Last week I attended IMARC 2018 and then the Minerals Council of Australia’s Environment and Communities Forum in Melbourne. I came away pretty exhausted which is always a good sign – although I don’t know about you but I also spend those weeks stressing about the work I’m not doing and the email stacking up!
For me there were a few things that were particularly interesting from the week. A standout was that I heard quite a bit of talk from industry about telling the story of mining in more compelling ways. Stories are powerful and proactively engaging the world around you is of course important. But back in the office I was reflecting a bit on the difference between the stories I share in professional contexts compared to those I share in personal contexts – as you can imagine they are usually a bit different.
In a professional context I’m usually sharing stories from the field about communities, or the challenges I see within companies or seeking to understand more about how our customers and peers are solving/seeing problems. In personal contexts the stories about work usually revolve around my tendency to leave things in hotels, the challenge of ‘getting it all done’, or how I spent an hour driving to Paraburdoo instead of Pannawonica after several long flights (in case you don’t know the Pilbara, they’re not exactly adjacent).
So, professional versus personal – different contexts, different content for different purposes. For me, when I try to think about how to take some of what we know about how relationships at small scales work into larger scales like company or industry to community, these differences are helpful to reflect on.
Our work shows us that building trust with communities leads to greater levels of acceptance (or social licence) – and building trust is, in part, dependent on how comfortable we are in being vulnerable with communities (and knowing they will not take advantage of that to hurt you).
It’s really hard to demonstrate that we trust others (and are trustworthy ourselves) when we are only sharing the best, most curated and managed version of ourselves. For industry, this could mean telling stories about how it created and then resolved challenges that matter to communities – to share a bit about ‘that time we got a bit lost’ as well as ‘how great we usually are at reading maps’.
Of course, that can be pretty tough to do through a tight corporate lens, but the benefits can be significant and this process can start in small ways in spaces where we feel safer to practice what it feels like to be vulnerable. I heard a couple of examples last week where companies were asking their leaders to practice being a little more vulnerable within their teams to build trust at that level – my experience tells me these companies cope much better with the vulnerability that seeking genuine engagement with communities inevitably brings. That is no accident – they have practiced, in small ways, at small scales, how to share things about themselves.
Effectively, sharing three dimensional, authentic accounts of the struggle to achieve our goals makes companies and industry not only more relatable but also demonstrates you trust communities (of all kinds) not to use that against you – having the courage to trust the outside world is a key part of becoming an integrated and valued part of it. This is important because I also heard a lot last week about ‘needing to build trust’ with communities and stakeholders in the mining industry – that’s pretty hard when you don’t trust them first.
