Lost in translation: inadequate non-technical risk assessment within major project teams in mining

Infrastructure projects increasingly encounter delays due to non-technical risks (NTR), those risks arising from interactions between business and external stakeholders with the potential to create future negative impacts on society and the environment. One sector where NTR is having a significant adverse impact is the global mining sector, where industry leaders rank NTRs as the leading cause of business risk. We investigate how NTRs are assessed during project pre-feasibility using semi-structured interviews with 20 respondents from major mining companies. We find four main factors contribute to the problem of NTR assessment: there is lack of clarity about what constitutes a NTR; there are different interpretations of how NTR is defined and evaluated; there are disciplinary silos within project teams that impede a holistic assessment of risk; and there is conflation between risk and root cause. These factors contribute to striking differences in perceptions of non-technical risks between professionals in project management versus their sustainability colleagues. A four step process is proposed to improve non-technical risk assessment, align project and sustainability professionals, and identify opportunities for mitigation measures. This work seeks to improve NTR management within mining, a sector that is under-represented in existing literature, by adding empirical research examining how project teams identify and assess non-technical risk and contributes to theory at the nexus of project management and sustainability.