1) Mining Operating System: When did mining stop being fun?
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
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 protective capacity and buffers that the old hands kept for a rainy day were taken out. In a highly interdependent production environment with inherent high variability in each part's output, balanced capacity chains lead to starvation and bottleneck blockage. Lost tons cannot be recovered inside the financial period. Pressure builds across the entire chain. Every department now needs attention and coordination, overloading what Goldratt called the Managerial Span of Attention.
The outcome is visible in McKinsey's MineLens Productivity Index. Even after stripping out lower-grade and deeper mines, global mining productivity was roughly 25% below 2004 levels by 2015. It has recovered since, but remains well below the previous best.
The same trend showed up across Fortune 500 companies. Yves Morieux of BCG explains how. In the 1950s, senior executives carried 4 to 7 performance imperatives. Today, 25 to 50, many of them are in conflict. Mining followed. A modern mine site can track 50+ metrics every day.
We work harder, with more data, more dashboards and more meetings, and produce less.
Force two. A flattened organisation, without changes in how work is planned and coordinated.
After 2008 and the 2011 to 2016 downturn, the cuts went deep. Anglo American restructured toward a workforce two-thirds smaller. Rio Tinto's capex halved. The reduction nobody celebrated was the layer of superintendents, planners and coordinators. The people who connect work. Then prices recovered. The layer did not come back.
Morieux's other number now matters. Managers spend 40% of their time on reports, 30% in meetings, and only 30% actually managing. Subtract the GFC layers, and you have a bottleneck in management attention itself.
The human cost is now measurable on three continents.
Curtin University's MARS Study (WA, 2,500+ workers) found that one in three were emotionally exhausted, one in three intended to leave, with managers the worst affected. South African mining: 29% of workers with moderate-to-severe anxiety or depression. Xinjiang coal: 20% of workers with severe occupational stress, leadership scoring highest.
Which brings us to the EY 2026 Top 10 Risks and Opportunities for Mining and Metals:
1. Operational complexity
2. Costs and productivity
3. Capital
4. Resource and reserve depletion
5. License to operate
6. Workforce
7. Geopolitics
8. Digital and innovation
9. Sustainability
10. Changing business models
Read the top three through the lens of the two forces.
Operational complexity (#1) is the chosen operational structure, a balanced capacity chain, interacting with a highly variable, interdependent mining environment. Variation collides with a lack of protective capacity, throughput drops, and managerial attention is overwhelmed.
Costs and productivity (#2) track lost tons. When the bottleneck starves or blocks, fixed costs spread across fewer tons. Cost per ton goes up, productivity goes down.
Capital (#3) follows. High variation in cost and output forecasts is read by capital markets as risk, and the cost of capital climbs. The sector's WACC is now 8 to 10%, more than double that of large technology peers.
In the posts that follow, I will work through these risks and show how Force One and Force Two are foundational to most, which is fortunate, since we can address them with limited resources. Workforce shortages bite harder when the connective layer is gone. Digital and AI investments fail to deliver ROI when bolted onto a balanced chain. Sustainability and license to operate stall when management attention is already saturated.
Mining stopped being fun because the operating system stopped giving employees the three things Daniel Pink names as the foundations of motivation: purpose, mastery and autonomy. A balanced capacity chain run by a thinned-out management layer strips out all three. Root causes are easier to fix than a symptom-by-symptom firefight, and that is what the rest of this series is about.
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