The Human Firewall: Darren Fleming on Staying Clear Headed in a Crisis

Every playbook and SOP you have ever written assumes it will be picked up by a calm, fully regulated human. My guest this episode reckons that assumption is exactly where incident response quietly falls apart.Recorded live at AISA's inaugural CyberConnect Canberra 2026 at the Hotel Realm, David Savva-Willett sat down with Darren Fleming, peak performance strategist, author, and the man better known as That Mindfulness Bloke. Darren represented Australia in elite sailing, studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford, has written seven books on communication, leadership and mindset, sat in complete silence for ten days, and spent more than twenty years coaching global organisations including Caterpillar, Cisco, BHP and Rio Tinto on how to perform under pressure.His CyberConnect talk, The Human Firewall, covers the thing no runbook touches: what actually happens to a responder's brain in the first hours of a Sev1.They get into why the nervous system, not the playbook, makes the decision. How adrenaline and cortisol cut off access to long term memory, and why "it made sense at the time" is a physiological answer rather than an excuse. The difference between situational awareness, stretched awareness and tunnel vision, and why "I just didn't see it" keeps turning up in the debrief. Why incident teams start turning on each other under pressure, and why that is the body working exactly as designed rather than a culture problem. What ten days of Vipassana taught Darren that a psychology degree could not. The collapse of the average attention span from roughly two and a half minutes to under a minute in twenty years. How a SANFL club lifted its win rate by changing what three senior players did during the half time break. And the one technique Darren would hand a CISO heading into a tabletop next week.Find out more about Darren's work at thatmindfulnessbloke.comCyber Voices is the official podcast of the Australian Information Security Association. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five star rating, it genuinely helps others find the show. Learn more about AISA or become a member at aisa.org.au