Our industry is built on experience. Each edition, we feature someone who knows their field inside and out, sharing the knowledge they’ve gained over many years. From practical advice to lessons learned the hard way, this is insight you won’t find in a manual. This month we hear from Ned Stephenson, Principal at Behavioural Blueprint.
Something goes wrong somewhere on the site and, almost by reflex, the machine responds. A new form appears, a procedure gets revised, another sign-off is added, and before long a flowchart no one asked for has drifted into the job like silt after rain. On paper, this looks smart. A gap’s been closed, and another control added. Which is precisely why the pattern is hard to challenge.
Out where the work is happening, however, a different story is unfolding. People are trying to run a plant, manage a pit, watch changing conditions, answer questions, keep things moving, and make a hundred small decisions before crib. Meanwhile, the folder gets thicker, the processes heavier, and the work itself is a little harder to see beneath the formality building around it.
Compliance is supposed to support judgement, not replace it. Yet in many of our workplaces that is happening, not through some grand declaration that thinking is no longer required, but through a slow and respectable accumulation of process. The risks do not change as often as the paperwork suggests. What changes is the system with the quiet feeling that more process must mean more control.
Every system is built to stop the last failure. Few are built to preserve the thinking needed for the next one.
A crew is preparing for a task that’s not unusual, but not routine enough to be thoughtless either. The permit is there, with all the controls listed in all the right places. Someone has run through the hazards, someone else has signed where they were meant to sign, and nothing has been skipped in any obvious sense.
Yet it would take a brave person to claim that everyone standing there holds the same mental picture of the job.
One person is thinking about isolation, another is worried about time because the gear has already been down longer than planned. The supervisor, who is trying to keep things moving while fielding questions from two directions at once, is carrying a wider picture but not necessarily a shared one. The documents look complete, but the understanding around them is patchy, uneven, and probably assumed.
That’s where compliance starts to part company with judgement. The paperwork suggests the job has been thought through, and in one sense, it has. Hazards were identified and controls nominated. But none of that guarantees that the most important question has been asked in a way that lives in the minds of the people doing the work: what is most likely to catch us out here, today, in these conditions, with this combination of people, plant, pressure, and distraction?
Mining has become very good at generating evidence that a process occurred, while rather less reliable at ensuring that clear thinking occurred at the point where it mattered. Forms, permits, and checklists are useful. But none of them can notice that the weather has shifted, that the handover was vague, that one contractor is unfamiliar with the area, or that everyone is moving a little faster because the job has started to feel late. Yet people notice those things, or at least they do when they still regard noticing as part of the job rather than an optional extra once the paperwork is complete.
Why, then, do organisations keep heading in this direction? Because adding processes feels responsible. It’s visible, it’s defensible, and when boards, managers, auditors, investigators, or regulators ask what has been done, it gives the business something solid to point at.
This is what makes the problem so persistent. The people building these systems are rarely fools or careless. They’re trying to create consistency and prevent a repeat of whatever went wrong last time. The trouble is that organisational responses are strongest where they are easiest to show. Adding a requirement is easier to show than building judgement. It’s much simpler to prove that a document exists than to prove that a person genuinely understood the reality in front of them. If you’ve been in an investigation, then you know that feeling.
Systems grow toward traceability, defensibility and proof. What they do not always grow toward is clarity.
If the form is signed, the permit approved, the document current, and a briefing completed, it becomes easier to feel that the work has been made safe by the act of administration. But a documented process and a live understanding are not the same thing. One can exist in perfect order while the other is badly frayed. It’s called the illusion of control.
This is not an argument for some misty-eyed return to common sense, as though complex work could be safely managed by instinct and good intentions alone. Of course it can’t. Mining needs standards because people forget, improvise badly, drift, and vary in skill. The trouble begins when process swells to where it pushes judgement to the margins and then punishes anyone who still tries to use it.
How do we prevent pushing judgement out?
It starts with a blunt question that ought to be asked every time a new process is proposed: will this help people see the job more clearly in real conditions, where time is short and ambiguity is real, or will it merely give the business another artefact to point to afterwards?
It means stripping away what no longer earns its place. If a document exists only because nobody feels safe deleting it, that is not control. It’s sediment. If a form collects information that no one reads, uses, or acts on, it’s not helping the work. It’s obscuring it. And if a process cannot be held in mind by the people expected to use it under pressure, then whatever its intentions, it’s futile.
And reward signs of active thinking. The person who says, “This procedure does not fit today’s conditions,” should not be treated as awkward, and the supervisor who slows a job because the paperwork looks right while the situation plainly does not, should not have to defend that instinct as though it were inefficiency.
In complex environments, hesitation at the right moment is not weakness. It’s one of the last protections left when the neat version on paper has parted company with reality.
People learn by reinforcement. When the initial concern is whether the paperwork is complete, what’s that telling them. When the first questions are: what has changed, what assumptions are being made, what feels different, and what does not quite fit, a different lesson is being taught. One builds compliance. The other builds judgement.
Now for the uncomfortable part.
This drift from judgement is easy to see in others and much harder to see in ourselves. It’s obvious when a crew treats a permit like a ritual, it’s apparent when someone signs a document they’ve barely read, and it’s clear when a meeting falls into ceremony while the real issue sits untouched in the middle of the table. Those examples are easy because they belong to someone else.
At what point did your document start to feel more important than the judgement behind it? At what stage did completing the process begin to feel like the same thing as understanding the job? At what point did enough paperwork create the comforting sense that the thinking had already been done by someone, somewhere, upstream?
That’s the trap. It’s not laziness or bad intent. Thinking surrenders by increments.
Nobody announces that judgement is no longer required. It just gets used less. With a checklist, doubt relaxes. With a procedure, all questions feel answered. With an approval in place, ownership drifts somewhere else. One small offloading at a time, the mind steps back from the work and the system steps forward, and because all of this feels orderly it rarely feels dangerous.
Yet everyone in this industry has seen the team that follows every step and still misses the thing that matters. A department can be awash with controls and yet lose the habit of noticing when the situation no longer fits the script.
Remember, a procedure has one great weakness: it can only describe what is expected. It cannot think its way through what is not.
So, ask yourself: are your processes helping thought, or replacing it?
Because every system is built to stop the last failure. Once people think the real job is satisfying the process, the process quietly becomes the job instead.
| Want to learn more? Visit Behaviouralblueprint.com/insights for more on workplace psychology. |
| IN THE KNOW: FAST FACTS – A signed form can prove completion, not comprehension – Checklists support memory. They do not replace judgement – More controls can create less clarity under pressure – Procedure handles the expected. Judgement handles the unexpected – Hesitation at the right moment can be protective – The questions a leader asks teaches people how to think |
