Notes from a talk given at the 13th Annual Social & Labour Plan Conference, Sandton, 25 June 2026.

Last week I spoke at the 13th Social & Labour Plan Conference in Sandton. The title I was given — “Systems Thinking, Implementation Excellence and the Future of SLP Delivery” — invites a big answer. I wanted to give a useful one instead: can SLPs make the difference, and where does the leverage actually lie?

A first impression, before the argument. The room belonged to the majors. South Africa’s mining output is concentrated — roughly thirty mining groups produce close to 80% of it — and it was those groups, and their advisers, who filled most of the seats. Their instinct is the flagship: the clinic, the bulk water scheme, the road. They have the balance sheet for it, and there is nothing wrong with it.

But it set me thinking about the operators who weren’t there in the same numbers — the smaller and junior mines I spend most of my time with. The flagship route is not a choice they get to weigh. Once you sit with that, the question of where SLPs add value starts to look different.

The scale test

Start with arithmetic, because it disciplines the conversation.

The mining industry’s entire claimed LED and social spend is somewhere around R3–5 billion a year. Set that against the numbers it is implicitly being asked to move: a national infrastructure financing shortfall the DBSA and World Bank put at roughly R13 trillion; a municipal water and sanitation backlog of about R400 billion; a municipal maintenance gap near R36 billion every year.

Put mining’s social spend on that chart and you cannot see it. That is not a criticism — it is the point. SLP spend was never development funding and was never going to close those gaps. At best it is catalytic: a small amount of money placed well enough to start something that others carry on.

If that holds for the majors with their flagship projects, it holds doubly for the junior. So the honest question is not “how do we make SLP spend bigger?” It is “how do we make a small amount of money catalytic?”

Why good intentions still disappoint

To get at that, I borrowed from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. Systems thinking asks one question of any persistent problem: what pattern is this system creating? Senge catalogued a handful of “archetypes” — recurring structures of feedback loops that reliably produce the same disappointing result, however good the intentions going in.

SLPs, I would argue, run a recognisable cascade. We promise everything at application stage, when a generous plan helps secure the right. We hit the wall — the money or capacity to deliver isn’t there. We paper over the gap with compliance rather than outcomes. We quietly do less, and targets drift down to meet what is actually happening. We shift the burden — whose fault is the shortfall? Positions harden between mine, community and regulator. And trust — the real commons — is depleted.

Each stage triggers the next, and the earlier you intervene, the cheaper the cure. The encouraging half of the picture is that the same staircase can be climbed back up. That is the Stockdale paradox from Good to Great: face the brutal facts, and never lose faith that you will prevail.

The case for the junior mine: one lane, done well

Here is my contention, aimed squarely at the part of the industry I work with.

A major can absorb a flagship project. A junior cannot, and should not pretend otherwise. When a small operation commits to infrastructure it cannot sustain, it walks straight into the cascade above — the over-promise, the wall, the paperwork, the eroded trust.

The alternative is not to do less for its own sake. It is to do one thing properly. For the junior mine, the lane that scales down without collapsing into tokenism is social entrepreneurship — backing enterprises and people who can stand on their own after the mine’s contribution ends. Treated as an investment thesis rather than a donation, it is exactly the catalytic role the scale test says is the only role available. A modest sum, placed in something that compounds, can outlast the mine itself. R4 billion deployed this way, working through an economic generation, is a different order of impact from R4 billion spent once.

Less is more

That belief shaped the simplest possible SLP I put to the conference. HRD for everyone — pervasive adult education and training, the foundation everything else stands on. HRD, fit for purpose — let each mine choose the skills its own operation and region actually need. LED in one lane — social entrepreneurship, framed as an investment thesis. And the floor stays the mine’s own duty — the social-impact mitigation in the EIA and environmental management programme is non-negotiable, and should never be counted as “development.”

Clear beats comprehensive. A junior mine that does these few things well will deliver more than one drowning in a plan it was never resourced to meet.

Who should own what

Much of the disappointment of the last two decades comes from asking one actor to carry everything. A more honest division of labour: the Department of Labour owns human resource development and employment equity — it is built for that. The DMPR concentrates on economic development, which is properly its lane. Municipalities and other organs of state do their own jobs, with infrastructure and services where they belong. Mines do business, and social entrepreneurs deliver the development work, because that is what they are good at.

To borrow again from Good to Great: get the right people on the bus first, then decide where to drive. Twenty years of SLP frustration looks a lot like the wrong people on the bus, handed ever more detailed route maps.

And the leadership the system needs is less enforcer, more facilitator — someone who measures, unblocks, coaches and shares, rather than only inspects. A whip can force compliance. Only a leader can create development.

Three roads ahead

Where do SLPs go from here? I see three roads. The likely one is that legislation keeps driving everything. The certain one is that the broader ESG journey continues regardless. The one I would wish for is “less is more.”

Running underneath all three is the change I think will matter most: AI. Used well, it is the real game-changer for small operators — the thing that finally makes sound planning, measurement and reporting affordable for a mine that could never carry a large compliance team. That is a subject for another post.

In closing

Can SLPs make the difference? Not by trying to fill gaps they were never sized to fill. But a small mine that picks one lane, treats its contribution as catalytic, and lets each actor do what only it can do — that mine can leave something behind that lasts.

Questions, challenges and better ideas are all welcome.

Gerrie Muller is a strategy facilitator and sustainability and SLP consultant at SLP4Good (www.slp4good.co.za).

Social entrepreneurship has a founding myth, and it is the wrong one. We picture the bold idea: the bridge that will connect a village, the centre that will train a generation, the park that will give children somewhere to play. We fall in love with the what. We raise money for the what. We cut ribbons in front of the what.

Then we walk away and the what dies.

Drive through any mining town in South Africa and you will find the evidence. A community hall with a padlocked door. A clinic with no nurse. A skills centre with broken windows and no electricity. A bridge to a field nobody farms. Each was built in good faith, signed off against a Social and Labour Plan, photographed, and abandoned. We call them white elephants. What we rarely admit is why they keep appearing. The problem is not budget, intention, or competence. It is the order of the questions we ask.

Social enterprise keeps starting with the what

Most social investment, and almost every SLP, begins with infrastructure. Build a bridge. Build a centre. Build a park. A thing is easy to count, easy to fund, and easy to photograph. A regulator can tick it off. A board can see it on a slide. A community can stand in front of it.

So the first question becomes what will we build? The second is how much? The third is when can we open it? Notice what is missing. Nobody asks who will run it once the contractor leaves. Nobody asks who in the community already cares about this problem enough to carry it. Nobody asks who the centre is actually for, and whether they were ever in the room.

This is the difference between charity and social entrepreneurship, and it is also where most social entrepreneurs quietly slip back into being charities. Charity delivers a thing and hopes. The entrepreneur builds something that sustains itself. You cannot build something that sustains itself if there is no one inside it with a reason to keep it alive.

Good to Great had the answer two decades ago

Jim Collins studied companies that made the leap from merely good to genuinely great and expected to find that they started with a bold strategy. He found the opposite. The great ones, he wrote, “first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats, and then they figured out where to drive it.”

First who, then what.

His insight was that the right people do not need to be tightly managed or motivated. They carry their own drive to produce results. Get them on the bus first and the question of where to drive becomes easy, because the right people find a good direction together. Get the strategy first and the people second, and you spend forever steering a bus full of passengers who never wanted to be there.

This principle matters more in social entrepreneurship than in business, not less. A company that picks the wrong strategy is punished by the market and forced to change. A social project has no such discipline. It can sit visibly broken for a decade and nobody is held to account. The only thing that keeps a social venture honest and alive is the people inside it, which is exactly why they must come first.

The who is the strategy

Shift the order and everything changes. Before you decide what to build, find who already lives the problem.

Who has been running a feeding scheme out of her own kitchen for ten years with no funding? Who is the retired teacher already tutoring children for free? Who is the young man fixing phones in a shack who could run a real business with the right backing? These people exist in every community. They are the right people, already on the bus. They have the drive Collins describes, the local trust no outsider can buy, and a reason to stay long after the consultants are gone.

This is what a social entrepreneur should actually be hunting for. Not a gap in infrastructure, but a person with proven commitment and no capital. Find them first, then ask what they need. The answer is almost never a new building. It is more often seed capital, skills, a market connection, equipment, or simply legitimacy and a little protection from the forces that grind small initiatives down. The intervention becomes lighter, cheaper, and far more durable, because it is attached to someone who will not walk away.

This is the difference between a clinic with no nurse and a community health worker who needed a fridge and a stipend. One is a monument to the what. The other is an investment in the who, and it is the only one of the two that will still be standing in three years.

What this means in practice

If you are designing a social venture, or reviewing a Social and Labour Plan, change the first meeting. Do not open with the catalogue of things you could build. Open with a map of the people already doing the work. Spend your diagnostic effort finding them rather than on a feasibility study for a structure.

Then build the venture around developing those people: ownership, governance, skills, succession. Let any infrastructure serve the people rather than the other way round. And measure the right thing. Not how many centres were opened, but how many are still alive and useful three years later, and who is running them.

The leap from good to great in social entrepreneurship is not a bigger budget or a cleverer build. It is a change in the order of the questions. Who, then what. Get it the wrong way round and you will keep cutting ribbons on buildings that are already dying. Get it right and you will back people who turn a small bit of help into something that outlasts you.

Stop building bridges to empty fields. Find the people already crossing the river, and ask them what they need.