Hello, and welcome back to The Intelligent Miner newsletter! This month, our editorial theme is ‘working collaboratively’. The ability to work jointly on an activity or project to achieve a common goal is a very human skill, and I think it’s one that is underrated and undervalued, not just in the mining industry, but in many sectors today.
As the challenges and opportunities that mining companies face become more complex, the range of skills and knowledge required to find solutions is broadening, and often, that transcends the aptitude of a single person or team of people. As such, the ability to leverage connections both in and outside of the sector, to think in systems, and to draw upon a business network to extend a company’s own capabilities, is now future critical.
Think about it: collaboration is required to successfully educate the next generation of mining professionals, to create partnerships with communities in mining jurisdictions, to evolve regulatory requirements and to harness the power of a team to deliver new projects. Executives and boards must collaborate to govern companies in a future-fit way, actors up and down the value chain must collaborate to ascertain the ESG credentials of raw materials, and teams are increasingly leaning upon partner companies and academia as part of their innovation efforts (we’ll be exploring the value of collaboration in many of these scenarios this month).
However, human skills like collaboration, empathy and influence, cannot be taught in a classroom; they’re the product of lived experience. And therein lies a potential problem… the COVID-19 pandemic robbed many students and young professionals of valuable chances to hone these skills. The way that we collaborate is also changing. Gen Z is the most digitally connected generation in history, and members are often likely to communicate via digital technologies than to seek out face-to-face opportunities. Digital collaboration comes with its own set of nuances, upsides and downsides.
So, the question is: if the future of mining depends heavily upon collaboration, how are we going to foster this future critical skill to deliver it?
Carly
As mining challenges grow more complex, no single team holds all the answers. In this issue, we explore why the ability to think in systems and leverage networks is now ‘future critical,’ and how the industry can bridge the skills gap left by the pandemic.
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“Mining is the most basic of all human endeavours and yet we live in a world where people don’t know where things come from”
Robert Friedland