The Jonah Group’s Limbic Risk Safety Leadership Program is built to tackle mining’s missing risk category that empowers supervisors and workers alike.
“After an incident, the common response is, ‘What were they thinking?’,” Jonah Group chief executive officer Nada Wentzel told Mining.
“It’s a question that implies blame, but a sharper version is, ‘Were they thinking, and if not, why not?’ Most investigations don’t answer it.”
Mining has more procedures, dashboards, and verification activities than ever, but serious incidents continue to occur, and the findings repeat themselves: the procedure wasn’t followed, and the control wasn’t verified. These are descriptions, not explanations.
“The industry retrains, rewrites, and reminds, but the loop starts again,” Wentzel said.
In 2024, the International Council on Mining and Metals’ (ICMM) member companies recorded 42 fatalities, marking a second consecutive yearly rise, with the organisation linking 83 per cent of those incidents to ineffective critical control execution.
“Mining does not lack safety systems; something is breaking between the system as designed and the system as lived. The systems assume clear-headed decision-making. The conditions on site rarely deliver it,” Wentzel said.
According to her, the missing category that most organisations do not name is called Limbic Risk: the human default response to operating under stress, where attention, judgement, and self-control quietly erode without the person realising it.
Five common field conditions trigger it. Fatigue, distraction, pressure, irritation, and complacency. Wentzel said these are not personality flaws; they are how humans are wired to respond when conditions stack up.
“Complacency in particular is misread on most sites; it is not a character or attitude defect, it is a human default,” Wentzel said.
“When tasks become familiar, the brain conserves effort, and everyone does it. The question is whether your environment surfaces it or conceals it.
“The ‘big five’ can be taught, supervisors can be trained to notice them, name them and interrupt them, before decisions degrade.”
Wentzel said human error is where most investigations stop. It should be where they start. A New South Wales Resources Regulator review found that 74 per cent of behaviours in analysed incidents were unintentional errors, most created by how the work was managed and organised, not by individual failings.
“If behaviour is shaped by the system, calling it human error stops the investigation too early,” Wentzel said.
Watermelon reporting
Limbic Risk becomes especially visible through Critical Control Verification (CCV), one of mining’s most important fatal-risk management tools.
Wentzel said it is common to see operations reporting 100 per cent verification completion. Every check done, every form filed, every monthly target hit. The dashboards are green. What they show is administrative compliance, not control health. The supervisors who owned those controls are trained to report counts, not whether the controls are working in the field.
“If verifications are rushed at the end of the shift, copied from last week, or focused on whether a control exists rather than if it works, the organisation has not verified risk. It has verified paperwork. It’s watermelon reporting, green in the dashboard, red in the field,” Wentzel said.
This is where Limbic Risk bites.
“A distracted supervisor verifies what is easiest to see. A pressured supervisor closes the action rather than opening a harder conversation. A complacent team sees the same degraded condition every day until it no longer registers as a risk,” Wentzel said.
Empowering supervisors
Supervisors play a crucial role on-site.
They run the pre-start. They organise the crew. They hear the irritation in a crew member’s voice before it becomes a workaround. They are also operating under the same five conditions as everyone else, often more acutely, because the pressure of the role compounds them.
“Supervisors are high Limbic Risk operators in their own right. Fatigued, pressured, pulled in five directions. And they are still the person expected to detect it in others and interrupt it before a decision goes the wrong way,” Wentzel said. “They decide whether a near miss gets a real conversation or a tick in a box. They hold the only conversations on site where Limbic Risk can be detected and de-loaded in real time.”
Most supervisors are promoted from the crew they now supervise.
They received the least leadership training of anyone in the management chain, and were then made the front line of safety according to Wentzel.
“This is not a willingness gap. It is an equipping gap, and it is the most under-invested control point in mining,” she said.
The Jonah Group’s Limbic Risk Safety Leadership Program is built to close it. The program trains supervisors to recognise the big five in themselves first, then in their crews, and to interrupt the pattern before it shows up in a decision.
Wentzel said the program changes three things. Pre-starts surface real risk. Control verification gets stronger. And the response to bad news “increases truth” rather than shutting it down.
“The pattern across operations is consistent. Pre-starts move beyond ‘any hazard?’ to what has changed and which controls need eyes on them today. Reporting volume rises before it falls, because the workforce trusts that reports lead somewhere,” Wentzel said.
“Investigations name the conditions that produced the decision, not just the decision itself.”
Incident frequency follows on a lag. The lead indicators move first.
The next time an investigation asks, ‘what were they thinking?’, the better question would be, ‘what conditions were shaping their thinking, before the decision was made?’ according to Wentzel.
“Mining will eventually name this risk category and build the discipline around it. The science is already there, and the field applications are being built now,” she said.
“The question is whether your operation waits for the next investigation to ask again or starts equipping the people best positioned to answer.”
This feature appeared in the 2026 Winter Edition of the Mining Magazine.
