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