In this episode, host Jowanza Joseph speaks with retired Brigadier General Tom Kolditz to explore what leadership looks like when lives are on the line, and why the best peacetime CEO might actually be the wrong person to lead you through a real crisis.

About the Guest

Tom (Brig. Gen., Ret.) Kolditz is a renowned expert in crisis leadership and leading in extreme contexts. He is the author of In Extremis Leadership: Leading as if Your Life Depended On It and served as the founding Executive Director of Rice University's Doerr Institute for New Leaders from 2015 to 2022. Named a 2025 Thinkers50 Coaching Legend, Tom currently leads Saxon Castle LLC, a coaching and leadership development consultancy.

Key Takeaways:

🚨 Defining In Extremis Leadership

Leading in a life-or-death situation fundamentally differs from everyday peacetime corporate management. We explore what followers truly demand from leaders when the pressure is on and the danger is real.

🤝 The "Shared Risk" Principle

A leader’s credibility in a high-stakes environment hinges on their willingness to face the exact same physical dangers as their team. If followers believe a leader is removed from the consequences, trust shatters.

🧠 Overcoming Tunnel Vision

When danger is present, human beings naturally narrow their focus. Tom breaks down the psychology of danger, explaining how leaders can train themselves to overcome this tunnel vision through rapid scanning and continuous sensemaking when information is incomplete.

🛑 Command vs. Collaboration

In a crisis, speed and consultation must be balanced. Tom discusses how to know exactly when to switch into "commander mode" and when you need to slow down to collaborate with your team.

📍 Presence in the Hot Zone

Physically showing up at an incident site has immense strategic value, but it can also backfire. We discuss the true role of physical presence in the first five minutes of a crisis.

📚 Resources & Contact

To dive deeper into Tom’s research on crisis leadership, explore his consulting work, and check out his upcoming releases, use the links below:

* Website: tomkolditz.com

* LinkedIn: Tom Kolditz

* Company: Saxon Castle LLC

* Books:

* In Extremis Leadership: Leading As If Your Life Depended On It

* Leadership Reckoning: Can Higher Education Develop the Leaders We Need

* Against the Storm: How Leaders Prevail When the World Shakes (Upcoming in Summer 2026, co-authored with Mariana Khomitska)

In this episode, host Jowanza Joseph explores Human and Organizational Performance (HOP)—a radical framework that encourages companies to stop looking for fault in their people and start looking for weaknesses in their systems.

About the Guest

Andrea Baker is a chemical engineer and the founder of The HOP Mentor, a consultancy dedicated to helping industrial organizations embed HOP principles into their core business systems. Beginning her career at GE, she eventually became the EHS Leader for manufacturing, assembly, and distribution facilities at GE Aviation. By 2015, she served as GE's HOP Senior Expert for Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, driving culture change across more than 300 multi-sector locations before founding her own firm in 2018.

Key Takeaways:

🛑 The Inevitability of Human Error

A core premise of HOP is that human error is completely inevitable. Accepting this reality isn't about giving up on safety; it means practically changing how you design systems so that you shift away from "fixing people" and instead focus on "fixing systems".

🤝 Replacing Blame with Learning Teams

Traditional incident investigations often devolve into blame assignments. Andrea breaks down how to implement "Learning Teams" instead, focusing on creating the psychological safety necessary for workers to speak honestly without fear of discipline, which leads to genuine, systemic learning.

🌍 Scaling Culture Across Borders

Having taught HOP across the US, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa, Andrea discovered that these principles resonate universally, despite vast cultural differences. She shares insights on moving HOP from a single pilot to an enterprise-wide norm, ensuring it becomes "just what we do" rather than just another separate safety program to manage.

📚 Resources & Contact

To dive deeper into Human and Organizational Performance and find HOP Fundamentals training, connect with Andrea and explore her work below.

* Website: thehopmentor.com

* LinkedIn: Andrea Baker

* Articles & Contributions: Safety Differently - Andrea Baker

* Collaborator: Southpac International

In this episode, host Jowanza Joseph sits down with global HSE leader Paul Leonard. They explore the philosophy of "Cathedral Thinking"—a long-term strategy for building high-reliability organizations based on trust, learning agility, and a deep sense of belonging.

About the Guest

Paul Leonard is a global HSE executive, expert witness, and culture change expert who specializes in preventing unplanned events globally. With a career spanning the US, Europe, Mexico, and China, he has led enterprise safety and HSE operations across major chemical and utility giants, including Entergy, Arkema, and Orbia. He currently leads initiatives through SinoCelt LLC.

Key Takeaways:

⛪ The "Art" of Cathedral Thinking

Great cathedrals like Notre Dame or the Washington National Cathedral took decades, sometimes centuries, to build. Paul explains why leaders must adopt this "Cathedral Thinking" framework to build a timeless, resilient organization, moving away from short-sighted "quick wins" and establishing a foundation that will outlast their tenure.

🧠 The Neuroscience of Belonging

A long-term safety vision cannot be executed through compliance alone; it requires a sense of belonging. Paul explores how social identity, authentic leadership, and shared purpose create the group cohesion necessary for workers to actively share knowledge, commit to ethical decisions, and prioritize safety.

⚙️ High Reliability Organizations (HROs)

HROs have no choice but to function reliably, because if they fail, severe harm results. Paul breaks down the concept of "Chronic Unease" and the mindfulness required to anticipate risk relentlessly, focusing on key pillars like a preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify data, and deference to expertise.

📉 Performance vs. Paperwork Noise

Many organizations have lots of safety activity—endless training, complex audits, and busy dashboards. Paul discusses how to identify when these activities turn into mere "noise" instead of actual risk reduction, and shares strategies for ensuring safety is treated as a core operating model rather than an isolated department.

📚 Resources & Contact

To dive deeper into Paul’s work on Cathedral Thinking and global safety culture, check out the links below:

* LinkedIn: Paul Leonard

* Consulting Work: SinoCelt LLC

* Speaking & Forums: Safety on the Edge - Paul Leonard Profile

About the Guest

Dr. Elif Erkal is a construction safety research expert who specializes in predicting serious injuries and fatalities (SIF) using data analytics. She currently serves as the Associate Director of Research and Strategy at the Construction Safety Research Alliance (CSRA) at CU Boulder. Her groundbreaking work challenges traditional safety metrics and advocates for the use of predictive models in high-risk environments.

Key Takeaways:

📉 The TRIR Illusion

Traditional metrics like TRIR are not just flawed; they are statistically invalid when it comes to predicting fatalities. Instead of merely counting injuries, organizations need to identify the real "precursors" that signal a major incident is coming.

🤖 AI and Predictive Analytics

Companies are sitting on mountains of unstructured safety data, from inspection reports to near-miss cards. By utilizing machine learning, organizations can shift from simply "collecting data" to actively predicting SIF exposure. However, algorithms must be carefully managed to ensure human safety managers don't become complacent.

⚡ High-Energy Controls

Not all safety controls are created equal. Instead of relying on administrative controls like rules and signs—which are known to fail—organizations should focus on High-Energy Control Assessments (HECA) to implement direct, effective controls.

🧹 Eliminating "Safety Clutter"

When looking at Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) frameworks, true safety culture goes beyond simply listing injury rates. Sometimes, removing outdated rules—known as "Safety Clutter"—is just as critical as creating new ones. Ultimately, safety is about stopping the practice of counting failure and starting to measure capacity.

📚 Resources & Contact

To learn more about Dr. Erkal’s research on predictive safety, check out the following resources:

* Website: CSRA*

* LinkedIn: Elif Erkal, PhD

*All of their research and resources are publicly available and free to access, including their published papers. Since the work is publicly funded, listeners are able to explore the papers, literature, and additional resources available on their website.

In this episode, I talk to Lee Campe, who blends military discipline with Lean Six Sigma methodologies. Lee teaches organizations how to shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive risk prevention.

About the Guest

Lee Campe is a former US Army Airborne Ranger and a leading national expert on metric development, KPIs, problem-solving, and Lean Six Sigma deployment. As the President of Performance Excellence INC since 2003, he has earned Master Black Belt certifications across four major deployments for industry giants like Home Depot, JP Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, and GE Power Systems. In addition to training thousands of corporate professionals, Lee served as a University Lecturer at the Georgia Institute of Technology for 17 years, bringing Lean Six Sigma into their MBA program

Key Takeaways:

🪖 The Ranger Mindset in Corporate Safety

What corporate executives can learn about decision-making, problem-solving frameworks, and leadership under pressure from an Army Airborne Ranger.

🛑 Red Flags in Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

When investigators use phrases like "lack of training," "failed to follow policy," or "lack of communication," they aren't finding the root cause—they are making lazy excuses. A true RCA should skip these red flags and instead output testable hypotheses.

📊 Applying DMAIC to Safety-Critical Environments

How the Six Sigma DMAIC framework (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) can be practically applied to safety investigations in high-stakes industries like space exploration, pharma, and food manufacturing.

📈 Metrics That Predict Failure

The difference between merely fixing a problem and actively preventing risk. Lee breaks down how to establish the KPIs and metrics that actually matter so organizations can predict failures before they ever happen.

📚 Resources & Contact

To go deeper into Lee’s work and problem-solving methodology, explore the following links:

* Website: www.leecampe.com

* LinkedIn: Lee Campe

* YouTube

In this episode, investigative journalist and author Justin Mikulka breaks down the hidden dangers of crude-by-rail transport, the systematic erosion of safety regulations, and why the rail industry often treats disasters as cheaper than accident prevention.

About the Guest

Justin Mikulka is a former civil engineer turned investigative journalist. He is the author of Bomb Trains: How Industry Greed and Regulatory Failure Put the Public at Risk. His reporting extensively covers the dangers of crude-by-rail transport, the environmental risks of the energy industry, and the “regulatory capture” of the safety agencies meant to protect the public.

Key Takeaways:

🚂 The Origin of “Bomb Trains”

The terrifying term "bomb train" wasn't coined by environmentalists or media watchdogs; it originated from the rail workers themselves, highlighting how unsafe the frontline operators feel doing their own jobs.

📑 Dangerous Regulatory Loopholes

Despite carrying highly toxic chemicals like vinyl chloride, the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, was not legally classified as a “High-Hazard Flammable Train” (HHFT). This classification loophole allows the industry to keep local first responders completely in the dark and unprepared for worst-case scenarios.

💰 Cost Over Prevention

Technology exists to make trains significantly safer, such as Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes, which deliver faster, synchronized stopping compared to the 19th-century air brakes currently in use. However, aggressive industry lobbying successfully rolled back ECP requirements, pointing to a business model that treats catastrophic accidents as cheaper than upgrading safety equipment.

🛢️ The Bakken Crude Threat

Following the devastating 2013 Lac-Mégantic disaster that killed 47 people, investigations revealed how highly volatile Bakken crude oil poses a far more explosive threat than conventional oil when transported by rail.

📚 Resources & Contact

To learn more about Justin’s investigative reporting and the regulatory failures in the rail industry, explore the following resources:

* Website: justinmikulka.com

* Book: Bomb Trains: How Industry Greed and Regulatory Failure Put the Public at Risk

* Current writing: Powering the Planet

* Reporting: DeSmog

* Social: Bluesky

In this episode, NASA veterans Dr. Jim Peters and Dr. Lou Carfagno from the Space Leadership Institute pull back the curtain on human spaceflight safety, commercial space partnerships, and what heavy industry and commercial business can learn from the cosmos.

You’ll find out:

* When the margin for error is absolute zero, how do you prevent emotional bias from overriding logical risk management?

* And more importantly, how can leaders on Earth apply these same mission-critical principles to protect their own operations?

About the Guest

Dr. Jim Peters retired from NASA after a 29-year career in human spaceflight, where he led the Shuttle Return-to-Flight debris risk integration after the Columbia accident and served as the Commercial Crew Program Risk Manager. A former nuclear submarine officer on the USS Hyman G. Rickover, he also successfully applied NASA's strict risk frameworks to the private sector as the owner and President of Quasar Data Center.

Dr. Lou Carfagno is a human spaceflight training and safety expert. With a background supporting top-secret SR-71 and U-2 spy plane missions as an aerospace physiology specialist, he transitioned to NASA as a spacesuit engineer. He is a recipient of the prestigious NASA Silver Snoopy award, recognizing his outstanding contributions to astronaut safety.

Key Takeaways:

🧠 Emotion vs. Logic in Risk Management

Humans are notoriously bad at intuitively judging risk—we fear highly publicized, rare events like plane crashes or shark attacks while ignoring the higher statistical risk of driving to the grocery store. NASA combats this emotional bias by relying heavily on Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) models to make purely logical, data-informed decisions.

🏭 Translating Space to Business

The core principles of NASA's risk mitigation—identifying, prioritizing, mitigating, and monitoring risks—apply directly to the private sector. Jim successfully translated these exact models from the space shuttle program to manage zero-day cybersecurity threats, power, and cooling risks at his commercial data center.

👨‍🚀 The 5-Inch Margin of Error

Engineering for space means fighting an environment that actively wants to kill you. Spacesuits aren't just about survival; they require an exact modular fit (measured in 1/8th-inch increments) to ensure astronauts can maneuver switches without losing fingernails or rolling around the suit's fiberglass torso like a ping-pong ball.

🚀 The New Era of Commercial Space

The partnership with commercial entities like SpaceX has fundamentally changed spaceflight. Instead of NASA completely controlling all design and operations, it acts more like a customer "paying for seats," while transferring shared responsibility to commercial partners by heavily enforcing "loss of crew" and "loss of mission" requirements.

📚 Resources & Contact

To learn more about Jim and Lou’s work translating space protocols to terrestrial leadership, explore the following links:

* The Space Guys: thespaceguys.com

* Space Leadership Institute: spaceleadershipinstitute.com

* Connect with Lou: LinkedIn

* Connect with Jim: LinkedIn

When we think about industrial safety, we often picture hard hats, steel-toed boots, and rigid protocols, but the future of safety isn't just physical—it’s psychological. In this episode, Dr. Emily J. Haas, Associate Director for Science at CDC/NIOSH’s Division of Safety Research, shares how to turn safety research into practical, real-world changes in frontline behavior.

About the Guest

Dr. Emily J. Haas is the Associate Director for Science at CDC/NIOSH’s Division of Safety Research and a leading voice in implementation science. Her pioneering work turning safety research into practical results in the mining industry has earned her the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and the Service to America Medal. She is also the editor of the Mine Safety and Health Handbook: Approaches from the Field.

Key Takeaways:

🧠 The Psychology of Safety

The future of industrial safety relies on implementation and behavioral science to turn safety research into real changes in frontline behavior rather than just enforcing rules.

👁️ Making Invisible Risks Visible

Showing workers real-time data regarding invisible dangers, like dust exposure, changes their behavior faster and more effectively than a thousand traditional safety lectures.

🤖 Navigating the AI Hype

While AI and predictive analytics have massive potential to modernize safety systems, leaders must understand where the technology is genuinely improving outcomes and where it is still overhyped.

🤝 Building Trust in New Technology

There is a crucial difference between simply having a safety system and having a workforce that actually trusts it. Rolling out new safety tech requires prioritizing worker trust, fairness, and well-being to avoid creating resistance or anxiety.

📚 Resources & Contact

To dive deeper into Dr. Haas's research on implementation science, trust, and safety culture, explore the following resources:

* Service to America Medal Honoree: Emily Joy Haas, Ph.D.

* PECASE Award Feature: Emily Haas Awarded PECASE

* Research on Safety in Coal vs. Metal Mines: Read the study

* Research on Real-Time Dust Exposure: Read the study

* Research on Trust and Technology Integration: Read the study

We used to think the greatest danger of artificial intelligence was that it might make a mistake. We were wrong. The real danger is what happens when the AI knows exactly what it is doing, recognizes that it is breaking the rules, and decides to do it anyway.

Can we stop smart systems from making disastrous decisions?

Listen to Jowanza and Joe exploring the exact dilemma.

Four Key Patterns Discussed:

* Technical complexity acts as a shield against accountability: The "Black Box" nature of AI techniques like deep learning creates a lack of transparency, allowing organizations to avoid responsibility. This leads to an "Accountability Gap" where leadership is shielded from liability, and responsibility is pushed down to low-level users who lack the authority to manage the risks.

* Models gain unearned authority through opacity: The "Illusion of Objectivity" causes users to accept probabilistic or biased AI outputs as objective truth simply because they cannot see the data "shuffle". As a result, organizations hand over real decision-making authority and sensitive access to AI agents.

* Optimizing symptoms instead of root causes: AI organizations often optimize for symptoms rather than root causes, which is particularly risky in high-stakes environments like manufacturing.

This live session is a follow-up to Episode 6 of Industrial Risk: Beyond the Blueprint, featuring Joe Flood. The core discussion anchors on the RAND Corporation’s 1970s fire department optimization model—which negatively impacted NYC neighborhoods by closing stations where they were most needed—and compares it to modern AI.

In this episode, Taras "Terry" Szmagala Jr., recently retired Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Eaton , shares how cross-functional integration of legal, compliance, and communications is the key to navigating global industrial risk.

About the Guest

Taras ("Terry") Szmagala Jr. is the founder of TGS Advisory, where he helps organizations build critical government affairs capabilities. From 2022 to 2025, he served as the Chief Legal Officer at Eaton, a global intelligent power management company. Prior to that, he led Eaton’s global corporate communications and government affairs, representing the company at federal, state, and local levels worldwide. Terry’s unique perspective is shaped by decades of corporate leadership and early-career experience working in Ukraine during its massive political transition in the 1990s.

Key Takeaways:

🏛️ Policy as Strategy

Companies must move away from reactive crisis management and treat government affairs as a strategic function essential to long-term operations.

🤝 The Danger of Silos

Separating legal, compliance, and communications into different departments is dangerous; combining them allows leaders to spot emerging risks much faster.

🚩 Ethical Red Flags

Organizations can pass their audits while their culture is becoming fragile. Terry highlights the subtle warning signs that ethical governance is at risk.

🚩 Red Flags in Audits

“Low rates” can be a dangerous metric for success if the underlying classification codes or audit data are incorrect.

📊 The ESG Implementation Gap

While boards often make ambitious ESG promises, government affairs expertise is required to bridge the gap between high-level intentions and measurable outcomes.

🔍 Prioritizing Threats

For companies operating across multiple international jurisdictions, the challenge is filtering through political noise to identify the specific policy shifts that could actually halt operations.

📚 Resources & Contact

To learn more about Terry’s work and his insights on navigating regulatory uncertainty, explore the following resources:

* Website: www.tgsadvisory.com

* LinkedIn: Taras Szmagala