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 Chemical Processing, and joining me is Dave Strohbar, founder and principal human factors engineer for Beville Engineering. Dave is also the founder of the Center for Operator Performance.
What Makes an Expert?
Traci: Today we are going to be talking about what makes an expert, which seems pretty subjective. Lots of folks fancy themselves experts, but you have a 13-point checklist that can definitively answer the question, are you an expert? Can you tell me a little bit about the list before we get into the specifics?
Dave: Sure. So this list was generated by Dr. Gary Klein, and he has studied expertise across a variety of domains and determined that these 13 characteristics are what you will typically see in an expert. Not that they'll have them all, but that all experts have some or most of these characteristics. And I think as we go through this, what you'll see is a lot of people think an expert is somebody that just knows more, who has more facts. And that's not true, in that what makes an expert isn't just that they know more, and it isn't that the more facts you know, the greater your expertise. There's much more to it than that.
So in this day and age of artificial intelligence where we're just trying to provide more facts at the fingertips of an individual and say, "Ah, well, they're an expert now because they have all these facts," that's not going to make them an expert. And if you want to make expert operators, then you need to learn that these are the characteristics and train them to those characteristics. It's your training program helping them develop these characteristics because, as Dr. Klein has said, and it's not just that an expert knows more. They see things differently, and that's where these characteristics come in.
1. Form Expectancies
Dave: Yes, this is a critical one, and it has to do with mental models. In other words, a true expert can tell you what they think is going to be happening next. So if you are in the middle of a difficult situation, the expert will be able to say, "Okay, well, this is what I think is going to be happening." And that's important for two reasons: one, obviously to form the correct action, but two, to also determine that the action isn't working and say, "Wow, this obviously is not what I thought was occurring because it's not meeting my expectations, and I need to think and find out and do something differently."
2. Monitor Cues
Dave: This is related to handling the flood of information that's going to be coming in, and the true expert knows which cues in the environment that they should be looking for, that's going to tip them off as to what is going on. So in the middle of this chaos that is some sort of off-normal, abnormal situation, lots of things are changing. But the true expert knows which cues they should be looking at that's going to tell them that, yeah, this really is a change in terms of the underlying causes and actions versus, yeah, these parameters are all changing, but they don't really matter in this situation.
3. Anticipate Team Member Needs and Limitations
Dave: This is an area where, in my years in plants, when we're going through upset response, I'll ask a head operator or a chief operator, I say, "During the upset, do you stay in the control room with the console operator, or do you go outside and help the field operators?" And they'll respond with some variation, "Well, it depends who's on the console." So the true expert understands where the strength of their team is and where they might be weak, and then gets either themselves or somebody else or gets the right resources, bulk that area up.
Again, it's not just about knowing facts, but it's knowing about, "Well, what do I have available at my disposal to work at?" If it's 4 a.m. versus 4 p.m., you're going to have all sorts of different resources, and so the exact same event at those two times may generate very different responses simply because the expert knows, "Hey, it's 4 a.m. I don't have maintenance out here. I don't have an analyzer tech. I don't have a lot of backup, and so we're going to take a course of action that would be different if this were 4 p.m. and I have these other resources at my disposal."
4. Know Where Equipment and Human Resources Can Mislead You
Dave: Yes. So a true expert understands that the information coming in can be incorrect for a variety of reasons, and they're quick to assess that in what's going on.
When we've gone through alarm rationalizations and deal with newer operators versus your more experienced operators, one of the issues that separates them right off the bat is a control valve on the console screen will show an output, and the valve's at 30% or 50 or 75 or whatever. The expert knows that that's a demand function. That's what the controller is asking for. The controller is asking for it to be at 30%. But they know it may be at 30%, it may not be at 30%. And so they know to say, "Hey, wait a minute. You need to go out and tell me exactly where that valve is, because maybe it's sticking and what I'm seeing here is not what's really happening."
And so the expert knows those sort of things and can factor them in where, if their expectancies are being violated, things aren't going the way they want, "Well, wait a minute. Maybe what I think is happening isn't what's really happening," and that's where we see it all the time in the senior operators, and knowing that, "Hey, this is just a demand indication. It's not actual valve position." It is one of those things that stands out very quickly when you're talking about process plant operators.
5. See Information to Spot Opportunities.
Dave: Yes. So the expert will start digging into certain areas and trying to find out, "Is this tank empty?" things that vary on a day-to-day basis because it might create an opportunity for them that they might not otherwise have. And so they will start asking for more information on certain areas because it's going to give them, potentially, a better course of action than what is the standard response. And this is always a problem with procedures where you've dictated, "Here's the courses of action that we want to take," and it's based on certain assumptions.
The expert, because they want to take the best course of action, they're going to seek some information and find out, "Well, is this tank empty and I can use it for a rundown tank, even though that's not what it's meant to do?" And by trying to seek those out, it will give them more flexibility in responding to the abnormal situation.
6. Adapt the Way They Perform
Dave: So in the abnormal situation, a lot of things are happening. The expert will adapt to that situation and say, "Wait a minute, we need to do something different here. I know the way we normally do it, but we're going to have to do it differently."
I was at a plant where the turbine driven high-pressure boiler feed water pump was out for maintenance. As we were driving in in the morning in a thunderstorm down in Southern Texas, unfortunately, he may have jinxed himself. The area manager said, "Well, I sure hope we don't lose the electric because we don't have that turbine as a backup." Well, sure enough, there's a lightning bolt and the lights flicker, and now everybody lost boiler feed water, and everybody's crashing down. Well, that's not normal. You're supposed to have that backup pump available.
Well, the novice is going to be really struggling with that, whereas the expert's just going to take it into the equation and adapt and say, "Okay, well, we're going to do things differently because I don't have boiler feed water now. And pretty soon, I'm not going to have steam. So let's make that particular change," whereas the novice, they tend to have one way to do things and they're going to do that, right or wrong, because it's the only thing they know to do. So the experts, they will change and adapt their actions to meet the needs of the situation.
7. Describe How Events Came About and Will Play Out
Dave: This is sort of related to the first one on expectancies, but they have a mental model of what's occurring, and so when something happens, they aren't usually just, "Oh, I don't know where that came from." The true expert can describe, "Okay, here's what I think led up to this, and here's where I think it's going to go," as opposed to, again, the novice will just be kind of caught off guard and kind of like, "Whoa, where did that come from?" or "Why is it we suddenly have no boiler feed water and no steam?"
It's like, well, the expert was already thinking ahead and saying, "Hey, the turbine's in the shop, so we lose the electric, we're toast. And here's what we're going to have to do if that happens." So the true expert can both look backwards and forwards around the event and put it into context of what they think is occurring.
8. Utilize Time Horizons
Dave: This was an interesting one. So this particular study, Dr. Klein was looking at different process plant operators. He was looking at some operators from refineries and some from pipelines. And utilize time horizons is how far out are you going to look for what might affect you or what might impact you?
It was interesting. The pipeline operators, who obviously are very schedule-driven, they have the pipeline schedule and when they're supposed to bring this in, bring that in, they had a much longer time horizon. In other words, they would look ahead to, "What's occurring in the next shift and the next day, and what do I need to be doing now to prepare for that?" And the refinery operators, who are less schedule-driven, they really didn't have that utilizing time horizons. But that's where you see it in the true expert, is they are looking ahead as to what needed to be done.
There was an old joke about some old baseball players, and Casey Stengel was noted as a really great manager, and Yogi Berra was noted as a bad manager. And they said the difference between them was three innings, in that the sixth inning, Casey Stengel was figuring out what he was going to have to do for the ninth inning, and Yogi Berra, in the ninth inning, was realizing what he should have done in the sixth. So having that time horizon of, "Hey, I need to prepare because I'm looking out, and this is going to be an issue if I don't do something now."
9. Use Recall Processes to Overcome Memory Limitations.
Dave: So with this abnormal event, and you've got all these sort of things coming on, the expert, you will see, will have sort of pre-packaged events stored in their brain. We have two types of memory, Traci. We've got what's called semantic memory, which is facts and numbers, and then we have what's called episodic memory, which, kind of by its name, it's things that have happened to you. The experts rely heavily on this episodic memory because there's too much information coming in to use that semantic memory, but I use these recall of these past events to cluster a lot of information, and then I can use that and apply that to the situation at hand, so that I'm not trying to deal with hundreds of different variables. For this particular event, which I've experienced before, this is important. This is what I need to know and this is what I need to do.
10. Construct Mental Simulations
Dave: The true expert, before typically taking an action, will run it through in their head to make sure, is this going to work? So rather than just taking an action, they're going to do a sort of a mental simulation. It's like, "All right, if I shut this down and I block this in, then that's going to cause this to happen here and this to happen there. Okay, yeah. That's what I want. We're going to be in good shape." And that's where, again, in our use of procedures, blindly using procedures, sometimes things aren't going to be exactly as you would expect. You're not going to have that turbine pump like you normally would. And so as you're taking these actions, the expert will go through their head and run a little mental simulation, say, "What's that going to do to make this happen?"
There's a situation in the airline industry where it was a weird confluence of different factors, but on this particular aircraft, if they lost one engine, the procedures that they had ultimately had them turning off the other engine, which is obviously exactly the thing you don't want to do. So a good expert will go through and go, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. I know what this is telling me to do, but now I'm just going to end up with a plane with no engines." And so these mental simulations are critical to cross-check the actions that they're going to take and say, "Yeah, that's going to work out for me," or "No, that's just going to put me in a bigger bind because something's changed or something isn't the way it normally is."
11. Decenter
Dave: So this is a difficult one for a lot of people, but the expert can essentially step outside of their team in the event that's happening so that they can look at the response and say, "Okay, as an outsider, now that I'm looking at it, oh, wow, we're doing the wrong thing," or, "Okay, everything's going pretty well." And so this is sort of the opposite of tunnel vision that we'll talk about, where people get so wrapped up in the event that they fail to realize what is occurring.
So the true expert can pull themselves out of that and kind of step back and say, "Hey, wait a minute, now. Are we missing anything here?" or "Are we so wrapped up on problem A that we've totally ignored this, what used to be a minor problem is now a major problem growing in a different section of the plant?" So that ability to de-center is very important to make sure that, yes, the team is functioning and from an outsider's perspective. So essentially, this insider has to become an outsider and say, "Yeah, it's doing what we would want it to do."
12. Engage in Deliberate Practice.
Dave: This is that you may not be practicing it in terms of actually making the moves, but practicing it in terms of these mental simulations when nothing's going on. And so the expert will go through and think through these different events and, "Okay, what would I do or how would I do that?" or, "Oh, hey, wait a minute. I've got a new guy on my crew today. How would I handle this particular upset or this particular event in this situation?" or "We haven't backfilled that. Usually, I have an extra operator and now I don't."
So the expert, when they have spare time and things are down, they will go through and sort of mentally practice. "What am I going to do when this happens?" Whereas, again, and this is sort of why, the novice is just going along and just gets slammed by the event and tries to react to it, the expert has already practiced it in their head so that when it happens, they've got a leg up and already know what they want to do and what they don't want to do.
13. More Recognitional Decisions Than Option Comparisons
Dave: This is something that came out and very applicable with the AI revolution. Back in the '80s, there were some expert systems that were being developed for process plant operators. And what it would do is, for a given upset, it would generate different options that could be taken. You could do A or B or C. And when Dr. Klein was studying these true experts, he found that less than a quarter of the experts ever considered options in what they were doing. They simply recognized the situation from things they had seen in the past and based their decision on that.
In other words, "Yeah, I saw this before, and I did this, and it worked great. We're going to do that again," or "I saw this before, and I did this, and it really wasn't so good. So we're going to do something different." But they don't take a lot of time generating options, you know, "It could be this, could be that," and then doing, "Well, what's the pros and cons of each option?" And it's a different kind of thinking, so making these recognitional decisions, and that's what's called analogical reasoning, reasoning by analogy. I find something comparable, and that's where I'm basing it, as opposed to an inductive reasoning type of situation where I'm going to look at these options and pros and cons.
But the dilemma is AI can generate a lot of options for you. In other words, for any given event, it can generate a list of, "Here's all the possible things that could have caused this event, and here's all the things you could do." But the true expert, that's not how they think. And so providing them that information, what we found in the '80s was that it just confused the expert because they weren't looking at options. So when you have this "expert system" providing them options, now, all of a sudden, they hesitated. "Why am I getting this? I wouldn't have done that."
So the true experts tend to use this analogical reasoning, and that's what they're looking for, is a sort of a characteristic pattern in the event, and that's what they're judging their response on. But it's not a, "I'm going to select the best option." It's simply that, "Hey, I've done this before and I know what works, and so I'm going to do that again," and then using those other characteristics. They're doing the expectancies, "Is it behaving as expected?" doing a mental simulation, "Is that going to work in this case?" All of those then come into play to say, "Yes, I've chosen the correct course of action, and this is the direction we want to take the plant."
Can Younger People Be Experts?
Traci: Definitely an interesting list of characteristics. And it kind of feels like, obviously, experience will lend itself to produce more experts. Can there be younger folks that are experts?
Dave: Oh, absolutely, because as I said, it's not just knowing more, it's seeing things differently. And so you can speed up the time it takes to become an expert, making it at a younger age.
A lot of it is taking these characteristics and building them into a training program. Rather than just have them absorb this over time as part of your training program to be, say, a console operator or a head operator, you take them through these sort of things that help them develop these characteristics. One is decision-making exercises. You take them through different scenarios that they... So rather than having to experience it in the plant, which, with improved reliability, they happen less and less, there's fewer and fewer opportunities to do this, but you can take them through these scenarios and help them develop these. "What do you think is going to be happening?" and get them into that.
Form expectancies. "What are you going to be looking for? What cues are you going to be monitoring? How would this vary if you were on a different crew from your normal crew?" So you can create the training programs to build these characteristics up in operators at a far younger age or less experience on the job because, as I said, it's not about knowing the facts. So it isn't just, "Well, I need to shove so many facts into their head." It's helping them to see things differently.
So if you can help the newer operators take on that way of seeing things differently, they will become experts far faster than we've had to have in the past where it's just simply by exposure and osmosis, that maybe they'll get these characteristics, but maybe they won't. So this should be the foundation of part of a training program to, let's make these people expert operators.
Traci: Obviously, this is applicable to life as well, so not just operators, and what a great episode we had here today. And I love how you paint a picture for us and help us to think about these things, so thank you for your time today.
Folks, if you want to stay on top of operator training and performance, subscribe to this free podcast via your favorite podcast platform, and 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.
