
• If the best Antarctic station leader or expedition leader had these sort of issues, then that gave me some solace in that kind of life.
• We probably had a couple of years worth of survivability if we'd gone on to extreme rationing. Thankfully, the way we resupply the stations allows that if something like what happened to us happens or there's a disaster with the ship and the stations that get resupplied, they do have enough food and fuel to run for a second season.

On being comfortable with not being in control

• Working in war zones and around conflict is that you get really comfortable just being out of control or not being in control of everything and it creates an approach to planning and thinking that is completely flexible and adaptable to whatever the enemy or the conditions are doing. So, for instance, in a war zone, you're worried about the physical enemy. You'll also have bloody dust storms and all sorts of weather. Weather plays a huge part in the military planning that often gets forgotten.
• No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy or everyone has a plan until you get hit. Any of those sayings, you really live them because you'll always do your planning – and the military planning processes are well renowned for the way they can come up with a plan that will deal with anything.
• The second part of that is then how do you adapt your plan or, or recognise that it needs to be thrown out the window and change. And if you try and stick to a plan that's not working, you'll just drive yourself to disaster.
• You'll always have to be adaptive and that held me in good stead.

On balancing instinctive action with planning

• When you're a startup or you're a small business or you're really pressed for time, you'll have to take risks. I think it’s quintessentially a military thing, but if you've got an hour, you'll use that hour, but you will have the decision and the plan ready to go at that time. Whereas non-military it's not completely isolated, but I've found working with non-military leaders, time is less of a factor. They'll happily run over budget and/or over time.
• There's a great saying for one of the ops managers at the Antarctic division: “If you leave it to the last minute, it only takes a minute.” Or “Do it early, do it twice.” If you start planning too far in advance, you don't quite know what the conditions are and exactly what's going to happen on the day. So there's a sweet spot of planning.
• If you could do all your planning meetings in an ice bath, geez, you'd be efficient! When you've got that compression of time and a restriction, you find it's almost freeing. You've got to make the decision. Let's go.
• When you add in boards and planning processes and then focus groups or feedback loops and everything, which are all really important to make sure you get the decision right, you start to ask, “Are we actually going to take a risk here that might work?”
• The people on the floor are going to say the same thing – less meetings, more time to actually do the job and often more decisive. Leadership is something that a lot of staff would really value.

On lessons from COVID on adaptability

• One of the big lessons anyone can take out of COVID was that everyone was forced to live in a world where it was out of control and you had to adapt and you had to respond. And you didn't know what was going to happen tomorrow.
• Everyone had to live in that world and some went well and others didn't.
• There isn't a solution. You're in a wicked problem. There's no clear solution to it and the only solution is to find a way to keep it ticking forward. You just had to find a way to get through every day.
• The best thing you can do, like you did is, is analyse it. Think about it, come up with a playbook and a toolkit and work your way through it, but you won't solve it. And you might have good days and then bad days and your good days might be shorter and you might have more bad days, but as long as you can keep it moving forward and ticking over individually and as a business, then you can hopefully get to a solution.
• I saw that footage of an absolute fireball, just exploding out of one of the engine inlets and engulfing part of the superstructure of the ship in flames, and it torched two IRBs, and the Zodiacs were melted instantly and just turned into a rubbery goo. And I'm looking at that fireball and thinking that's an explosion. And then we went, “Yeah, we actually might be getting the lifeboats here. This is going to get pretty hairy!”

On the human response to fear and threat

• So prior to that, everyone sat in their own, most people shared a cabin but you'd stay in your cabin and you'd read a book and people were social, but not too social. After the fire and in that period on the way home, people would sit around in like groups of four or five in cabins watching movies, reading books, discussing things.
• I ran a seminar on understanding threat response and human response to fear. I understand what they'd been through and how one’s body and mind will respond to fear and extreme threat, which the average person doesn't take the time to unpack and understand.
• We did a bit of that whilst trying to help those that were really struggling, doing what we could to help them on the ship. And it led to some varied responses. Some people have had long term impacts from that scenario that still to this day that they're grappling with.

On defining risks for strategic planning

• They teach you that in the early days of of military training and everything as well, that the worst decision can be no decision.
• If you've got an hour, a perfect plan that takes takes 61 minutes is a fail. You, you have one hour to achieve this objective and that is your goal. And, and you just get so focused on that environment and a plan that will achieve that objective or do a bloody good, have a good go at it. That's, that's the most important thing. And generally speaking, they'll never fail you in your military assessments for a decision that, you know, was tactically acceptable. But they will fail you for inaction or a plan that was going to be too slow or too long.
• You assess risk with your eyes and what's between your two ears, paperwork, processes, they're all necessary, but they will not actually assess your risk and solve your risk. So if you're going through a checklist or you're going through paperwork, or you're going, Oh, we need to do a risk assessment on this, is that risk assessment a process thing? Okay. Or are you actually assessing the risk? Have you got the right people with the right eyes and experience and the goo between their ears actually assessing that risk? Because if you're just putting it through a process to come up with an answer that you probably already know, you're wasting everyone's time. And if you know what the risk is, tying that risk to your goals of like, well, Oh, it might be risky to do this. You're like, yes, but if we're here to sell houses or we're here to save lives or we're here to do this, we have to take that risk to do that. Yeah. And that's what we exist to do.
• You have to find a way to go, right. We have to take some of these risks and inaction and. Indecision can be far more costly in the long run of just sitting there waiting it out.

On learning from failure and timing a pivot

• Those in the leadership positions will then know, you have to then accept that if it doesn't work that failure is an option and you then have to learn from that and be willing to move on and take it rather than just stay there, be indecisive, not take any risks and survive. It's an option. Is it actually going to achieve your goals or is it just going to achieve kind of purgatory? 
• Have you given it the time to work. Okay. Was it a three year plan? And now have the conditions changed significantly that we need to abandon that plan, or are we, it is a three year plan. We're at a year going, this hasn't worked. You go, what? So when, like, do we abandon it or not? Now you don't want to be, like I said earlier, you don't want to be too tied to a plan that's going to fail, but if you've not given it the success or the chance for success and it's the conditions are still the same and the condition, like the environment is the same that you set out on that course, have you run it? It's full term to go, right. It was a three year plan. We will make the decision at the two year mark when we finally do get some feedback, but at the one year mark, we can't abandon this plan.

On being adaptable around your mission

• We went out there with all these goals, but when I wrote up the mission plan, it was really clear about what our minimum acceptable standard was for success, such that it meant the second year could go ahead.
• It's always overambitious with Antarctic summers of you trying to squish far too much in. And everyone goes down there with the big shopping list of things. And I had scientists from a number of different universities, a number of different sub projects within the two major university funded streams, and then some other bits of ad hoc science from wildlife monitoring and other bits as well to kind of assess the human impact of the other science that they're doing.
• I've found that the planning cycles in Antarctica are great because it comes down to the weather and you always have this plan of how your seasonal plan. You'll always go, okay, we've got our one month concept of operations and we've got a two week planning cycle and we'll do a 72 hour planning thing and it always just comes back to almost 48 to 72 hour planning processes, or you can ever deal with because the forecast beyond that is never any real indicator of what the weather's going to do. You get all these bizarre human factors and then priorities change and all this sort of stuff.
• You just end up coming back to this very short, very dynamic planning cycle where everyone has to be ready to go and do almost anything every day when the things change. And there was some great flexibility shown by the team when the whole thing would go out the window for whatever reason, be it where there are operational factors. That degree of flexibility is remarkable.
• I earned my money as the field leader at that tail end when you've got a week or two of weather left and you've got competing factors. If you've got to get everyone back to the main station, people have got flights to get back to the continent to Australia. You've got to pack down the camp, leave it ready for next year, get as much science done. At this point, people have felt they've not had opportunities to do things.
• You kind of have to calm everyone down and in different ways to say, “Just trust me, I know what I'm doing with this stuff. I can see your concerns, I can see the risks, but these are risks worth taking because we came here to achieve as much science as possible. We will run science right up until the last possible moment and on the proviso that those scientists know that if they are here, they are also here as labourers. And then also we're going to drop the standard of living. Like, we've had a full working field kitchen up until this point. We're now going to drop down to it being that there will be a hot water urn, so you'll be eating two minute noodles out of a packet, which is still pretty good.” We had a basic shower system, but now everyone will have a last shower for the last week out here. So we had to drop the standard of living, but we were not going to drop the medical capabilities.

On where leaders get risk management wrong

• Overthinking it. I think in a lot of ways, you'll know it inherently. If you've got the right experience, you should be able to identify the actual risks straight away. But people overthink it and start just filling the gaps or filling it up with additional risks that are either just inherent risks of doing business.
• Keep your eyes open. There’s a classic military thinking process: OODA (Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act). And certainly as a leader, stay back and keep your eyes up to whatever the conditions are because as they're changing, you then need to change the plan.
• Where you earn your money as a leader is to stay back and look up and try to keep your hands off the tools.
• Say “yes” is the best advice I've ever got. When you get an opportunity or something comes up, say “yes” and work out the how later.

On his number one interview question

• What are you going to bring to the party? What's your party trick in a more corporate sense? 
• We did this at one of our selection camps, but it was a training camp before we went down this summer with the scientists. We said that when we're down there, we're out in the field, we will have a chef, but she'll need days off. Or the chef might not be available for whatever reason. And you're going to have to cook your own meals using the contents of a box we gave them. And it's a pretty boring box of stuff. And you're putting a bunch of scientists in a kitchen that's crowded and doesn't have all the utensils, doesn't have all the spices, doesn't have anything you might want, you can't go to the shops, but here's your box of food. I want a three course meal with hors d'oeuvres and entrees and everything. And you've got an hour or two hours, whatever I gave them.
• And that's what I want to see from anyone I'm taking on an Antarctic expedition or anyone I'm going to work with is. You've got the skills and the resume, that's how you got to this interview. Great. Everyone else that got to interviews, ticked that box. What are you going to do in a situation like that? If you've, you've got the bare bones or what can you cook with, nothing? Or what's your musical instrument? What do you, what do you bring to the party outside of your work?

Final message of wisdom and hope for future leaders 

• Say yes to opportunities. Don't be too tied to the plan and assess risk with the goo between your ears and your eyes. That's that's what it all comes down to. 

Stay epic,

Greg