You’ve just been given the assignment:

As Vice President of Global Environmental, Health, and Safety, of a Fortune 500 manufacturing company, you are expected to transform a globally distributed function into a proactive, resilient, and business-aligned capability. Your mandate is explicit: drive a cultural shift toward proactive safety, embed EHS excellence into the company’s operating DNA, modernize global standards, leverage advanced data analytics, redesign performance metrics, and align EHS efforts with long-term business objectives. You are also expected to integrate external benchmarks, foster cross-functional collaboration, and elevate performance across every region and function.

This is not a program refresh.
It is not a compliance initiative.
It is an operating-model transformation.

And it exists because the systems that once kept organizations safe are increasingly fragile in ways we don’t always see.

Why This Assignment Exists Now

Organizations today operate in an environment defined by rising asset complexity, accelerating automation, thinning workforce experience, tighter margins, and near-zero tolerance for catastrophic risk. At the same time, regulators, investors, and boards expect not just compliance, but demonstrable control of operational risk.

The challenge is that many EHS management systems appear strong. Procedures are in place. Audits are clean. Injury rates are low. Yet incidents—often severe ones—continue to occur in organizations that believed they were well controlled.

This is the hallmark of system fragility: systems that look stable under normal conditions but fail abruptly under stress. The assignment you’ve been given exists because traditional EHS models, while necessary, were not designed for today’s pace, complexity, and uncertainty.

The First Insight: This Is Not an EHS Problem

One of the earliest realizations in this role is that you cannot transform EHS by “fixing EHS.”

Most legacy EHS management systems were designed for predictability. They assume hazards can be fully anticipated, work can be standardized, and compliance equals control. In reality, modern operations rely heavily on human adaptation—adjusting to degraded equipment, time pressure, staffing gaps, and conflicting priorities.

Fragility emerges when EHS systems:

• Rely on procedures that describe work as imagined, not work as done
• Treat adaptation as deviation rather than necessity
• Depend on lagging indicators that mask accumulating risk
• Use static risk assessments in dynamic operating environments

Under these conditions, the system absorbs stress quietly—until it can’t. Transformation stalls when leaders mistake the absence of incidents for the presence of control.

Reframing the Mission: From Compliance to Managing System Fragility

True transformation begins by reframing the EHS mission in language the business understands:

Protect people, safeguard operations, and preserve enterprise value by keeping the organization within safe operating boundaries.

This reframing is critical because fragility is not eliminated by more rules—it is reduced by understanding system limits, monitoring drift, and strengthening controls before failure occurs. When EHS is positioned as a capability that manages system health and risk exposure, it aligns naturally with operations, engineering, finance, and strategy.

Safety becomes inseparable from operational reliability and asset integrity. EHS evolves from a reporting function into a risk intelligence function.

What Changes—and Why It Matters

At its core, the transformation is a shift in how organizations think about control:

Traditional EHS Systems

• Reactive and event-driven
• Focused on lagging indicators
• Built on procedural compliance
• Optimized locally

Modern, Resilient EHS Systems

• Anticipatory and risk-based
• Focused on leading indicators and weak signals
• Designed around control effectiveness and system health
• Oriented toward enterprise-level risk

In many organizations, sites with excellent injury rates carry the highest latent risk due to aging assets, deferred maintenance, or fragile controls. Traditional EHS systems rarely surface this reality. Modern EHS must.

Building a Unified Global Safety Culture That Reduces Fragility

One of the most visible expectations of the role is building a unified global safety culture. The common mistake is equating unity with uniformity.

Fragility increases when global standards force identical solutions onto different operating realities. High-performing organizations instead unify around common principles: how risk is evaluated, how escalation occurs, how leaders respond to bad news, and how learning is captured.

A unified culture exists when leaders everywhere ask the same questions about system health and control effectiveness—even when local conditions differ.

Theory to Practice: Building a Unified Global Safety Culture

Building this kind of unified culture requires deliberate action, not messaging. Leaders must define a small set of non-negotiable global principles—how risk is evaluated, what constitutes unacceptable exposure, when and how escalation occurs, and how leaders are expected to respond when controls fail. These principles must be reinforced through leadership routines: common risk review questions used at every site, standardized escalation thresholds tied to severity potential rather than injury outcomes, and consistent expectations for learning reviews that focus on system weaknesses instead of individual error. Global standards should specify intent and critical controls while allowing local teams to determine how those controls are implemented. Leadership development, performance evaluation, and recognition systems must reinforce transparency and early risk identification, making it clear that surfacing fragility is a leadership responsibility—not a failure.

Modernizing Standards: Designing for Real Work and Real Variability

Legacy global standards often describe ideal conditions and perfect execution. They become brittle when reality deviates.

Modern standards acknowledge that variability is normal and adaptation is inevitable. They are designed around:

• Critical controls, not exhaustive rules
• Intent and boundaries, not perfection
• Support for human performance under pressure

By shifting from rulebooks to decision-support frameworks, standards reduce fragility by helping people make better decisions when conditions are imperfect—which is most of the time.

Theory to Practice: Modernizing Global Standards

Modernizing standards in practice requires rethinking both their content and how they are used. Leaders must identify and explicitly define critical controls—the small number of safeguards whose failure would result in serious harm—and ensure standards clearly describe their purpose, performance expectations, and degradation signals. Standards should define decision boundaries, clarifying what must never be compromised, what requires escalation, and where informed local judgment is expected. Field validation is essential; standards must be tested against real work through frontline engagement and learning teams to ensure they reflect actual operating conditions. Finally, standards must be embedded into daily work through planning processes, digital workflows, and leadership conversations, transforming them from compliance artifacts into tools that support safe adaptation.

Leveraging Advanced Analytics: Making Fragility Visible

Fragility persists when leaders cannot see it.

Advanced analytics is transformative not because it produces better reports, but because it exposes where systems are weakening. Leading organizations use data to monitor control effectiveness, detect weak signals, and identify patterns of drift across sites and processes.

This allows leaders to intervene while risk is still manageable. When EHS analytics can answer questions like Where is risk accumulating faster than our controls? the function moves from hindsight to foresight.

Theory to Practice: Using Analytics to Reduce Fragility

Translating analytics into reduced fragility requires redefining EHS data strategy around exposure, control effectiveness, and system health rather than incident counts. This begins with identifying indicators that signal weakening controls—such as repeated temporary fixes, permit deviations, deferred maintenance, or workload saturation—and integrating data across EHS, operations, and maintenance systems. Analytics should highlight trends and variability, not rank sites by outcomes. Most importantly, organizations must institutionalize leadership routines where data is reviewed alongside operational context, enabling proactive intervention before systems drift outside safe operating boundaries.

Redesigning Metrics: From Reassurance to Governance

Metrics shape behavior—and fragile systems are often reinforced by reassuring metrics.

Low injury rates and clean audits can coexist with high exposure. Transformational EHS leaders redesign metrics to reflect:

• Risk exposure and severity potential
• Control reliability and degradation
• Learning velocity and transparency

These are not scorecards; they are governance tools. They inform capital allocation, operational priorities, and leadership focus. They help boards and executives understand whether the system is becoming stronger—or more fragile.

Theory to Practice: Redesigning EHS Metrics

Redesigning metrics requires intentional trade-offs. Organizations must reduce the prominence of lagging indicators and introduce measures that track risk exposure, quality of control verification, time-to-escalation for high-risk conditions, and the effectiveness of corrective actions. Metrics should be designed to prompt inquiry rather than judgment, encouraging leaders to ask where systems are weakening rather than who is underperforming. When metrics reward learning, transparency, and early intervention, they become stabilizing forces rather than sources of distortion.

Leadership and Culture: Where Fragility Is Either Reinforced or Reduced

The most difficult part of the assignment is cultural, and it begins with leadership.

Fragility thrives when bad news is suppressed, deviations are punished, and leaders reward the appearance of control over insight. Resilient organizations do the opposite. Leaders signal that early warning is valued, that learning outweighs blame, and that system weaknesses are leadership problems—not worker failures.

Accountability shifts from who failed to how the system allowed failure to develop. Ownership replaces enforcement.

Theory to Practice: Leading for Resilience

Reducing fragility depends on how leaders behave when risk is surfaced. Leaders must be trained and evaluated on their ability to respond constructively to weak signals—rewarding early escalation, probing for system contributors, and resisting the urge to default to individual accountability. This requires consistent leadership routines: asking the same risk-focused questions at every level, participating in learning reviews, and visibly prioritizing control reliability. Over time, these behaviors create trust and ensure that risk is addressed before it manifests as harm.

The Real Outcome of the Assignment

The assignment has already been given. The only question is whether organizations are willing to change how EHS is led.

If the transformation is successful, the result is not simply fewer incidents or better audit scores.

It is an organization that understands its own limits, detects drift early, and adapts without losing control. Leaders make better decisions under uncertainty. Operations become more reliable. EHS is recognized not as a compliance function, but as a discipline that actively reduces fragility and protects enterprise value.

Ultimately, this assignment asks a deeper question:

Will EHS remain a function that reports on safety—or will it become a leadership capability that strengthens the systems the business depends on?

In today’s operating reality, only one of those models is sufficient.

Selected References: Foundations for Modern, Resilient EHS Leadership

1. Work-as-Done vs. Work-as-Imagined

(Safety-II, Resilience Engineering, System Fragility)
Supports article sections on fragility, real work, standards design, and system drift.

• Hollnagel, E. Safety-I and Safety-II: The Past and Future of Safety Management.
  Foundational framework for shifting EHS from rule compliance to managing system performance under variability.
• Dekker, S. Drift into Failure (2nd ed.).
  Explains how organizations gradually migrate toward risk despite procedures and controls.
• Woods, D. et al. Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts.
  Establishes adaptive capacity and brittleness as core properties of complex systems.

2. Human & Organizational Performance (HOP 2.0)

(System Learning, Weak Signals, Predictive EHS)
Supports sections on leadership behavior, learning, and early risk detection.

• Conklin, T. The 5 Principles of Human Performance.
  Widely adopted operational model reframing incidents as system outcomes rather than human failure.
• Dekker, Hollnagel, Woods. Human Factors and Safety Science: A Decade of Progress.
  Connects human performance, system design, and modern operational complexity.
• Conklin et al. Pre-Accident Investigation Framework.
  Practical methodology for event-free learning and identifying latent system weaknesses.

3. Adaptive & Dynamic Risk Management

(From Static Assessments to Live Risk Awareness)
Supports sections on analytics, leading indicators, and managing drift.

• Hollnagel, E. Resilience Engineering in Practice.
  Practical guidance for continuous monitoring of system performance and control effectiveness.
• NASA – Dynamic Risk Assessment and Control (DRAC) methodologies.
  Applied models for real-time risk evaluation in high-consequence environments.
• NATO STO / Military Adaptive Risk Doctrine (post-2019).
  Influential in shaping continuous risk sensing and decision-making under uncertainty.

4. Agile & Lean Portfolio Management for EHS

(Operating-Model Transformation, Not Programs)
Supports sections on governance, prioritization, and transformation execution.

• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) – Lean Portfolio Management.
  Increasingly used to manage EHS initiatives as value streams aligned with enterprise priorities.
• McKinsey & Company. Agile at Scale (Operations & Risk applications).
  Practical guidance for integrating EHS into enterprise transformation efforts.
• LNS Research. EHS 4.0 / Industrial Transformation.
  Strong applied linkage between digital operations, EHS governance, and analytics.

5. High-Reliability Operating Systems (HRO 2.0)

(From Culture to Integrated Control)
Supports sections on leadership, escalation, and enterprise risk governance.

• Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K. Managing the Unexpected (updated editions).
  Foundational HRO principles informing leadership behavior and risk sensitivity.
• INPO / DOE High-Reliability Models (post-COVID updates).
  Applied in nuclear, energy, and chemical sectors with integrated operations and EHS oversight.
• MIT Sloan Management Review. Digital Operations & Reliability research.
  Connects HRO principles with real-time analytics and operational control centers.

6. Risk-Based Prioritization & Value-at-Risk (VaR) Models

(Board-Relevant EHS Governance)
Supports sections on metrics, governance, and enterprise value protection.

• COSO. Enterprise Risk Management (2017–2023 updates).
  Framework for translating operational risk into strategic and financial impact.
• McKinsey & Company. Risk as a Strategic Capability.
  Widely used to connect operational risk to EBITDA and enterprise value.
• CCPS / API RP 754. Risk-based and severity-weighted process safety metrics.
  Practical tools for exposure-based prioritization beyond injury rates.

7. Digital Learning & Just-in-Time Competence

(Reducing the Gap Between Knowing and Doing)
Supports sections on standards, human performance, and control reliability.

• Ericsson, A. et al. Peak.
  Applied research underpinning microlearning, field-based coaching, and skill sustainment.
• PwC / Accenture. Digital workforce enablement (AR, AI task guidance).
  Practical deployment models in manufacturing, energy, and infrastructure sectors.
• ILO / EU-OSHA. Digitalization of Occupational Safety and Health (post-2020).
  Applied guidance on AI-supported learning and competence in modern work systems.