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).