a game of cat & mouse

The physiological game of cat and mouse currently being played out in RED was probably predictable, but I admit I didn’t see it early enough. I was sucked in by the rhetoric like most others.

The discussions between RED and the Philippine government departments are now firmly in the centre of this ‘physiological’ arena with no real winner possible, and certainly not RED if they maintain the current BOD’s. The NGO’s have picked up on the duplicity and have discovered so much more about RED/Greenstone than the Oz market could have ever done.

The cause of the current problems with RED can be ascribed to the “Peter Principle” whereby ’Every member in a hierarchical organisation climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence’. Studies on this principle (see http://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.0455v3.pdf and references) indicate that “despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organisation where the mechanism of promotion rewards the best members and where the mechanism at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other.”

Adjunct research in the Peter Principle predicts:

- Such organisations will over promote modest good news or results whilst underplaying bad news or poor results within an organisation (re: RED’s reported improvements in mining volumes over the March 2013 quarter when previous quarters attained much higher volumes vs. extreme delays in announcements to the market when there is bad news; the negligent cause of the dam failure and the problems in lifting the CDO). Some people call this marketing; the NGO’s are calling it “economical with the truth”.

- Competent employees within the organisation are likely to be terminated or move on to other companies (still an unknown within RED).

- Suppositions will be used to justify the strategies of the organisation when the experience and past performance of individuals are lacking.

- The use of superlatives to describe those they wish to succour favour from (the use of “Director General” when referring to the Acting Director of the MGB or “Chief Principal Consultant” when referring to a consultant trying to fix their mess (can anyone find a reference to any engineering consultant being referred to as a Chief Principal?)). Conversely the lack of title is used to denigrate when wanting to be adversarial (the lack of the title of the Acting Director of the MGB on the RED/Greenstone protest banners recently).

- In questioning any matters of competence these organisations will react against perceived external detractors rather than correct problems from within.

- These organisations will be less efficient and use more resources to achieve their goals.

- Multi-layers of negligence are possible within these organisation unless matters to rectify the situation are made by shareholders or other authorities (the negligence has happened in RED but not the rectification process). The list of other predictors of the Peter Principle is exhausting.

The failures within RED were promoted. If the reverse were true, heads at the highest level should have rolled within the last six months. The abhorrence in this case was that the BOD’s (and possibly a few of the major shareholders) huddled together to weather the storm and made no attempt to rectify the shortcomings within RED. Rather, they continued to exasperate the problem over time to the detriment of the shareholders and the local community.

And so we have one of the most embarrassing cases of negligence in the mining industry which was flippantly described as an “Innocent Mistake”?