We Are Training for Certainty. Operations Fails in Deviation.

Over the past year, I’ve had more than 100 conversations with operations leaders across power, chemicals, food & beverage, and other process industries.

Different companies.
Different geographies.
Different levels of maturity.

But the same pattern keeps showing up.

Most incidents are not caused by a lack of procedures.
They happen because teams have limited opportunity to practice abnormal or infrequent scenarios before they face them in the real plant.

The industry baseline is stronger than we give it credit for

Nearly every organization I spoke with has:

• Established operating procedures

• Emergency response plans that are regularly drilled

• Pre-startup and safety reviews

• Toolbox talks and refreshers

• Post-incident reviews and lessons learned

• Experienced operators who care deeply about doing the right thing

This is not an industry asleep at the wheel.

Yet incidents still cluster around:

• Startups

• Shutdowns

• Transitions

• Recoveries

• Situations where assumptions quietly fail

The gap is not knowledge. It is practice.

What I heard repeatedly was some version of this:

“They know what to do. They just haven’t had many chances to do it.”

Readiness today is still largely built through:

• Time on the job

• Being present during rare events

• Informal storytelling

• Mentorship and tribal knowledge

That works — until it doesn’t.

Because experience is fragile:

• Staffing is leaner

• Trips and upsets are less frequent

• Senior operators retire

• Organizations move people faster

• Large enterprises change slowly

Confidence decays when exposure drops.

How teams are compensating today

Operations leaders are not waiting for perfect solutions. They are adapting.

Across conversations, I saw teams using:

• Tabletop drills for abnormal situations

• No-notice scenario discussions

• Walkdowns tied to procedures

• Crew-wide qualification drills

• Storytelling from past projects and incidents

• Early ops involvement during projects

• Contractors to bridge experience gaps

• Evergreen training and refreshers

These approaches matter.
They improve awareness.
They keep knowledge alive.

But they also share limits.

Where current practices hit a ceiling

Discussion-based training relies heavily on imagination.

It struggles to test:

• Timing

• Cognitive load

• Control system interactions

• Cascading failures

• What happens when safeguards don’t work

Several leaders pointed this out directly:

• Emergency response is drilled well

• But real incidents don’t follow the script

• Teams are prepared for Plan A

• They are far less practiced in Plan B, C, or D

One leader put it plainly:

“We keep training certainty. Reality shows up as deviation.”

The simulator paradox

Many facilities already have simulators or OTS platforms.

Yet they are often:

• Vendor-managed

• Engineering-heavy

• Expensive to expand

• Limited to a narrow set of scenarios

• Treated as a project, not a practice

So simulation exists, but is underused.

The barrier is rarely belief.
It is cost, ownership, and scalability.

This is not a tooling problem

What these conversations made clear is that readiness is a system problem.

It sits at the intersection of:

• Training

• Operations

• Engineering

• Organizational structure

• Economics

• Change velocity

The industry understands what good readiness looks like.
What it struggles with is making readiness:

• Repeatable

• Realistic

• Scalable

• Sustainable under real constraints

A reframing worth considering

Instead of asking:

“Do we have procedures and training?”

The better question may be:

“Where do our people get to practice deviation safely?”

Because incidents don’t happen when people forget the rules.
They happen when the situation no longer matches the rules as written.

Why we started ProseraPod

These conversations are the reason ProseraPod exists.

Not to sell tools.
Not to promote silver bullets.

But to surface:

• What operators and leaders are actually experiencing

• Where current systems work

• Where they quietly struggle

• And what patterns cut across industries

If any of this resonates, you’re not alone.

And if you’ve found approaches that work, the industry needs to hear them.