I'm writing a book, Process Safety for Frontline Leaders. I own HSE Engineering.

Entry one. "Notes from the Patio," April 28 2026.

Forty years in this industry teaches you a lot of things. One of them is that good work and a calendar full of meetings do not always coexist. There is a particular kind of attention that long-form thinking requires, and it does not survive being interrupted twelve times a day. I knew that for most of my career. I just did not have the option to do much about it. That changed this spring.

I am writing a book and building a training program for the unit supervisors, area superintendents, shift managers, maintenance supervisors, instrument and controls supervisors, and every other front-line leader with a crew that touches the equipment.

The leaders who make the call at 3 a.m. about whether to start up or wait for daylight.

Most process safety training programs, documentation, and literature are not written for them. They are written by professionals, for professionals, in the language of professionals. There is a place for that, and I have written some of it myself.

But it leaves a gap, and the gap is exactly where the work happens.

People in this industry have lived through serious process safety events and wished the leaders running the units had better information in front of them. I have been one of those people. What I am building now is the answer to that gap: a book, a training program, and the courseware to deliver it.

What no one tells you

Several friends who had already retired told me the transition would be bigger than I expected. I believed them, more or less, but I did not really understand it until it started happening to me.

The corporate days are full in a way that is hard to see while you are inside them. You stop noticing the noise because the noise is the water you swim in. Time off becomes precious because there is so little of it. Then one morning the noise is gone, and time off is just time, and what comes back is someone you recognize.

It is hard to describe without sounding dramatic about it. It is spiritual, in the plain sense of the word.

A modest proposal

If I were running a company today, I would protect thinking time the way we protect safety critical tasks. Half a day a week, minimum. No meetings, no calls, no Outlook. Just uninterrupted hours for the kind of work that requires more than ten minutes of focus to do well. That is not how most companies operate, and I think it is costing us more than we realize.

The noise is relentless. Email, Teams, town halls, text messages, back-to-back meetings, PowerPoint decks nobody reads. You adapt to it because you have to. After a while you stop noticing it. But it is doing something to your ability to think, and I suspect it is doing something to our industry's ability to lead.

I did not fully understand that until the noise stopped.

When I walked away from corporate life and the calendar went blank, something started happening. Slowly, and then all at once. The fog lifted. The constant low-grade urgency dissolved. What came back was not rest exactly. It was clarity. A quiet mind. The feeling of being fully inside my own thinking for the first time in decades.

Other people warned me the transition would be bigger than I expected. Some told me they struggled, that their identity was so tied to the job that losing it felt like losing themselves. I understand that. But that has not been my experience. What I found on the other side of the noise was someone I recognized.

For now, back to the patio and the book.

— Danny