Podcast: Train Operators for Real-World Chaos, Not Perfection

Chemical processing operators need training that mirrors real-world conditions, not idealized scenarios. The final six guidelines from Walter Schneider's research emphasize maintaining motivation through consequences, presenting complex contexts with distractions, intermixing tasks to build switching skills and incorporating time pressure. Training should capture expert strategies that minimize workload—like focusing on key parameters rather than monitoring everything—and teach operators to triage actions during high-stress situations. By including realistic elements such as weather conditions, phone calls and multiple simultaneous problems, training programs help operators learn what to prioritize and when. This naturalistic approach accelerates skill development in managing the complex, fast-moving challenges of chemical plants.

Edited Transcript

Welcome to the Operator Training edition of Chemical Processing's Distilled Podcast. This podcast and its transcript can be found at ChemicalProcessing.com. You can also download this podcast on your favorite player. I'm Traci Purdum, editor-in-chief of CP, and joining me once again is Dave Strobhar, founder and principal human factors engineer for Bevel Engineering. Dave is also the founder of the Center for Operator Performance and operator training columnist for Chemical Processing. Hey, Dave, thanks for joining me again.

Dave: Oh, thank you for having me again, Traci.

Traci: Well, in our last episode, we discussed the first five of 11 guidelines to correct for training fallacies. Today we're going to address the final six. This is based on the paper "Training High Performance Skills, Fallacies and Guidelines," written by Walter Schneider at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. And I guess, again, the best way to do this is just to name off these guidelines for you and let you explain them to us and how we can best use them. Does that sound good?

Dave: Sounds perfect.

Maintain Motivation

Traci: All right, so starting off at No. 6, maintain high motivation throughout the training period.

Dave: So we had talked earlier about keeping the students engaged by frequently asking questions or making sure that they're paying attention, but one of the motivational aspects, particularly in our industry, is that they understand what they're dealing with. And so sometimes training gets so focused on doing everything right and correct that they don't appreciate what happens when things go wrong.

And so sometimes you want to be able to show what happens if you don't do this correctly. Fire safety videos do this a lot where they'll show, this is how you do it, and if you don't do it correctly, this fire is going to get out of control.

I was taking a course in papermaking and there is a video of a bird flying into the papermaking machine and, well, it destroyed the machine and, you know, I'm guessing the bird got destroyed too, but you just couldn't see it. But those are the sort of things that have a visual imagery and keep people going, "Oh yeah, this is important." You know, this isn't just — if you're in a simulator, nobody's going to get hurt in a simulator, which is why you do it. But they need to understand what it is that could happen, and so you want to do that to make sure they stay motivated throughout the training period.

Traci: For sure. And bringing up the bird imagery — do you remember that picture? They show it in the sports reels all the time where the pitcher throws a pitch and it hits a bird flying by. That was the image that just came up in my mind when you said that.

Dave: Yeah. That's about what happened to the bird when it decided to go into a paper machine. But that, you know, that was a multimillion-dollar machine that just blew apart — having a bad pun on there — when that bird hit it. And, you know, very quickly, you know, it sinks in: "Oh wow, this could be really bad if things don't go right."

Illustrate Rather Than Tell

Traci: Yeah. For sure, for sure. No. 7 here is present the information in a context that illustrates more than the to-be-learned task.

Dave: So sometimes in training, we focus on, well, here's what you're going to do. And so, you know, one of the problems — in a lot of training, a common training technique are what-if drills: If this happens, what do you do?

Well, the problem with that is you've already done the troubleshooting portion for the individual. You say, well, this is the problem, and yet that's not how most real-life incidents begin. And so you want to provide what is all this — what are all the things going on when this happens? What else is happening there? A pipeline controller was talking about going into a simulator and said the simulator helps them interpret everything in that context, whereas if you're developing scenarios, you want to put in other information that may be distracting or red herrings and force the student to filter through all the other things that are happening when this happens to determine, what's my course of action?

Problems don't create and present themselves in these nice, clean situations where, here's your problem, because more than likely you can get through that pretty easy. The problem is sorting through all the information you're getting, the signals and the cues and saying, "OK, well, which ones are important?" So if you're doing a scenario, some simple things: have it raining outside. You're on shift, you've been working, it's been pouring down rain all day, when suddenly — and then you present whatever happens. Well, there's going to be a tendency to try to factor the rain into that solution when it may be totally extraneous, but that's how they learn. Because they learn to filter what's important and what isn't.

Traci: And that's a brilliant way to do that. You know, bring up those real-world scenarios. Maybe the phone's ringing constantly or you're being bothered by issues at home or something. Just putting all those components together and making sure that they can, as you said, pull out the stuff they need to pull out and focus on the important aspects.

Dave: Right. Exactly. You could have the operator who has just qualified on that particular job — something very likely in real life — so, you know, can you trust that they know what to do and are doing it? So yeah, you want to put those aspects of reality into the training, and then they can better learn what I need to focus on.

Intermix Training

Traci: The next guideline we have here is intermix component training.

Dave: So, particularly, Dr. Schneider is looking at very complex skills, and in some other areas you might be focusing on certain subtasks that are very critical. So, you know, it might be landing approach, takeoff if you're in aerospace; if you're nuclear power, it may be the point where you're going to be going critical or managing the boiler feedwater system.

But you don't want to spend all your time on one subtask and you're just drilling it back and back. And then they're like, "OK, they've really got this." You want to mix those up so they're not doing all of one thing at one time. And the reason for doing that is twofold. One, it can make it a little more interesting. You know, how many times do I have to simulate an approach to this airport? So it is a way of increasing the interest, but it also gets them used to switching tasks. I was doing this and now I have to do this.

And again, an aspect of real life that comes in. I may be working on something when something else comes up and I need to switch tasks. So intermixing those tasks is a way to build and reinforce that switching that we typically are going to have to do on a routine basis.

Traci: And I'm going to toss this in here just 'cause it popped into my head: training for things that actually happened, like incidents. Do they do that kind of training afterward? So they take all of the elements that happened during the incident and then put it into the training?

Dave: Sometimes they do, and obviously the really serious ones — the Chemical Safety Board will show a video, and because it has already occurred, a lot of the factors that went into it are predetermined. And so they don't look at, "Oh well, what if this had happened and what if that had happened?" So they will do some of what they call after-action reviews to try to train the crews on, this is what happened, which is great. But then you also want to take that and then say, "OK, this isn't a one-time thing." What are the underlying elements of that incident and let's put that back into the training program from the beginning so that we cover those items.

Some locations, I've heard operators complain — they said, you know, simple things, a unit trips, their safety instrumented system actuates and brings it down. If everything went well, there's very little feedback on that. But that's where you can learn from when things went well, sometimes as much as from when things didn't. And so I've heard operators lament that they aren't brought up to speed on, well, what happened over there? Why did it activate? Sure, everything went well, but I want to know that little period up to that so that I can head it off.

Introduce Time Stress

Traci: Good points there. The next guideline we have is train under mild time stress.

Dave: Yes. Well, you know, most of the things we're training for, the clock is ticking and you don't have forever to solve the problem and carry out the tasks. So if you're going to train, you want to train with some time stress to force the individual to learn prioritization, stress management. The Center for Operator Performance — we develop these decision-making exercises, and you give the scenario at this point in time to the student and you say, "OK, so what do you think is occurring? You have 30 seconds." And then you start counting it down: "You have 20 seconds, you have 10 seconds. OK, time's up."

So you put this time stress in, and it was amazing. They weren't used to that, the people that were going through it, because normally it's kind of calm and I go through this. But that's not what they're going to be experiencing in real life. So you want to make sure that at some point — maybe on their first trial, you don't do something like that. But you need to have that time stress element in there. You need to stabilize this tower within 20 minutes, and you have a clock ticking away. So they understand that I don't have all day to do this. And so you can build that time stress into the scenario.

If you want to just build stress into the scenario, what we discovered is that if you have the operations manager observing the training, that ramps the stress up a great deal. But certainly the time stress — you want them to get used to, this is not something you can take all day to figure out. You need to come to a conclusion and act as fast as safely possible.

Traci: And I guess that goes to the fact if you get on a game show and when you're playing at home, it's a much different thing than when you're actually on the game show. It's a lot more stressful. So obviously training for that is beneficial for sure.

Dave: Yes. And I think we've all seen speed chess, where the thing is to try to make your move within a certain period of time. That's used to train chess masters so they can recognize what's occurring on the board. Because a lot of chess is very complex pattern recognition, but you don't have all day to figure out what the pattern is. You put that time stress in there.

Minimize Workload

Traci: The next one is train strategies that minimize operator workload.

Dave: Yes. So, you know, this is the type of thing where you need to go to the experts and you need to start understanding what are they doing and how are they doing it and make sure that the new operators understand that. Because oftentimes, what you'll find is that when they learn this from the experts, they're like, "Oh wow, that sure would have made life easier had I known that."

I've had different operators at different times — the most experienced operator on a unit — one operator on a dewaxing unit said, "If I know what the lean solvent flow is, I can tell you exactly how this unit is running." And he was probably being a little facetious, but he had learned that from that one parameter, he could infer a lot of what was going on. Operator in a cat cracker: "If you give me regenerator bed temperature, I can tell you how this unit is running." Same sort of thing.

So you want to get from these experts, how are they doing this? What are their tips? Sometimes an operator said, "Well, you know, this particular — it's a big unit — don't worry about the back end of the unit, let it go because it's the tail. And you need to get the dog under control, because if you're going to try to control the tail, you're going to be spending all day doing that."

And so you want those tips from the experts to come in and say, "Hey, focus on the reactor regenerator, let the gas plant go. Because the gas plant is never going to be stable until you get the reactor regenerator stable." So those kinds of strategies that the senior operators use — and it may not be in the procedure. The procedure may have a different one that will work, but it may result in more workload. "Gee, they want me to look at these 10 different things," when the expert says, "Oh, I don't look at all those things. I look at this, and from there I can infer X, Y and Z, and that makes it so much easier."

Because I think we've talked on some previous training programs: Our working memory — what we can hold in our conscious at any given point in time — has a finite limit. And so you want to make sure that you've got it boiled down to a handful of parameters or a handful of facts. Because nobody can process every variable that these chemical plants have, and you need to find out which ones matter and why they matter.

Traci: Absolutely. And that kind of brings in working with AI a little bit too. You get the expertise from your senior operators and how they do it, but then maybe kind of pair that with some AI to really round out everything.

Dave: Well, and some operators may not even realize what they're doing. But yeah, hopefully if you use AI to analyze some events, you can see that, "Oh wow, this is what they're really focusing on," so that you can pass that along to the next group of operators.

Time-Sharing Skills

Traci: Our final guideline, No. 11, is to train time-sharing skills for dealing with high-workload environments.

Dave: So this is sort of related to No. 10, but, you know, we know that when there's a major upset, so much is going on and you have all these different items that are occurring. And so in teaching the response — and this sort of ties together a lot of things we're talking about — you want to teach them to determine, what do I need to focus on right now? And what can wait?

And so you're going to look and say, "OK, I need to do this right away and I can hold off on this other thing," having to do with the potential risk. An operator at a propane deasphalting unit — they had had a momentary power failure, and so his first thought was, "Well, I am going to secure the heaters before I go and secure the charge pumps." And what he found out is when he got to the charge pumps, they had filled up with asphalt. And so then they had to be taken apart and repaired, and it was a long time delay. And then one of the senior operators who had worked at the unit said, "Oh yeah, that's the exact same thing that happened to me. I thought I could wait on the charge pumps. Well, I did the heater."

Well, those are the things you want to teach them. Here's what you really need to do first. And these things can wait. It's not that you don't want them done, but you want to make sure that, "Hey, I need to do this because there's a time element involved. I need to make sure I do those first."

Sharing an example with an operator sort of on the other side: We were going through, what did they have to do during these upsets, and then, what was the consequence? Well, what if you didn't do that? What would happen? And we were on a particular tower, and I said, "Well, what would happen if you didn't do that?" And he says, "Well, the tower would explode." And I was incredulous. And I said, "What?" And his response is, "Well, not right away."

So it was down near the end, and it was like, if that chemical sits in there long enough, it'll begin to react. And, as he said, so it can be very bad, but you got time. It's not going to explode in the first five minutes. So do other things that are more important, perhaps less hazardous, but it's understanding that time component and learning to prioritize, to triage your actions and say, "I'm going to deal with these things first, and then I'm going to go to these other items."

And so I understand I'm not trying to do everything all at the exact same time because, of course, that's impossible. But you're accomplishing and you're checking off, "Hey, I've gotten these critical things done. Now I can deal with these other items that I've identified as, we can wait and deal with those later."

Traci: Learning how to triage is very important. Dave, anything you want to wrap this all up? These 11 — last episode's first five and these final six — tie it all together for us.

Dave: Well, I think a lot of what we're seeing that Dr. Schneider put forward has to do with getting the real life into training in terms of learning how to handle multiple tasks, learning to do it under time pressure, learning how to filter through other things that are occurring. There's a whole field of study that has developed in the last 20 years called naturalistic decision-making, and it was that we were finding out that people were being taught how to make decisions the way you would buy a house in terms of, "Well, I'm going to compare the other houses in the neighborhood and price difference and what it is." And it's like, when the lights flicker and all the motors have stopped, you're not doing that.

And so making decisions in the real world have a different set of guidelines. And I think Dr. Schneider's article really tries to bring that home. So you need to factor a lot of these things into your training program, and if you do, it's really going to accelerate the individuals getting these high-performance skills.

Traci: Well, Dave, you help us all the time as well — help us to understand what's important and what our next course of action should be. So I appreciate the time you always put into these podcasts. Audience members, if you want to stay on top of operator training and performance, subscribe to this free podcast via your favorite podcast platform to learn best practices and keen insight. You can also visit us at chemicalprocessing.com for more tools and resources aimed at helping you achieve success. On behalf of Dave, I'm Traci, and this is Chemical Processing's Distilled Podcast Operator Training Edition. Thanks for listening. Thanks again, Dave.

Dave: Thanks, Traci.