alignment. Despite rapid digital progress, evidence suggests that human leadership capabilities remain central to translating technological intelligence into safe and resilient operational outcomes. These developments highlight a critical tension: while digital technologies expand analytical capabilities and operational visibility, they do not automatically translate into improved safety performance. The effectiveness of smart mining systems ultimately depends on how leaders integrate technological intelligence with human judgment, communication, and long-term organizational alignment. This unresolved tension points to a structural gap in current practice. In Latin American mining context, particularly in highly contractor and intensive environments, such as Peru, this integration challenge becomes more visible. Digital tools may be deployed unevenly across organizational layers, increasing coordination complexity and exposing leaderships capability gaps rather purely technological limitation. 3. IMPROVEMENT A persistent gap exists between the availability of digital safety information and the human capability to interpret, contextualize, and act on that information under real operational conditions. Over-reliance on automated recommendations may reduce critical thinking and situational awareness, while insufficient attention to communication and trust can limit reporting and learning. Furthermore, digital initiatives often overlook the organizational risks introduced by change, such as cognitive overload, resistance, and misalignment between operators and contractors. This gap highlights the need for a structured leadership model that integrates digital intelligence with human-centered competencies and responsible change management. 4. CONTRIBUTION This paper contributes a structured Human + Digital Safety Leadership Model grounded in three leadership pillars relevant to smart mining, and an exploratory empirical baseline from Peru that characterizes current practices, perceived outcomes, and barriers across operators and contractors. The contribution supports leadership development and implementation strategies that align digital transformation with sustainable safety performance, addressing both technological opportunities and human risks. Rather than proposing technology adoption as a primary solution, this paper argues that leadership capability maturity conditions the safety return on digital investment. In this sense, the Human + Digital model reframes digital transformation as a leadership development challenge as much a technological one. Beyond empirical characterization, this paper introduces an operationalized leadership framework that enables mining organizations to diagnose their Human + Digital maturity, 32
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