Commitment precedes performance: Your people hold the key to digital transformation Terry Henrikson, General Manager, Asia Pacific, Commit Works
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s the mining industry continues to deal with disruption from the pandemic, mines around the world are adjusting in a still-uncertain environment to recover their business and scale quickly. They’re implementing new protocols around worker safety and reimagining the “next normal” on-site, while navigating new parameters for the industry overall. COVID-19 aside, the mining industry is being shaped by major trends which cascade top-down from productivity to commitment. The industry is under pressure as resources become more scarce and harder to mine. Despite a recent profit boom, productivity increases are threatened by the challenge of managing complexity in scaled up operations with expanding workforces. In a recent article, Bain & Company identified the essential role digital transformation plays in the four key objectives mines might have post COVID-19, and offered two critical next steps leadership teams must take to achieve them. The first is shoulder-to-shoulder leader alignment. The second is one I find most relevant in work we do with mines around the world: “making sure each business unit has the capability to deliver changes from the bottom up.”
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BBMC Yearbook 2021
To mine leaders who are currently weighing their own organisation’s readiness to transform, three critical capabilities will determine the future success of any project: People, processes, and technology – in that order. People: The humanity of every project Good transformation leaders recognise early there is ‘humanity’ in every project, and regardless of the critical technology, processes and procedures being implemented, people lie at the heart of successful change. The 70% failure rate of organisational change programs to meet their objectives connects back to how committed their people were to begin with. Unless change management is given an equallycritical status, the project will stall or worse, become little more than a costly venture that generates no real value to the business.
The 70% failure rate of organisational change programs to meet their objectives connects back to how committed their people were to begin with.
