The Pitt and the "Perfect Swarm" of Teamwork
Personal Perspective: Deconstructing emergent behavior.
Posted June 2, 2026 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Like more than fifteen million others, I’ve consistently tuned in to episodes of the televised medical thriller, The Pitt , where across little and large events, the drama literally turns on trauma .
The hyper-realistic series occurs in a busy, sometimes frantic, emergency department at a large hospital in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. But medical teams like this swing into action in any big American city.
Patients most urgently in need arrive in ambulances with life threatening, code-blue level emergencies—a “floating face” fracture, which I won’t explain, or a “hand-degloving” case that explains itself.
At the other end of the scale some others stumble in needing treatment for conditions that result from poor judgment, injuries that the medicos regard as “minor” and borderline-comic. For example, an instance of imprudent sunbathing on a holiday weekend is a condition that might be termed “code pink.” Or a cannabis overdose that ended with a celebrants’ tongue that needed stitching. (If you’ve seen that vivid bit, I’m sorry for loading you up with it again.)
Patients such as these will be routinely patched up, sometimes literally glued back together, and sent home with a prescription along with a wry admonition.
Unforgettable, That’s What They Are
Regular viewers won’t easily forget other complex, urgent, and critical injuries that compel the intervention of a team of experts who deploy special skills.
A dislocation required leverage that took several tugging hands to snap it back into place. A trachea severed by a bullet necessitated fishing out before a victim’s breathing could be restored. When a speaker tower collapsed at a music festival and broke the ribs of an audience member and bruised his lungs, air leaked dangerously within, impairing his respiration and squeezing his heart. The emergency team punctured his chest wall to relieve the pressure. Realistic special-effects are not always visual. Hisssssss….
Expecting the Unexpected
High drama proves to be routine in this setting, especially when emergency disrupts routine for a varied team who are prepared to expect the unexpected.
Teamwork follows a dizzying rhythm and holds to a sequence. First-responders who have kept patients alive during transportation hand them over to triage nurses. Triage nurses gauge the crisis and gather information for the charge nurse. The charge nurse summons an attending physician who manages the team which may anaesthetize or resuscitate a patient, administer medicines, staunch bleeding, insert a tube to open an airway, or restart a heart. Radiologists, neurologists, orthopedists, cardiologists, and surgeons join to play their lifesaving roles.
Life and death stakes could not pile higher. Surprises mount. But order mostly prevails on screen. And there you have the key to understanding why tens of millions of eyeballs follow each episode.
Teamwork as Perfect Swarm
During the swirling developments, life must go on. Episodes of The Pitt realistically move along with workaday tasks and personal circumstances. Paperwork and record-keeping cannot be abandoned. There are roommates to deal with. A helicopter parent hovers over professional development and career possibility. Somebody’s organizing a workplace betting pool.
But emergency pulls the actors away, urgently and sometimes extraordinarily, as all must focus on the instant cases, the current upheaval. The most catastrophic events, acute in their challenges, while not precisely unforeseen, require collaboration of a higher magnitude.
Here The Pitt excels with thrill. When a mass casualty event—an “active shooter” outrage— inundates the ward with critical injuries, the emergency department must draw from all the resources that the hospital holds, sometimes assigning staff to unfamiliar roles. Or a cyberattack and ransom caper obliged employees to resort to analog procedures, scurrying to keep track on paper and carrying messages by hand, the old-fashioned way. Or, creatively, physicians used sharpies to record patients’ conditions and medical needs directly on patients’ skin.
When a waterslide attraction at a local amusement park collapsed, the unit admitted a flood of horrific incoming crush injuries and amputations. The catastrophe required specialists and students to work outside their specialties to save lives. Some needed to step up. Others needed to step down as hierarchy gave way to expertise and experience. The charge nurse shouts down the recalcitrant who outrank her and bucks up the timorous below.
Management theory and workplace psychology calls this kind of extraordinary response, the temporary, urgent collaboration, a swarm .
Key Aspects of a Swarm
Theorists resort to this biological metaphor to describe the new entity that overtakes customary practices, stretches responsibilities, overcomes turf maintenance, and subverts individual prerogatives and hierarchies.
Swarms form quickly. They may dissipate just as fast. But meantime, before the disaster abates, there is not a moment to lose, and so they cohere in exhilarating purpose. People are not bumblebees, but they can temporarily and, more or less, move as one.
Swarming and Teamwork
The metaphor of the swarm proves useful not just in describing disaster management scenarios but in a variety of widely divergent situations in teamwork and play.
Think of the crew that pulls together to make a feature film: writers, producers, actors, voice coaches, choreographers, gaffers and grips, costumers, set designers and special effects wizards, finishing with marketers and distributors. They have dropped everything else. After they’ve released Gone with the Wind or Cocaine Bear , though, they’re on to other projects.
A similar diversity of nimble talent recruited and marshalled to a purpose could be listed for museum exhibit development teams, covert frontline infiltration units, neighborhood blizzard response volunteers, and Mars exploration missions.
Play Emerges and Swarms
Play, though fundamental (and probably because it is so basic), tends to slip beneath our notice. The connection of play to spontaneous, emergent, organized behavior, shouldn’t escape us here.
Watch a rugby scrum, for example, and you will see a swarm in action. Partygoers, for the occasion, organize to swarm over a game of charades. Listen carefully to a group of seven-year-olds swarming over a scene inspired by Pokémon or Transformers, and you will enjoy complex, rolling, improvised drama informed by deep understanding of characters’ motivations played out with willing, struggling, mythopoeic rough-and-tumble. Players improvise the crisis that propels play.
These assemblies, though playful, are like other more consequential swarms: temporary, ad hoc, decentralized, cooperative, purposeful, unifying, challenging, agile, and thus keenly prepared for the unexpected.
Dan Dworkis, MD, PhD, “The Psychology of Swarm Teams: The Hidden Challenge of Temporary Collaboration,” Psychology Today (May 29, 2026); Yeshe Colliver, et. al. “Free Play Predicts Self-Regulation Years Later,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly (2022); Thomas Henricks, “Orderly and Disorderly Play: A Comparison,” American Journal of Play (2009).
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Scott G. Eberle, Ph.D. , is the vice president for play studies at The Strong, editor of its American Journal of Play , and lead contributor to its re:Play Blog .
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.