Guy Desharnais - How Cognitive Biases are Crippling the Mining Industry

The mining industry is strewn with failed projects, with many more that are chronically underperforming. The list of excuses for the failures is long: resource overestimation, unrepresentative metallurgical testing, bad design, poor cost estimates, and inadequate community engagement to name a few.

These are often reported as “technical issues”, somehow insinuating that they are normal and unavoidable. As a matter of fact, each failure or shortcoming is caused by humans that made unsound decisions.

Cognitive science shows us how our brains alter perception to trick us into making irrational choices. As with most accidents, several factors contribute to cause mining professionals to make poor decisions. Taken individually, errors tend to have a linear impact; but combined they conspire to create exponentially worse outcomes. The mining industry is bound to continue its chronic underperformance and stakeholder disappointment until it deals with the human factors that are warping our feasibility studies.