Why Mining Construction Managers Need Effective Work Health and Safety Education

Abstract

Societal expectations for serious breaches of health and safety legislation that lead to loss of life have changed. The Australian harmonized work health and safety legislation has introduced industrial manslaughter to many jurisdictions across Australia, placing senior leaders at risk of prosecution. This paper examines whether mining construction managers (those involved in the building or maintenance of infrastructure at a mine site) have been adequately prepared, both ethically and practically, to understand how complex socio-technical systems could fail and the role human cognitive architecture plays in such systems. A case study is presented, which adequately highlights tragic outcomes from management inaction. The aim of this perspective article was to critically examine whether there is the need for greater health and safety education for construction managers within Western Australia’s mining construction sector. The analysis argues for the importance of embedding fundamental health and safety education in tertiary curricula and statutory training programs to promote and strengthen a positive safety culture and reduce high-severity incidents. The conclusion of the review is that there is a strong case for giving future mining construction leaders a better introduction to the fundamentals of workplace health and safety during tertiary education. By including work health and safety in their curricula, educational institutions can better prepare students for leadership roles in the industry.

1. Introduction

In Australia, the construction industry remains one of the most statistically dangerous industries [1]. In 2024, construction accounted for 37 fatalities, the fourth highest fatality rate (2.8 per 100,000 workers) of all industries in Australia, while the fatality rate for the mining industry was 3.4 and was the third highest fatality rate [1]. The construction industry had 17,600 serious injury claims (a frequency rate of 9.3 per million hours worked) and the mining industry had 3300 serious injury claims (a frequency rate of 6.7) in 2024 [1].

Significant incidents and fatal events continue to impact the mining construction industry. While deaths on mine sites have yet to be eliminated, causes in Western Australia in the past five years include being struck by other vehicles or mobile plant, struck by falling rocks, a haul truck colliding with a light vehicle, mobile plant falling into an excavation (stope), engulfment in a ground collapse, and falling from height [2]. These tragic events were preventable.

Mining construction is a complex socio-technical system [3], which is defined as “the synergistic combination of humans, machines, environments, work activities and organizational structures and processes that comprise a given enterprise” [4] (p. 550). Constructs such as heavy machinery, mobile plant and digital monitoring are not independent from one another and rely on the inputs of humans [5]. Workplace safety, for example, relies on effective collaboration among personnel, established procedures, training, supervision, regulatory frameworks, and equipment, rather than being solely dependent on technology. The work performed in mining construction is challenging and varied, and modern workplaces would be wise to strive to what Provan et al. [6] term as “guided adaptability” towards safety management.

In complex systems, incidents seldom arise from a single identifiable failure or rule violation. Instead, they often emerge from interactions among multiple subsystems that individually appear to be functioning correctly. This view is consistent with established theories in safety science, such as Perrow’s Normal Accident Theory, Rasmussen’s concept of “drift into failure,” and Leveson’s systems-theoretic approach to safety [7,8,9]. In such systems, minor deviations in different parts of an operation may interact in unforeseen ways, gradually eroding safety margins until an incident occurs. In mining environments, for example, pressures to maintain production targets may combine with equipment constraints, communication delays, or incomplete situational awareness, creating conditions in which locally rational decisions collectively lead to unsafe states [10].

A key challenge associated with complex systems is that their behavior can exceed the cognitive capacity of individuals to fully understand or anticipate. Operators, engineers, and managers must often make decisions based on partial information and simplified mental models of the system. As operational complexity increases, it becomes progressively more difficult to foresee all potential interactions between system components. Under these conditions, traditional approaches that rely primarily on rules, procedures, and compliance may become less effective. Indeed, the proliferation of rules can sometimes increase cognitive load and reduce flexibility in responding to unexpected situations [11,12].

Consequently, modern safety thinking increasingly emphasizes resilience rather than strict procedural control. Guided adaptability follows the Safety-II philosophy developed by Hollnagel [11], which recognizes modern workplace safety as a somewhat complex arrangement. Rather than focusing on preventing failure (or avoiding things that go wrong, as in the Safety-I approach), Safety-II seeks to understand and support everyday successful work (refer Table 1). Hollnagel outlines some key principles for things to go right:

Table 1. Comparison of Safety-I and Safety-II.

	Safety-I	Safety-II
View	Safety is achieved when things do not go wrong	There is a need to understand everyday successful work
Principle	Reactive	Proactive
Goal	Preventing errors and incidents	Enhance system capacity to adapt and succeed
Focus	What went wrong Analysis of unfavorable outcomes	What goes right Monitor and adapt to events
Objective of investigations	Identify the causal factors and root cause of failure	Understand how something goes right
Human factor	Seen as a liability	Seen as a source of flexibility and resilience

Note. Adapted from Safety-I and Safety-II. The past and future of safety management [11].

• An acceptable level of safety is achieved when people adapt, adjust and navigate work variability.
• Understand that workplace incidents do not occur from ambivalent task variations but from the same variabilities, which usually lead to success.
• The goal is to enhance system capacity to adapt and succeed.
• Incident investigations examine how work usually succeeds, not just what went wrong.
• Safety succeeds through the ability to respond to unexpected situations, monitor changing conditions and emerging risks, learn from failures and successes, and anticipate threats and opportunities.

Recent research has found that mining construction personnel are progressing into senior roles quicker than expected, mostly driven by market conditions and a talent shortage across the industry [13]. Participants of the study provided feedback that they held a general lack of understanding of their obligations from a health and safety perspective. Entering the workforce with little or no health and safety knowledge places graduates and new-to-industry professionals such as engineers at a distinct disadvantage. Construction at a mine site is undertaken at a frenetic pace. Employer expectations to achieve deadlines and budget, coupled with client demands, leaves little time for mentoring or basic safety education during construction projects other than mandatory site inductions [13]. Given the transient nature of the workforce, including white-collar professions, promotion—and the additional responsibilities and accountabilities that come with it—may be presented sooner than expected.

The aim of this paper was to critically assess whether there is a greater need for health and safety education for construction managers with Western Australia’s mining construction sector. The article is presented as a perspective and therefore reflects an interpretive analysis using selective literature. The article is meant to inform discussion and not establish causality or generalizable findings so does not include all aspects of safety and health education required. Future research, as outlined in the Conclusions and Recommendations section, should test the propositions outlined through empirical studies.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a summary of the potential cognitive biases mining construction managers may experience and should be aware of as part of decision-making. An overview on how leadership can influence safety culture is discussed in Section 3. A case study exploring how management inaction can lead to disaster is discussed in Section 4. Section 5 continues exploring the dangers of management inertia and provides an overview of why managers need to maintain a sense of unease about safety within their organization. In Section 6, proposals and suggestions are discussed on potential inclusions within tertiary and vocational education to provide future senior decision-makers with a grounding in workplace health and safety. Conclusions and recommendations are formulated and discussed in the final section of the paper.

2. Potential Biases of Mining Construction Managers

According to Sweller [14], human cognitive activity is concerned with how humans learn, think and solve problems. The primary function of managers is to make decisions [15]. Decisions use data and perceptions to predict future events such as performance and outcomes, making a determination based on goals and the preferred pathway to achieve those outcomes [16,17]. Within the mining construction industry, managers are faced with a host of issues, such as dealing with a transient workforce [18], production pressures [19], incentives [20], and client demand [13], all of which have the potential to encourage bias in the decision-making process [21]. Given that the evidence suggests that managers increasingly rely in intuition and tacit knowledge to make decisions [21], it is important that mining construction managers are aware of the types of bias that may be influencing their thought processes.

2.1. Optimism Bias

Optimism bias refers to the tendency for individuals to overestimate the likelihood of future outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of unfavorable future outcomes [22,23]. In mining construction, for example, there may be an underestimation of how long a project will take to complete and how much it will cost [24], resulting in cost overruns and poor planning [25]. Indeed, a study conducted by Chadee et al. [26] determined that optimism bias was a root cause of project delays and cost overruns. In a workplace health and safety context, studies have found that workers with higher optimism bias are more likely to display intentional unsafe behaviors than those with a more conservative approach [27,28]. Optimism bias can also lead people (e.g., managers) to believe that injuries or other workplace safety incidents are less likely to happen relative to other similar projects; therefore, attempts to improve site-based safety may be undermined [29].

2.2. Normalization of Deviance

In mining construction, normalization of deviance can be demonstrated by the gradual reduction in safety standards [30], or where behaviors start to ‘drift’ from process standards and become considered the norm among teams over time [31]. Industries such as oil and gas [31], construction [32], and healthcare [30] are being studied by the social sciences to understand this phenomenon. Hester [33] advises that social learning theory suggests that social behavior is learned by observing and then imitating the behaviors of others. Such behaviors can go unrecognized to those people inside the team or organization and the choices to solely circumvent the desired behavior become institutionalized over time [32]. Inquiries about major disasters have indicated that a normalization of deviance event occurs through a breakdown in safeguards, actions by previous workers, management system breakdowns and oblivious leadership [31]. From a mining construction viewpoint, the pressures to do more with less, increase productivity and reduce overall costs have been linked with normalization of deviance [33].

2.3. Confirmation Bias

Vorobyova et al. [34] inform us that managers assume during the decision-making process that people have a tendency to selectively gather information rather than gather the information in a rational manner. Confirmation bias influences the beliefs and expectations on the selection, retention and evaluation of evidence [35], leading decision-makers to confirm their existing beliefs and expectations and, potentially, guide them to make wholly incorrect decisions [36]. Studies have demonstrated that people generally accept information that confirms or aligns with their preconceived views, while at the same time seeking ‘skeptical’ information that challenges those views [34]. In practice, confirmation bias reduces the filtering out of evidence that contradicts a held belief or position, thus diminishing the opportunity to correct extreme arrogance and suboptimal mistakes [35,36]. Within a mining construction safety context, confirmation bias may manifest with managers focusing on data that supports their belief that risks are under control and dismissing contradictory information [37], such as expert opinions or safety concerns from the workforce.

2.4. Motivated Reasoning

Motivated reasoning is a concept from cognitive psychology in which decision-makers interpret evidence in a way to suit their own preferences rather than assessing the neutrality of the information [38]. Rather than reasoning being an unbiased or deliberately deceitful process, motivated reasoning is driven by self-interest [16], in that information is processed in order to reach a pre-determined and desired outcome [39], and to confirm prior attitudes and beliefs [38]. An example of motivated reasoning is the topic of climate change. In the United States, evidence has been produced that motivated reasoning plays a part in the belief or denial of climate change, often based along political lines, with Democrat and Republican supporters rejecting new information which contradicts their beliefs [39,40]. In industries such as mining construction, motivated reasoning may influence decisions, which are reinforced by production and schedule pressure, incentives tied to construction progress and safety performance, and sunk costs.

2.5. Sunk Cost Fallacy

Sunk cost fallacy is an irrational cognitive decision-making bias where people continue to invest in a situation after an investment has been made [41,42]. Essentially, a sunk cost is a cost that cannot be recovered and is often considered the motivating factor in the decision to continue with an investment [43]. In construction, the decision to continue with a project may be decided upon despite unfavorable metrics for various reasons, such as developing a good reputation for future projects, client pressure, escalation of commitment, and social desirability bias [44]. While rational decisions should be based on future costs and future benefits, sunk cost fallacy occurs when the focus is instead put on the money already invested or the inability to change course due to the time and money already sunk into the project.

2.6. Availability Heuristic

Heuristic is an educated guess, a mental short cut, or a rule, or piece of information used in, or enabling, problem-solving or decision-making and is present in everyone and informs the way people judge the frequency and probability of events based on how readily relevant instances come to mind rather than on actual evidence [45]. The availability heuristic was first defined by Tversky and Kahneman in 1973 [46] and refers to the mental availability of relevant instances and how quickly they can be recalled [47]. These recollections may lead to false conclusions due to ‘fallible memories’ [48], and systematic biases [46]. An example of the availability heuristic is that of the public’s perception of airplane travel, particularly following extensive media coverage of a recent event. The availability heuristic leads people to believe that air travel is less safe than driving, for example, yet in reality, the statistics do not support that view [49]. The danger for managers in mining construction is the potential for false conclusions to be drawn from lengthy incident-free periods, where recent incidents are not mentally available, or to overreact to a single event and ignore other existing risks.

2.7. Authority Gradient

The authority gradient refers to the distribution of decision-making and the perceived imbalance of authority and power within a group or organization [50]. Such perceived differences in status can lead to communication breakdowns as those with a lower level of authority find it difficult to question or challenge a more senior authority [51,52]. Steep authority gradients exist when juniors feel that they cannot question, challenge or correct more senior staff members. To overcome what Weller [52] has described as something akin to tribalism, organizations should strive to adopt a culture of safety to minimize barriers to speaking up and raising concerns [53], thereby creating a shallow gradient where individual roles are understood but yet allow for safe and effective communication between everyone [54].

3. Safety Culture and Safety Climate

The importance of strong leadership to safety culture and climate is well researched and documented. There is no doubt that a manager’s safety competency is crucial to influence their workers’ safety practices, and mining construction managers play a vital role in creating and embedding a positive safety culture. As Awolusi et al. [55] assert, the majority of workplace incidents are not caused by careless workers but by failures in safety control and safety management, which are ultimately the responsibilities of white-collar management.

Two terms, which, according to Hopkins [56], have been fighting for supremacy, are safety culture and safety climate. Safety culture refers to the norms, values and common practices shared by groups within an organization in relation to safety [57,58]. It is seen as a subset of organizational culture and is used primarily to understand how beliefs and values shape matters of health and safety at work [59] and for understanding safety behaviors and outcomes [60]. According to Biggs et al. [18], safety culture has been used to explain why organizations differ in safety performance despite having the same risk exposure, available technology, and laws. As to the question of whether all organizations truly possess a safety culture, Hopkins [56] reasons that all organizations can indeed be said to have a safety culture, which may just vary in effectiveness. In other words, safety cultures exist within all organizations, it is just a matter of whether it is a good, bad or indifferent safety culture.

Guldenmund [61] posits that a safety climate refers to the values and attitudes explicitly expressed regarding workplace safety, such as policies, procedures and formal communications. Safety climate can directly impact a worker’s perception of the workplace through the actions of management: if management is perceived to be committed to safety, it is more likely that the workforce will also demonstrate a commitment to safety [62].

Safety culture and climate, however, are more than just shared values, beliefs and attitudes. Cooper [63] reports that the creation or enhancement of safety culture is dependent upon the conscious manipulation of certain organizational characteristics. Schein (1990, as cited in Glendon and Stanton) [64], advises that culture can be defined as “a pattern of assumptions developed by a group as it learns to adapt to its environment” (p. 194). The very breadth of the many safety culture definitions has tended to focus on how workers think and have largely ignored workers’ actual behavior and matters related to situational constraints, such as resources, work pace and job design issues [63]. A study conducted on how incentives affect safety motivation, which can be affected by culture [65], within the construction industry demonstrated that following the implementation of incentives, safety motivation amongst the workers significantly increased, which in turn showed a significant increase in worker compliance and participation in safety activities [66].

That said, safety culture goes deeper than just organizational norms and human behaviors. The traditional approach when discussing safety culture focuses on human aspects rather than also incorporating technical and systemic aspects [67]. For example, traditional incident investigations have a tendency to focus too heavily on human behavior and human error, which can easily shift attention away from the deeper systemic causes of incidents. Therefore, systems thinking should be considered as a component of the investigation arsenal for organizations when examining the causes of major incidents [68].

In the construction industry, the transitory nature of work can play a significant factor in an organization’s attempts to embed a positive culture of safety [18]. It is therefore difficult to develop and implement a long-term risk management strategy as permanent organizations are able to do [69]. The work is project-based, with different trades coming and going throughout the building cycle. As Biggs et al. [18] explain, even if a positive culture is accomplished during the project, the culture is often lost when the project comes to an end and the workers disband. While this may be true, leadership in safety is fundamental and should be sustainable by those who hold positions of authority, responsibility and, ultimately, accountability.

4. Management Errors: When Leadership Fails

An unfortunate common thread that permeates many reports into large-scale workplace disasters is that of management failure. While it is unquestionably acknowledged that competent and committed leadership is vital for workplace safety and health to thrive, management ambivalence can lead to the devastation of a positive safety culture, reputation, profit and, all too often, to the loss of life. Investigation reports following major workplace disasters have often cited the deleterious contributory nature of management’s approach to workplace health and safety management [70,71]. Such an approach could have been avoided through better education and training for those in positions of authority.

Often, warnings of an impending event are revealed, manifesting as minor variants, near miss events, or observations to management by the workforce. Disasters such as Bhopal [72,73], the space shuttle Challenger [73], the Herald of Free Enterprise [73], BP Texas Refinery [74], and Deepwater Horizon [75,76] were all found to have taken an over-confident view of the warning signs of the looming high-scale event. Indeed, at the formal investigation into the Herald of Free Enterprise tragedy, the corporate body was lamented to have been “infected with the disease of sloppiness” [77] (p. 14).

Had these warnings not been ignored or dismissed, these events would not have impacted on the lives of so many people. In the Australian mining sector, one event in particular mirrors the consequences of management inaction, which led to disastrous consequences, and which aptly demonstrates the dangers of the cognitive biases discussed in Section 2.

Moura Coal Mine

On the night of Sunday 7 August 1994, the town of Moura in central Queensland was plunged into mourning following catastrophic organizational and management failings that cost the lives of 11 miners. In the words of the Wardens Report: “It is the opinion of the Inquiry that events at Moura surrounding assumptions as to the state of knowledge of the night shift on 7 August, and the safety of those at the mine, represent a passage of management neglect and non-decision” [78] (p. 46).

At BHP’s Moura No 2 Underground Mine, at approximately 11.30 PM, a gas explosion trapped the 11 miners 265 m underground, and some three kilometers from the mine entrance [79]. Ten other miners were located in the Northern area of the mine at the time of the explosion. They, as stated at the inquest, experienced popping in the ears and some were knocked over by the pressure wave of the explosion but were ultimately able to escape by using their carbon monoxide self-rescue units [79,80]. In the days following, attempts to rescue the 11 miners were abandoned following a second and more violent explosion on 9 August and the decision was made to seal the mine [78]. The bodies of the 11 miners were not recovered.

This was not the first such disaster to befall Moura. On 20 September 1975, 13 miners died following an explosion caused by spontaneous combustion at the Kianga Mine [78,80,81]. Eleven years later on 16 July 1986 at Moura No 4 Mine, 12 miners perished [78]. On this occasion, an explosion was considered to have been caused by either frictional ignition or from a flame safety lamp [78]. In all, between 1974 and 1994, some 40 miners lost their lives due to spontaneous combustion events in Queensland, including the Box Flat Mine disaster, which resulted in the loss of 17 miners [80,81]. Ham [81] reports that for the period from 1971 to 1995, there were some 41 spontaneous combustion events across Queensland’s coal mining industry, so lessons were most definitely there to be shared and learned.

Following the Moura No 2 Mine tragedy, an inquiry was established under the Coal Mining Act 1928 (Qld), which lasted between 18 October 1994 and 6 April 1995 [78]. Some 66 witnesses provided evidence, producing some 5200 pages of testimony. The inquiry triggered major legislative changes [82] and hastened the development of improved mining practices [81]. Chief amongst these improvements was the requirement to establish a regulatory regime based on mine safety management plans to identify, assess and control principal hazards [83].

Similar to the findings of the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, the inquest into the Moura explosion deduced that “the organization from top to bottom was systematically inattentive to the potential for disaster” [80] (p. 6). Indeed, the report from the inquest concluded that the tragic event was the result of “a passage of management neglect and non-decision which must never be repeated in the coal mining industry” [78] (p. 46).

Locally, the leadership at the mine fundamentally failed to protect the workers. Confirmation bias allowed for warnings of the possibility of an explosion to be ignored, with what Hopkins [80] describes as over-reliance on a certain hierarchy of knowledge. This hierarchy overrode any health and safety training or education which may—or should—have been provided to the mine’s managers. Hopkins [80] describes hierarchy as inherent knowledge based on personal experience. When reports of high carbon monoxide (CO) levels and ‘tarry’ odors (both common signs that coal is starting to self-heat) were reported in the days leading up to the fatal event, the leadership at the mine failed to withdraw the miners from underground [78], believing instead that there was no immediate danger [71], and thus allowing normalization of deviance to cloud their judgements. Had the warning signs not been tolerated and ultimately ignored, the interpretation of the carbon monoxide levels would not have deemed them to be acceptable, preventing the catastrophic explosion.

Had the managers at Moura fully understood their obligations through better health and safety education, it is reasonable to suggest that the events of 7 August 1994 may have been avoided. The inquest found that there had been a significant breakdown in communication (a fundamental principle of work health and safety) from the senior managers, down the management structure, all the way to the miners. When advised again of the potential for an explosion to occur, management abdicated its responsibility, leading for a ‘free-for-all’ decision-making process as to whether work should continue that night [80]. Incredibly, the culture at Moura allowed the final decision on whether to enter the mine to usually be offered to the miners themselves. However, on the night of the explosion, the men who entered the mine were not advised that the decision to work that night rested with them [78,80]. As the report stated:

There was no discernible action on the part of management to, in any way, test the knowledge of the workforce nor to ensure that they were fully informed for what was to become the life and death decision they were tacitly expected to make. There was in fact no clear signal to the workforce that would tell them that it was left in their hands to make such a decision.

[78]

BHP Australia Coal Pty Ltd., who owned the mine, contributed to the tragedy through ill-advised decisions and processes. For example, bonuses were paid on production tonnages [80]. These bonuses made up a large percentage of the miners’ pay. When leaving crucial decisions on whether to work or not to the workers themselves, who rely so heavily on production bonuses, motivated reasoning places them in an unreasonable predicament. In this case, directional motivated reasoning may well have impeded rational decision-making and affected their attitudes and beliefs [84].

Hopkins [80] also states that the miners, conscious of the existing authority gradient, may have felt the need to push through safety issues. Also, the miners were not told that an explosion was expected to occur during their work shift, even though management had this information. After all, if the mine is not as profitable as the Board expects, jobs may become jeopardized.

Another crucial error by BHP Coal Australia was the decision to decentralize responsibility for health and safety to the Moura site [80]. The corporate office was therefore ill-equipped to fully undertake appropriate due diligence activities to check the voracity of the implementation of crucial safety systems. An audit had been conducted at Moura six months prior to the disaster, but the hazard of spontaneous combustion was overlooked [83]. Additionally, the small corporate health and safety function reported into a HR manager [80]. These are arguably two departments with opposing philosophies: in HR, the worker is fitted to the task, while in safety, the task is fitted to the worker.

The last significant failing of BHP Coal Australia to be discussed in this article is the safety metrics someone, presumably at a senior level, had imposed. According to Groombridge [83], BHP had an obsession with monitoring lost-time injuries as a measure of health and safety effectiveness. They had some success. Between the reporting periods of 1989/90 and 1993/94, the lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) at Moura had been reduced from 153 to 71 [78]. However, tracking the LTIFR is problematic for a number of reasons. Such lag metrics provide little assurance as to the true state of safety within an organization [85], are easily manipulable [86] and reveal little about the likelihood of a future workplace or organizational incident [87]. Further, the LTIFR reveals more about how well injuries are being managed rather than how low-frequency, high-severity events are being managed [76,79] and provide little assurance of compliance to safety legislative requirements [88]. Such reliance on lagging indicators of health and safety effectiveness may lead to complacency from all parties, which has been reported to account for 67% of workplace incidents [89].

For some time now, scholars have been recommending a shift away from the overreliance on, and potential lack of understanding of, lag indicators. As argued by Hopkins [90], any safety indicator is only worth developing if it drives authentic improvement and if the executive decision-makers focus enough attention on them to allow the metric to make a genuine difference. Dekker [91] has urged for the development of safety metrics that “reward transparency and move away from metrics based on the absence of bad news” (p. 31). One such metric posited in the literature is that of process indicators, which measure processes relevant to safety rather than negative outcomes such as injury rates. Hopkins [92] has suggested two types of process indicators: those which focus on the behavior of employees (such as the percentage of employees complying with PPE requirements) and those which measure the activity of management, who remain ultimately responsible for workplace safety. Examples provided by Hopkins include the percentage of safety training received by the workforce or the percentage of audits completed on schedule.

A proposal by Dekker and Tooma [85] is that of “capacity indexes”. Rather than focusing too heavily on what went wrong, organizations should measure themselves on the presence of capacities for things to go well, even under variable conditions. This correlates to Safety-II thinking, moving organizations away from outdated and somewhat dangerous reliance on negative frequency rates. Six capacities are proposed: the capacity to acquire and maintain safety knowledge; the capacity to understand the operations and the risks; the capacity to adequately resource safety; the capacity to respond to events and risks; the capacity to demonstrate engagement and compliance; and the capacity for assurance.

Errors and mistakes in judgement and structure contributed to Moura experiencing what Dekker [10] describes as “drift into failure”. When an organization drifts, it is not a rapid decline but rather a gradual slide via unremarkable changes, trade-offs and decisions, which gradually move the organization to an incident. Such decisions have the tendency to normalize risk, aligning work-as-done to work practices which are not optimally safe, and which only become identifiable after an incident has occurred [10]. Hollnagel and Woods [93] posit that organizations should adopt a resilient approach to safety management. By drawing a parallel to the literature on how societies collapse, Hollnagel and Woods argue that a resilient system must be able to anticipate, perceive and respond to problems. Rather than focusing solely on the prevention of incidents, resilience in safety management adopts a Safety-II approach by sustaining safety performance within the complex socio-technical environment, learning from how things go right and ensuring deviations of the system are controlled. The next section discusses the dangers of managers and leaders taking such a complacent approach to work health and safety.

5. The Folly of ‘Safe’ Organizations

According to Schulman [94], there is no such thing as an absolute safe organization, suggesting instead that any organization is only as safe as the next incident ahead of it. In other words, an organization’s history of safe performance does not necessarily equate that an organization can claim to be safe [94]. Reason [95] posits that while high incident rates may reasonably be concluded as evidence of a poor safety state, low asymptomatic rates do not necessarily indicate a good one. Reason [95] further concludes that a common mistake an organization can make is to believe that it has achieved a safe state, interpreting that no news is good news rather than adopting an attitude of increased vigilance over complacency.

In environments such as mining construction, with tight deadlines and strict budget requirements, the risk of complacency is not uncommon. Mining construction managers who are under pressure, experiencing negative stress, or who are poorly motivated are at risk of demonstrating complacency [96]. One characteristic that separates a robust organization from one of general ambivalence is a “preoccupation with the possibility of failure, a conviction that today is going to be another bad day” [97] (p. ii25). Such uncertainty is at the heart of risk, which, in its crudest etymology, is simply not knowing for sure whether the day will bring an incident [98]. Reason [12] termed such uncertainty as “chronic unease”, describing it as a manifestation caused by people forgetting to be afraid. Fruhen et al. [99] further describe chronic unease as a state of psychological strain in which individuals experience discomfort and concern about the control of risks. By its very nature, chronic unease counteracts optimism bias by eliminating the tendency for managers or organizations to believe that negative events are less likely to present themselves, while simultaneously maintaining vigilance against the normalization of deviance.

Leadership in particular needs to be aware of maintaining uncertainty, as it often perceives safety culture and performance as much better than its workforce [100]. In a study of ‘vulnerabilities’ in underground mining, Daniel et al. [101] highlight that a lack of knowledge, non-management or poor and faulty management of vulnerabilities may affect health and safety. Flin and Fruhen [102] posit that information being received by leaders is often incomplete, contradictory and inconsistent. Effective safety management at senior levels of an organization requires an understanding of the potential inadequacy of information flowing upward and an awareness of possible ‘smoothing and filtering’ to reduce apparent ambiguities in order to deliver good news messages [102]. Management themselves may not be able to evaluate the voracity of information, as they are often detached from the operational sites and the people for whose decisions they affect [99,103].

Research into chronic unease was conducted by Fruhen, Flin and McLeod in 2014 [104]. Following a literature review, they identified five themes from the various descriptions of chronic unease: pessimism, propensity to worry, vigilance, requisite imagination, and flexible thinking. The study concluded that managers would differ in the extent to which they experience chronic unease [104]. Individuals need to regulate how a sense of chronic unease informs their decisions: too much, and the individual may be overcome with high levels of anxiety, which may impinge on their decision-making; too little, and complacency may set in, meaning that warning signs—such as those at Moura—may be ignored or not considered [102,105].

As was discussed in the Moura case study, there was little in the way of a demonstratable sense of chronic unease by the mine’s leadership. Instead, unease was overruled by optimism bias, whereby the mine’s management had normalized the warnings of high carbon monoxide levels and the telltale odors of heating, and ignored the lessons from prior events at Moura and other mines regarding spontaneous combustion. Such failure is often not instant. Dekker [10] argues that such normalization does not necessarily result from a place of devious behavior but rather it is the result of management working under pressure. In complex socio-technical organizations, operational adaptations, goal conflicts and uncertainty result in trade-offs being made, often at the expense of safety [106].

Organizations that focus too heavily on lag metrics such as the lost-time frequency rate (LTIFR) are metaphorically driving a vehicle forward to an unknown destination, while at the same time navigating the journey ahead by looking in the rearview mirror. Towards the end of the last century, Hopkins [92] warned against the dangers of such metrics. Referring to them as “entirely unsatisfactory”, Hopkins presented three compelling reasons. First, they are more aligned to successful injury management than to actual changes in safety performance. Secondly, such incidents within an organization are infrequent, and therefore ‘statistically insignificant’ on a year-by-year basis and are not a clear representative of changing or improving workplace safety. Thirdly, the LTIFR provides no firm data or assurance on how well the most serious low-frequency, high-consequent workplace risks are being managed. This is very much a Safety-I mindset, yet organizations are still obsessed with lag safety indicators.

Another common folly that leadership falls into is to espouse that safety is the number one organizational priority. While this overused statement may be well-meaning, in reality the safety-first mantra is little more than a myth and is really only considered a priority if an organization can truly afford it to be [107,108]. Such a mindset implies that workplace safety is a goal that can be isolated and prioritized [109]. Arguably, any organization that espouses the safety-first myth is at risk of missing a fundamental logic: safety is a “dynamic and complex process” [109] and that such messaging inevitably comes from misconceptions regarding the science of safety management [110]. In the end, it may be viewed by many at the sharp end of the organizational hierarchy as disingenuous and evidence that, crucially, the management of safety is misunderstood by the organization.

So why do leaders of organizations continue to roll out this tired assertion? Zohar [111] suggests that if productivity was seen to be a higher priority than safety, there may be a risk that workers could align their behaviors accordingly. And yet, safety is often compromised with other competing operational demands, meaning that there is a mind shift in priorities when productivity or profits are at risk. This is an uncomfortable honesty for organizations to face, and one which leaders need to be open and transparent about, or risk eroding trust [110]. Besnard and Hollnagel [107,108] recommend that organizations would be better served to admit that safety should be considered as “high as affordable from a financial and ethical perspective” or As-High-As-Reasonably Practicable [11]. High-functioning organizations do not feel the need to market safety as the number one priority. According to Pater [112], they message safety as an essential organizational construct, on par with productivity and morale. As Hopkins declared:

Too often leaders think that they can achieve safe operations by publicly stating that safety comes first…and then leaving it to others to ensure that the organization runs safety…then express surprise and dismay, following a major incident, that the organization for which they are responsible was systematically inattentive to safety and that the practices of the organization were geared to maximizing production and not safety.

[56] (pp. 8–9)

Just as leaders willfully adopted zero harm messaging, the question has to be asked as to who is advising them. Certainly, work health and safety legislation does not compel safety to be the highest priority. Legislation generally requires organizations to manage hazards and risks to a state of reasonable practicability, with the cost of remediating such hazards and risks as a key consideration. If safety truly is proclaimed to be the number one priority, is it safe to assume that leaders have ensured that the best possible equipment has been provided, the highest level of education and training for the workforce is in place, a wholly adequate budget for safety has been assigned, and that, at the very least, the most experienced and qualified health and safety personnel sit within the senior and most influential health and safety positions within the organization?

Rather than being beholden to a waning philosophy of how to manage and measure safety, organizations should instead be embracing how systems thinking would benefit their performance. The concept of systems thinking in itself is not a new phenomenon and can be traced back to the beginning of the last century [10]. While not a concept which is easily defined [113], with an immense diversity of methods, approaches and specialties [114], systems thinking essentially seeks to understand how outcomes emerge from the interaction of many connected components, rather than from isolated actions [115].

Under the traditional Safety-I approach, organizations are determined to discover the root cause of what went wrong [11]. If, however, a theoretical lens was applied to safety management, incidents would be viewed not as the fault of humans or of broken systems or components, but rather as the interaction of a host of factors, which had been hiding in plain sight [116]. Systems thinking views work as a dynamic socio-technical arrangement, which may assist in solving complex problems such as recurring issues, or issues that may have been made worse by previous attempts at rectification [117].

In terms of practical safety management, there are benefits to applying systems thinking. In an analysis conducted by Vautier et al. [118] on integrating systems thinking into human and organizational factors (HOFs), two distinct benefits were identified: the improvement in the understanding of the workings of a socio-technical system, and as a guide for decision-making and the associated implementation of actions.

6. Education for Mining Construction Managers

One of the findings of the Robens Report was the acknowledgement that formal training was an important facet of the committee’s recommendations. The report declared that “it is equally clear that specialized training in safety matters is needed for particular categories such as managers, safety officers, instructors, supervisors and workers’ safety representatives” [119] (p. 134). Robens recommended that the proposed new health and safety authority that the committee was advocating for should assume a proactive role in promoting and coordinating safety training and emphasized the importance of the authority’s involvement in addressing neglected areas, such as incorporating safety components into management education programs. Health and safety education has been demonstrated to benefit safety performance [120], to improve the skills of line managers and positively influence behaviors [121].

Today, the necessity for more formalized education for managers is consistent with findings in the existing literature [99,122]. This consensus underlines that managers require comprehensive and structured safety education to effectively fulfill their roles and promote workplace health and safety. Managers who possess foundational knowledge of safety requirements are able to influence the implementation of effective safety programs and to devise the strategic means to prevent injuries, illnesses and fatalities in high-risk projects [122].

Commentators have long argued for the inclusion of safety education within tertiary courses [120,123,124,125,126,127], particularly at the undergraduate level. The rationale behind this call is that early exposure to safety principles equips future professionals with foundational understanding, fostering safer work practices from the outset of their careers. This approach is particularly relevant to disciplines associated with high-risk industries, such as engineering, which are closely linked to construction. Awolusi et al. [122] argue that if the importance of construction safety and general safety management is recognized and included in the educational programs of construction industry managers, an improved safety culture will have the opportunity to flourish.

Tener (1996, as cited in Abudayyeh et al.) [128] stated that the construction engineering industry in the United States “increasingly demanded professional engineers who were capable of solving not only technical problems but also those of management, social, political and leadership” (p. 170). Indeed, Abudayyeh et al. [128] contend that educating students to succeed in industry should be the primary goal of any engineering program, and that if graduates do not possess value-adding skills, including safety, then the course has failed not only the student, but also the industry.

A report commissioned by the European Union in 2010 recommended that university education for a range of professions—including designers, architects, engineers, business and finance managers, and medical professionals—should incorporate health and safety education. The report highlights that professionals who will require an understanding of workplace health and safety in their careers would benefit from integrating this knowledge into their university studies, ensuring that they are better equipped to uphold safety standards in their respective fields [129].

It is not only academics calling for greater safety content in tertiary courses. Studies have underscored that students themselves expect to be educated in safety [126]. A recent study of engineering students conducted by Panik et al. [57] demonstrated that students believe that safety is an important part of their respective fields of study, with many reporting that they did not feel adequately prepared to handle safety issues. Consequently, current and future leaders in the Western Australian mining construction industry may be unintentionally set up for future failure. Dahl et al. [130] concluded that mandatory safety education for business leaders is important for two reasons: compliance with legal requirements and the establishment of robust occupational health and safety.

Despite the close association between professions like engineering and the construction sector, tertiary education in these fields commonly lacks a formal introduction to workplace health and safety. This absence means that graduates may enter the workforce without adequate preparation to manage or address safety risks, potentially hindering the development of a robust safety culture within organizations. Engineers, for example, are often rapidly promoted into positions where work health and safety is a significant component of their work and lack the understanding of risk, including that of workplace health and safety [125]. Incorporating safety within university education exemplifies to the student how safety is relevant to many aspects of their education and instills within the student a strong safety culture and the belief that safety is relevant [126,127].

It is generally acknowledged that there are challenges of incorporating safety aspects into a curriculum. While there is increasing pressure on academia to produce highly knowledgeable and job-ready graduates, courses may be constrained by the requirements of the university’s curriculum conditions [122,129]. Buy-in to include safety with the curriculum may be restricted due to teaching staff who may lack the requisite knowledge, interest and experience to support the inclusion of safety components: effective safety education is dependent on the experience and knowledge of the teaching staff [127,131].

While safety training is a key component of legislation and organizational safety management systems, the distinction between education and training is an important consideration. According to Awolusi et al. [55], education conveys to the student high-level skills and knowledge that are transferable to different situations, while training can be considered more context-specific, dealing with procedures or rules for undertaking a particular task or activity. Studies have shown that organizations seeking to improve site safety culture should focus on developing people in key decision-making positions through both education and training [60].

What, therefore, should be included in such education? Clearly there is a need to provide a fundamental legislative foundation to equip mining construction managers with a certain degree of competency and knowledge. However, compliance-based education alone would arguably not be sufficient to enhance a leader’s skills in the complex decision-making aligned to workplace safety.

Education for mining construction managers increasingly needs to move beyond technical competence toward understanding and managing complexity in socio-technical systems. At the core of this is systems thinking—the ability to see mining operations not as isolated tasks (drilling, blasting, hauling, and processing), but as an interconnected network of geological, technical, human, and organizational elements. Decisions made in one part of the system (e.g., scheduling, ground support, or reagent dosing) can propagate in unexpected ways elsewhere. Developing this mindset helps managers anticipate unintended consequences and avoid overly simplistic ‘fixes’ to complex problems.

A critical extension of this is recognizing the gap between work-as-imagined and work-as-done. Plans, procedures, and risk assessments (work-as-imagined) rarely capture the full variability and constraints encountered in real operations (work-as-done). Managers must therefore learn to engage with frontline workers to understand how tasks are actually performed under time pressure, resource limitations, and changing conditions. This links directly to complexity literacy, which includes appreciating nonlinearity, emergence, and uncertainty, as well as the limits of prediction and control in mining environments. Within such contexts, cognitive bias awareness becomes essential: biases such as confirmation bias, overconfidence, and hindsight bias can distort risk perception and decision-making, particularly in high-stakes or time-constrained situations.

Given the inherent uncertainty in mining, stemming from geological variability, incomplete data, and dynamic operational conditions, managers must be trained in decision-making under uncertainty. This includes probabilistic thinking, scenario evaluation, and the ability to act without complete information. Closely related to this is the skill of weak signal detection, identifying subtle indicators of emerging issues (e.g., small changes in ground conditions, equipment behavior, or process trends) before they escalate into failures. These capabilities shift management from reactive to proactive modes of operation, which are essential in complex and hazardous environments.

Phillips et al. [132] proposed integrating systems thinking into university studies to develop and enhance leadership skills. Managers need to be able to interrogate norms and not just enforce safety rules. It would not be an unrealistic expectation that mining construction managers have a rudimentary understanding and awareness of how heuristics and their individual cognitive and experiential biases affect the way in which decisions may be impacted. Such biases “originate from cultural norms and values, internal and external influences, and emotional states” [133] (p. 23). Generally, people draw on cognitive shortcuts to make probability assessments less complicated, potentially leading to judgment errors [134]. By possessing a fundamental grasp of cognitive bias awareness and how such systematic thinking errors can influence judgment, leaders can utilize evidence more deliberately and draw rational conclusions for decisions [135].

However, as Dekker [10] conveys, complex systems do not necessarily provide a suitable platform for the required cognitive resources or for sufficient time to make informed decisions. Indeed, such systems require decisions to be made under ambiguity, time pressures and uncertainty. Decision-making under uncertainty involves selecting actions without necessarily being able to acquire complete information and facts to assure predictable outcomes. When faced with such decisions, managers need to remain adaptable to amending decisions as new information emerges [136].

Leaders should also have an understanding of how human and organizational performance (HOP) principles can assist in improving safety performance. Human and organizational performance is an approach to workplace safety that recognizes human performance as an integral part of complex work systems, rather than as a problem to be controlled. Williams and Roberts [137] state that there are two key benefits of HOP. Firstly, it moves organizations away from the Safety-I mindset of blaming the employee following incidents and injuries. Secondly, HOP recognizes that any injury or fatality exposes system failures.

Monteiro [138] informs us that there are five principles to HOP. The first is that “to err is human”. The elimination of all human error is futile, and therefore organizations need to accept that errors, mistakes and even intentional violations will occur. The second principle is that blame solves nothing. Dekker (as cited in Provan, 2018) [139] states that “people are the solution to harness not the problem to control” (p. 163). Blame is all too often an easy option and instead organizations should be applying what Reason [12] refers to as “just culture”. The third principle is that learning is vital. The primary objective of investigating incidents is to learn what went wrong and do everything practicable to prevent the incident from occurring again. However, learning from what went right is often overlooked and is rarely given as many resources. The fourth principle is that the context drives behavior. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary [140], context means “the circumstances, conditions, or objects by which one is surrounded”. HOP maintains the view that organizational processes and cultural values shape how humans behave, particularly when under pressure in complex systems. In HOP, it is assumed that errors will be made given the fallibility of humans [138]. Therefore, organizational context plays a role in the behavior and actions of workers. As Reason [12] states: “The organizational model views human error more as a consequence than as a cause. Errors are the symptoms that reveal the presence of latent conditions in the system at large” (p. 226). The final HOP principle is that response matters. How organizations, and in particular their senior leaders, respond to incidents is considered critical within HOP. A genuine forward-thinking organization declares a collaborative approach, while those tied to Safety-I philosophies do little to encourage future events to be reported. High-reliability organizations have learned to respond to incidents by enhancing the resilience of the system [141].

Another recommended inclusion in education for mining construction managers to prepare them for future leadership positions is that of scenario-based learning, offering students the opportunity to learn from realistic experiences [142]. Such situations provide students with opportunities to test theories, solve problems and to think critically, allowing them to analyze the facts while tapping into cognitive and emotional ‘learning dimensions’ [143].

7. Artificial Intelligence as a Tool to Enhance Operational Safety

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to significantly enhance safety in mining construction by acting as a decision-support and risk-awareness tool within inherently complex and hazardous systems. Rather than replacing human judgment, AI can augment it by processing large volumes of data from sensors, equipment, and operational records to identify patterns that are not readily visible to humans. For example, machine learning models can be used for predictive risk assessment, identifying conditions that precede accidents, such as changes in equipment behavior, ground stability indicators, or deviations in operational parameters, thereby enabling earlier intervention [144]. Similarly, computer vision systems can monitor worksites in real time to detect unsafe conditions or behaviors (e.g., proximity to hazards and PPE compliance), effectively serving as an additional “set of eyes” in dynamic environments. This aligns closely with the need for weak signal detection and proactive safety management in complex systems.

More broadly, AI enables a shift from reactive to anticipatory safety management, which is particularly valuable in mining construction, where uncertainty and variability are high. By integrating data across multiple sources (e.g., geotechnical sensors, environmental monitoring, and equipment telemetry), AI systems can support holistic, system-level insights, consistent with systems thinking approaches. Importantly, AI can also reinforce human and organizational performance (HOP) principles: instead of attributing incidents solely to human error, AI can help uncover systemic contributors by analyzing patterns across many events and normal operations [145,146]. However, its effectiveness depends on informed use. Managers must remain aware of issues such as data quality, model bias, and over-reliance on automation. In this sense, AI should be understood not as a solution in itself, but as a tool that enhances human understanding and decision-making within complex socio-technical systems, ultimately contributing to safer and more resilient mining operations.

8. Conclusions and Recommendations

The aim of this perspective article was to review critically whether there was a need for greater workplace health and safety education for construction industry managers in the Western Australian mining sector and discuss the dangers of managerial inaction. With industrial manslaughter legislation now in effective across Australia, the question this paper sought to answer was whether mining construction managers have been adequately prepared, both ethically and practically, to understand how complex socio-technical systems could fail and the role human cognitive architecture plays in such systems. The conclusions are that there is an argument for mining construction leaders to be given a better foundation in workplace health and safety during tertiary education. The educational institutions producing tomorrow’s mining construction leaders have an opportunity to include work health and safety in the curricula to provide students with a grounding in the philosophies of work health and safety management before they enter the workforce, in order to set them up for success in future leadership roles and to avoid the decision-making mistakes which have been learned from workplace incidents.

This paper has identified gaps in current knowledge regarding health and safety education at a tertiary level for mining construction managers. There has been little written and researched concerning what health and safety content could be included in tertiary courses to provide students—and potential future mining construction leaders—with a solid grounding in health and safety management. It is recommended that further research be undertaken to identify from which education streams mining construction industry managers typically come and undertake a review of such courses to determine the level of health and safety content. With modern views on corporate liability for serious events shifting and increased demands made for those in senior roles to be held to account, further research should be undertaken to examine the barriers for including fundamental health and safety education in relevant mining construction courses.