People make around 50 mistakes a day, just not all of them have consequences.

Most people have loss aversion cognitive bias, so they feel losses, twice as hard as gains.

We’re all human. We all make mistakes and forget things. Our attention span is limited. We overlook key information when making decisions. We get distracted, bored, tired or preoccupied. We mishear and misunderstand.

It is in these reasons why technology is making our lives safer, more productive and allows us to do greater things that are better with humans doing them.

Part of this is why mobile phones have changed our lives. If we need to get somewhere, we way find, if we need an answer, we search it, and if we need reach someone we call, message or email them.  Smartphones highest use of digital device over computers and think of the productivity that has come from this.

In knowing these benefits in productivity from technology, when it comes to technology adoption, the mining and minerals sector remains 40% less digitally mature than comparable industries.

We are struggling to attract and retain the new workforce entering the industry,  however they are used to living with digital reliance, and then switching into a foreign way of living.

• We are in a location of low to no coms, and high cost associated with change.
• We have seen so many things fail, we have become tech resistant.
• Tech often retrofitting from other industries and failing in the environment.
• Lengthy internal vendor processes, resulting in entire project teams changing roles and the project being forgotten.
• Internally built software, with lengthy time frames, often lacking design to remote environments, ongoing maintenance & change management.
• Poor change management. (which can be seen in this model)
• High contractor and mobile workforce, unfamiliar with internally built systems.

We can see the value of technology, however have ways of working we need to overcome

Some ways we can improve this and where we often see things can fail are.

Product selection – Does it add value? And make work easier for your end users, does it work offline and designed for a for the mining demographic.

Change management, communication, consultation, training, deployment & Continual review.

Accepting change will take time. We often see changes fall off in this phase, or inconsistency in driving change, before habits can be formed.

Leadership in change – holding people to account for its use, and backing the change.

Collaboration with industry – Were fortunate were in a position where global technology companies for mining are forged.  Australian software companies 60 per cent of software solutions used in mining worldwide.

If anything covid taught us, technology change can be made, when its needed, and open up new opportunities for our workers when its managed correctly.

I hope this has inspired you to be a part of the digital advancement in mining, to make safer and greater opportunities, as no matter the commodity price,