Rob Karpati

Be open, honest, transparent. People are smart - they know whether they are being respected and whether approaches take their considerations into account. Trust is built gradually, it takes time, but building trust is fundamentally about long-term earnest honest engagement. This is incidentally true in any stakeholder dialogue, not just with communities that neighbour mines.

There are no shortcuts to building trust. Earnest engagement, listening to and respecting the concerns of communities is essential. Engagement solutions need to reflect multiple interests, where communities feel like they have been heard. This process takes time, requires transparency as well as structure. The goal is to progress at the ‘speed of trust,’ which means building trust earnestly without taking shortcuts that erode relationships in the long term.

We live in a world with increasing uncertainty combined with complexity. Understanding the nature and the sources of uncertainty helps in managing variability. Systems, whether within a company, an industry or across a country are all integrated in different ways, with process variability being a natural feature of how they work. Systems thinking, which starts with increasing understanding of how interactions across integrated processes work, is the start for understanding and ultimately knowing how to manage the variability that results from the process.

Embedding a sustainability focus in a company is cultural - building value for the concepts, respect for stakeholder engagement, capacity fir effectively integrating stakeholders into broader strategy and executing against this strategy. A company that isn’t clear on how it will bake sustainability into the DNA of its broader culture is a company that won’t be operating sustainably over time. A cultural focus starts with leadership, the board and c-suite. Understanding whether they value and insistent on sustainability in the organization is the start of understanding whether the company is intent on sustainability integration into corporate culture.

Be clear about theories of change, combining facts and transparent assumptions in cohesive ways. Sceptics may disagree, but facts and clear assumptions can be the basis for conversations that highlight how sustainable focus on stakeholders can add value, or put differently how doing good can contribute toward doing well.

Focusing on the critical few KPI’s starts with understanding what can improve act strategy positively or negatively. KPI’s support replanning as well as accountability, replanning in the sense that an organization learns from successes as well as failures, and accountabilities because analysis of results ties directly to validating contributions of individuals.