Over the next month, I will be writing about a shift in mining safety law that many senior executives are still absorbing, and why the typical response will not be enough. The regulator's question after a serious incident was often framed, roughly, as: 'Did you have a system?' Procedures, attestations, and audit cycles defended the operator and the individual officer. They are still necessary but no longer sufficient. What is changing is the level at which accountability is a

More often than we would like, we encounter the following: digital twins in control rooms, predictive maintenance on major fleets, and short-interval control systems streaming KPIs onto large displays. Each initiative was supported by a business case promising increased output or reduced cost per ton. Yet the gains are often far smaller than expected, and in some cases drift backwards over time. This concern is now prominent enough to feature in EY’s annual mining risk rankin

Three workforce statistics from three continents. Curtin University's MARS Study of more than 2,500 Western Australian mining workers found that one in three is emotionally exhausted, one in three intends to leave the industry, and managers score worst on both. South African mining: 29% of workers report moderate to severe anxiety or depression. Xinjiang coal: 20% screen for severe occupational stress, with leadership again hit hardest. These workforce trends are not just HR

Mining has changed over the last two decades, and not always for the better. I asked a group of about 50 mine managers to recall a time when they couldn't wait to get back to work after a holiday. In other words, when work was fun. One attendee raised a hand. The why: two forces stacked over a generation. Force one. Balanced capacity production chains. Cheaper cloud and computing made far more data available, which was used to balance capacity across the production chain. The

I asked about 50 mine managers to recall a time when they couldn't wait to get back to work after a holiday. One hand went up. Two forces, stacked over a generation, explain why. Force One. Cheaper data made it possible to balance capacity across the production chain. The protective buffers the old hands kept got stripped out. In a highly variable, interdependent environment, that produces starvation, blockage, and lost tons that cannot be recovered inside the period. Forc

In the previous post, Joel recommended every COO confirm three things before committing to a plan: 1. Where does the true bottleneck sit? 2. Is that the right place for it? 3. Ensure your resourcing and mine plan is designed in such a way that the bottleneck is supported as best as possible. Joel's three questions aren't just another checklist. They tell you whether you're signing off on a plan or a fantasy. I’ve recently worked through one of the most thorough treatments of

Nobody discusses this part. When a mine regularly misses its production target, the target is reduced and resourcing follows. That's obvious. What's less obvious is how this affects the people who keep the operation running. They've been working flat out, coming in early, covering gaps, solving problems that never should have reached them. Then the message arrives: the target they couldn't hit has been lowered, and so has the resourcing. Think about what that conveys. Not "we

Let me say something directly: you didn’t design this problem. The KPI structures that create coordination failures at the constraint weren’t invented by your current leadership team. They grew out of decades of perfectly reasonable logic: → Industry benchmarks that measure departments independently → Financial thinking that treats utilisation as a universal good → ERP systems that optimise each node without seeing the chain → Years of “best practice” that made local efficien

A VP commented: "We spent 18 months thinking we had an execution problem. Turned out we had a decision rights problem." His GM could identify the constraint. His department heads were capable. But when their KPIs conflicted—which happened daily—there was no clear call on who decided what gave way. So everyone optimised locally and hoped the system would sort itself out. From the portfolio level, it looked like the usual suspects: Variability. Departments not collaborating. Th

A VP told me recently: “My managers are already empowered.” He meant it. And he’s probably right. His mine managers can make hiring decisions. They control their budgets. They can stop work for safety. They have authority over their domains. But here’s what I’ve noticed across dozens of sites: The decisions that fragment the system don’t happen in the mine manager’s office. They happen in the 6am maintenance planning meeting. The shift handover. The scheduling session. Dozens

Bain recently asked executives from miners worth a combined $300bn what matters most for improving site operations. Technology came dead last. What topped the list: → Buy-in from the front line and management → Understanding what actually creates value → Stable leadership No surprise there. Most executives I speak with already know this. The question isn’t whether people matter more than systems. It’s why capable people, with good intentions, still can’t get alignment to stic

EY has released its 2026 mining risks report. For the first time, operational complexity is top of the list, and now ahead of geopolitics, capital access, and workforce challenges. Their diagnosis resonates: deeper orebodies, declining grades, aging assets, variable output. Mine operators suffer this complexity daily. I would like to offer a different perspective, with a better solution. The complexity we feel is not only in the orebody, but also in our management systems.

"It wasn't the 23% output increase that surprised me. It was the calm and absence of stress." This is what a mine executive said to me last year. After eighteen months of watching a fixable problem persist, his CEO finally put something in writing: authorisation to prioritise system flow when departmental KPIs conflicted. What happened next was not just breakthrough; it was a collapse of the firefighting mode they were always in. Departments that had been locked in quiet comb

I recently spoke to a group of mine managers about why their job is so hard. The answer isn't geology. It isn't equipment. It isn't people. It's arithmetic. The Challenge of KPIs in Mining Operations Here's what most boards don't realise: the KPIs they cascade down are mathematically incompatible. A typical GM is handed targets that demand: 75-85% utilisation on drilling 75-85% utilisation on trucks 75-85% utilisation on the plant Hit monthly tonnage These aren't made-up numb

In my previous article, I made a point that stings a bit: You can feed what you think are P50 assumptions into a stochastic engine… and discover that your “P50” completion date behaves more like P02 in the real world. The tool hasn’t failed — it’s calmly telling you the system you’re planning is physically incapable of delivering the promise with any reasonable confidence. That’s why some executives feel burned by “better planning” investments: they improved the modelling, bu

In the previous post , we looked at why so many mine plans break by Wednesday, and how Flow (TOC) changes the physics of the system so plans actually have a chance. We showed that when you stop “balancing capacity” and instead: Put the true constraint at the centre, Protect it with buffers and protective capacity , and Align KPIs to Flow rather than local utilisation, You move from brittle, KPI-driven chaos to Superflow – higher tonnes, at lower cost/tonne, with less firef

Fix the physics with Flow (TOC), then let stochastic planning keep it honest Walk into almost any mine and you’ll hear some version of the same story: The monthly plan looks solid. By Wednesday of Week 1, it’s already broken. Planning says, “Operations won’t follow the plan.” Operations say, “Planning builds fantasy schedules.” Behind the finger-pointing is a shared frustration: plans have almost no shelf life . We believe the core problem is not discipline, or even modelli

1. Introduction Over the last two decades , there has been a substantial decrease in mining fatalities . This trend, however, has levelled out and stubbornly resists further improvement . Automation and removing humans from dangerous situations remain viable levers, but justifying the cost can be a constraint for smaller organisations. Figure 1 illustrates the decline and levelling out of fatalities as well as a reduction in mining productivity over the same time peri

This is the sixth article in our series on The KPI Trap . 1. In Article 1 , we introduced the trap: how local, functional KPIs create silos and conflict, preventing focus on the actual constraint. 2. In Article 2 , we mapped the "vicious cycle" that this creates, in which rational local decisions erode trust and guarantee systemic failure. 3. In Article 3 , we showed why teams embrace the solution, "Flow KPIs," because it turns work into a game with clear pu

Most mines don’t need more dashboards that measure outputs (outputs are the consequence of focussed actions), they need a MOS that manages FLOW so tonnes, unit cost, and the teams unified focus on achieving plan can move together. If your dashboards are green but your averate output is flat, your MOS is likely optimising local efficiency instead of mine-wide throughput. Let’s build the case for keeping your MOS and upgrade it to a FLOW-Centred MOS that uses the constraint a