The Moment Your SOP Falls Apart

My career didn’t start in a training room. It started in a kitchen.

As a management trainee in Food Production, our only “crisis drill” was the lunch rush. Tickets piling up. Equipment overheating. A chef calling timings like a conductor. I learnt early that you don’t rise to the level of your training; you fall to the level of your preparation.

As a Food Production lecturer, I saw another truth. Students who knew every technique would still freeze the first time a sauce reduced too fast. Knowledge doesn’t create composure. Exposure does.

In a Facilities Management company, the pattern held. Elevators stuck. Electrical failures. VIP movements derailed by a single miscommunication. People didn’t struggle because they lacked SOPs. They struggled because real situations never look like clean flowcharts.

At a high-end beach resort on the southern tip of India, the stakes were higher. A wedding power outage. A guest medical emergency. A VVIP arrival with impossible timelines. These were the moments that revealed who could think under pressure, not just follow instructions.

Later, at a luxury island resort in the Indian Ocean, the lesson became clearer.

 One midnight, the Presidential Villa called. AC failure in two bedrooms of a four-bedroom villa. The guest was calm. The team wasn’t. The duty engineer, excellent in training, froze the moment he entered. Not from fear, but from unfamiliar pressure.

The next morning, we didn’t revise the manual. We recreated the moment. Same villa. Same heat. Same urgency. As he worked through the steps in real conditions, his clarity returned. What helped him wasn’t the SOP. It was immersion.

At sea, the pattern repeated. A young crew member froze during an unexpected alarm. Later he said, “Sir, the real sound felt different.”

That sentence captured everything I’d witnessed across kitchens, classrooms, facilities, resorts, islands, and ships.

People don’t freeze in a crisis because they lack training.

They freeze because the training never matched the moment.

Crisis-readiness isn’t about drama. It’s about design.

Not teaching steps, but teaching how to think when the steps fall apart.

What has consistently worked for me:

• Train in real spaces, not quiet rooms.

• Add unpredictability: noise, heat, time pressure.

• Make practice slightly tougher than reality.

• Debrief without judgement.

• Build confidence first. Competence follows.

When everything goes wrong, people don’t search for SOPs.

They search for the version of themselves who can stay centred.

Our job in L&D is to help them build that version early.

#LearningAndDevelopment #HospitalityTraining #CrisisManagement #LeadershipDevelopment #TrainingDesign #LearningInTheFlowOfWork #ServiceExcellence #kketanwaghmare