What a Canadian basketball legend can teach an oilfield safety manager, and why the industry is starting to listen.
By all accounts, Steve Nash shouldn’t have made it.
He was undersized, overlooked, and underwhelming as a prospect. A scrawny kid from Victoria, British Columbia. Nash had none of the athletic advantages typically associated with a two-time NBA MVP. But he mastered something most players never touch: the art of deliberate practice. Not just repetition, but focused, feedback-driven, pressure-tested skill-building. That same principle isn’t reserved for elite athletes and concert pianists. It’s now finding a home in industrial safety training.
Thankfully, Allan Moore doesn’t talk like a corporate consultant. and he speaks about this intentional concept in passionate detsil. He talks like someone who’s been hurt. A former roughneck who became a safety manager in Taiwan by sheer circumstance. He spoke Mandarin, and no one else wanted the job. Moore quickly learned that memorizing rules wasn’t saving lives.
“You can explain to someone how to steer a car,” he says. “But until they’re behind the wheel, sliding on ice, they don’t know how to drive.”
That’s not metaphor. It’s a systems failure. Moore’s seen workers who aced safety modules panic in real-life emergencies. He’s also watched unremarkable crew members step up and make life-saving decisions. Because they had practiced, deliberately.
In most workplaces, safety training is a hybrid. Two-pronged: liability management and content delivery. It’s static. Passive. And in many cases, it ends with a printed certificate. Moore believes that’s a dangerous illusion of preparedness.
“There’s no feedback loop,” he says. “We teach compliance. But we don’t teach adaptability. Or judgment. Or what to do when the radio’s out and someone’s bleeding.”
He’s not alone. Across sectors, there’s a growing recognition that knowledge without repetition is fragile. Memory fades. Stress disrupts recall. And rote learning doesn’t translate when decisions have to be made in seconds.
What Deliberate Practice Actually Means
Deliberate practice is not “more practice.” It’s not about hammering the same checklist. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson coined the term. It’s in reference to a very specific kind of learning. Goal-oriented, feedback-rich, and focused on pushing outside the learner’s comfort zone.
Steve Nash used it to rewire his shooting form under fatigue. He practiced free throws with distractions. He trained ambidextrously so that nothing on the court would surprise him.
Moore saw something similar in the field. Workers who engaged in simulation-style drills performed better under stress. Pressure scenarios, task rehearsals, and skill verification under supervision gave workers the edge. And crucially, they got injured less often.
Some Canadian companies are moving toward this model. Albertan training provider MI Safety uses hybrid systems. They combine online modules with hands-on skill verification. The courses include employer-signed checklists, bringing feedback and repetition into the process. Others are experimenting with VR. Jennifer Lastra is a Navy veteran turned safety-tech entrepreneur. She runs a company that uses immersive scenarios to train workers. They’re trained not just on what to do, but how it feels to do it under pressure. It’s not theoretical. Lastra’s system targets psychological safety. Split-second decision-making. The intersection of fear, confidence, and training.“We’re not checking boxes,” she says. “We’re changing behavior.”
From the Court to the Jobsite
Nash once said, “I’m not a guy who can jump over the rim. I’m a guy who has to think the game.” That mindset is what turned a kid from Vancouver Island into one of the best point guards of his generation. Relentless rehearsal becomes a form of intentional refinement. The safety industry is still haunted by “tick-the-box” culture. Fingers crossed it’s on the brink of a similar revelation.
Not every worker needs to become an MVP. But if more of them trained like Nash, deliberately, rigorously, and with real feedback, they might just get home in one piece.
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