Ep 83 Katherine Teh: From Conflict to Consent. How a Social Purpose Company is Changing Mining

Welcome to the For Love and Money podcast, the show where business and social purpose meet to inspire a movement for positive change.

Here's your host, Carolyn Butler-Madden. My guest today is a strategist, reformer and changemaker whose work has helped reshape some of the world's most complex and contested industries, from mining and renewables to public policy, agriculture and pharmaceuticals. Katherine Teh is one of the world's foremost authorities on social license and legitimacy.

For over three decades, she has worked at the intersection of sustainability, governance and public trust, bringing sharp clarity where others see only risk. Her ability to align fractured interests and rebuild trust has made her a trusted advisor on more than $200 billion in major projects around the globe. But Katherine's story begins far from the boardroom.

Driven by an early ambition to become a war correspondent, she rose quickly through the ranks of journalism, becoming the youngest female A-graded journalist in Australian history. At 29, she led one of the country's most influential gender justice campaigns, mobilising over one million women to reframe gendered violence as a workplace safety issue. And that was more than two decades before the Me Too movement swept the world.

Since then, she has led national and international public dialogue processes on polarizing issues. She's designed innovative products and business models to solve systemic problems and helped industries navigate outrage, restore legitimacy and deliver long-term value. In 2002, she founded the world's first social license agency, developing a methodology that combines strategic foresight, stakeholder alignment and social impact design to turn opposition into durable earned support.

Today, as Executive Chair of Spektrum, Katherine leads a new kind of critical minerals company, one that does development differently. By partnering with Indigenous communities and applying consent-based models, she and her team are unlocking stranded assets, accelerating approvals, and creating nature-positive regional futures. Katherine is on a mission to transform not just who development is done with, but how it's done and what it leaves behind.

She builds systems that restore legitimacy, resolve conflict, and demonstrate that ethical, inclusive development isn't a trade-off. It's the foundation for resilience and long-term success. She's an entrepreneur, an activist, a visionary, and a woman who's never waited for permission to lead. And I cannot wait to get into this interview. And I feel like this interview could be a series, but we have one episode.

Please join me in welcoming Katherine Teh. Katherine, welcome to the For Love and Money podcast. Thank you so much. That's great. I really appreciate the time to delve into these topics. It's so important. And I appreciate your time coming on this podcast. And I know our listeners are just going to get so much out of this. So let's kick off with the big question. What is your view? Is there a role for love in business?

I absolutely think there is. And it's not the sort of saccharine tipping of your hat to why all of us should be cuddling around the fireplace in kumbaya sort of love, which sometimes business people dismiss when they think of that idea because they're trained to imagine that there's an objective set of ways to make good business decisions. But the way I think about love is that there is a fundamental humanity that we are in and our businesses reflect.

So as values change and communities change, our businesses should be changing to reflect those expectations, products, models, you know, ways of doing things.

And in my world, I would think bringing humanity to opposition and bringing an understanding why opposition occurs to major projects or public policy issues or protest, if we could actually hear from a humane and loving perspective why those concerns arise, we would have, I think, such a better business culture and such a better set of business models because they would be richer for it. I love that. Bringing humanity to opposition.

And it goes to one of your areas in your career, which is that whole empathy training, isn't it? It's like to bring humanity into opposition, you need to be able to have empathy. Yes. And I think that I find when you go into the middle of a crisis of any sort, that not only is the community up in arms and outraged, but so are the people inside the companies or the sectors.

They are also up in arms and outraged. So you get this dynamic where two parties at each other's throats and we can come in and seek to resolve and address issues in a way that can actually turn things around into being a win-win for everyone. But it's easier when you're not triggered by the circumstances. So it is fundamentally human to get angry and it's fundamentally human to want to see a genuine resolution of an issue. So it's kind of, how do we track that?

How do we create capacity inside our cultures and our leaders to do it? And if not, at least acknowledge where we need to bring another party in because we are too stuck in our own perspective about why the other is wrong and why we are right.

And we seem to be living in a time where there is this confected outrage often, and it is being manipulated by certain forces to create that division and strip away the humanity and the empathy and really kind of just sort of lodge people into their positions, which must make that so hard to bridge the gap. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating thing to sort of see how Neil Postman's forecast actually came to be.

He did say, don't ever think of any technology as morally neutral, because he looked at the Jefferson debates and what that enabled in our democracies for the genuine engagement and discussion of different perspectives. And he tracked different media through from radio to television and said, look at what the soundbite is doing to the way we construct and think of difference. It's easy for us now to shut off a different perspective.

We're not necessarily leaning into, well, how is it that I've come to that view and why is it that others think quite differently? Not engaged as a society in really teaching people that that's an important thing to do because there is value in the other perspective.

Neil Postman, did you say? Yeah, Neil Postman wrote a seminal book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, which has influenced so much of my thinking around how you create platforms for resolution of significant differences and why it's so important to do that, to keep on iterating for platforms that will allow us to have these very important discussions. If we believe in democracy, then the richness of difference should be something we sell Celebrate, not shut down.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. We'll include a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you for sharing that. And I can see there's going to be rabbit holes we go down. It all relates to what you're doing now. But, yeah, I want people to get a sense of your career trajectory beyond the introduction. You've had such a rich and varied career across human rights, diplomacy, corporate ESG, and now critical minerals. What's been the thread connecting your journey and what led you to found Spectrum Development?

I think the one thing that I remember really got me when I was a resources journalist was the very big difference between the way companies were talking about a problem and the way the communities were talking about a problem. And what I would consider the vast moral gap between perspectives. And I was intrigued, like, how is this possible? How can we have such significant differences and why are they not able to sort of come closer or address those issues?

Because it's fundamental to business that if you are in a community that doesn't want you and rejects you, that you would actually be doing, you know, worse business than if you were in a community that did want you. I mean, that's just such a basic concept, I thought. But back in 1980s, in the late 80s, when I was a business journalist.

The idea that I actually needed to take these communities into account, I literally had an investor relations person say to me, look, it might give you a warm, fuzzy feeling on the inside, but it doesn't make a difference to our share price, so we don't give a damn. And, you know, interestingly, we're still having a type of debate like that now and it's not actually set.

There's no genuine way for how a corporation can effectively adopt the value sets that might actually enhance their business and evolve their business models effectively to drive sustainable development outcomes. Even if that's an expectation of society, even if we know that products and investors and others are saying that's what they want, there are so many invisible barriers to those changes. And to me, that's just continually been a driver for me.

How do we link up the business alignment to the societal alignment, to the cultural alignment, to the systemic alignment in order to create the catalytic changes that we need to drive outcomes? Where imagine a business entity was actually helping create nature-positive, people-positive outcomes. Well, if every organization was doing that, it generates the most incredible opportunity for societal peace and happiness. You know, it is, you might think, an amazing goal.

But as I went, I was in a UN conference in 2000 and a man who works in this area stood up and said, I believe in world peace. And even in a UN environment, people were titted and started to laugh. And he said, well, you know, if that is the reaction that we have at a UN level for people who actually have come together about these issues, then you can see how embedded our cynicism about possibility of the best outcomes for humanity. Really challenging to achieve.

Because there's always detractors. There's always people who say, oh, it's not possible. You can't do that. And I have that, you know, sense now that here we have a great strategic opportunity to make and drive change. And there are obviously going to be detractors saying, this isn't possible. There is no way you can get a community to be supportive of a mining project. So I've got lots of evidence that you can. And now the question is, well, can we do that in a profitable way?

And that's what we're trying to achieve in Spectrum. These barriers to change you talk about, are they legitimate or is it, I mean, that's a simplistic question for a very complex issue. But what you're doing suggests that they are barriers that you can overcome. Absolutely. And every barrier is information, you know, it's information about what needs to be addressed in order to deal with that barrier. It's not information that says you don't and shouldn't progress.

Many years ago, one of my clients asked me to create a social maturity analysis for when coal-fired power stations would no longer be socially acceptable. She'd come to the conclusion that it wasn't going to be a lack of coal that stopped coal-fired power.

She thought it was going to be more a social construct. And so in about 2005 and thereabouts, we started to build an academically rigorous assessment of the evolution of public policy against social norms and how you could sequence that and how you could forecast that. And we've written a lot of academic papers about this. Each stage has their own set of barriers that have to be addressed before you can move to the next stage. It's a little bit like the old-fashioned video game Donkey Kong.

You know, you could only get to stage one and, you know, it's the same thing, right? So, but we do that as a society. Even if there's a brilliant idea, it doesn't go from a brilliant idea to, you know, a social norm overnight. It has to go through these stages. So, we verified over decades now that there are these stages.

And the question is what are the things that propel us to decide that we want to go to the next stage and the next and the next and that we want to create businesses that actually drive better societal outcomes, that we want businesses that create better environmental outcomes. Now, there is a huge movement of people that want that and there's also money sitting saying from super funds that they want that.

But there is this massive barrier and the massive barrier comes in the form for certainly companies like BlackRock when they go out to talk about ESG. They have 16 lawsuits against them at the moment. So the barriers to change and to actually bring these pools of capital to bear on this is very significant. But the good news is we've got these pools now.

That's the good news. Yeah, okay, brilliant. But can you just explain to some listeners who might not be aware of BlackRock and the position they took, why they have those 16 lawsuits against them? Yes. Well, I mean, so BlackRock was seen as a leader in relation to ESG and Net Zero. There was a lot of, in fact, leading statements that their managing director made.

And when Trump came in, he actually very specifically wanted to see people stop doing what he'd consider the virtue signalling of climate activism. And a number of different organisations, including BlackRock, backed away from those positions. The question obviously arises that, you know, politicians, they come and go, business strategies can vary in relation to the political context.

But what are the things that are so true that you would continue to believe that even in a context where it was no longer politically in your interests. And litigation is a good sort of signal. And there was a sense from some of the states in America, the red states, that BlackRock's commitments actually undermined financial returns.

So this is a live challenge. Today, there is some incredibly significant information that's come out about the intelligence that the Norwegian fund had in relation to the climate, they turned a mega improvement based on some of the forecasts that they used around the sorts of companies that they would or would not invest in based on it.

So if you can show that investing in better environmental and social businesses drives us better returns, then you can dismiss or defend yourself against claims that this is actually a waste of shareholder funds. And it's, you know. And you've got to make sure it's not greenwashing and all of these things. So the credibility of the claims are vital. The transparency in relation to what is actually being achieved is vital.

And the returns have to be comparable, not concessional, in order to really drive catalytic change in our view. Thank you for that. So Spektrum describes itself as a social license mining developer. Yeah. For listeners who might be unfamiliar with that term, what does it mean and why is it essential to the net zero transition?

Yeah, so social licence was evolved out of the mining industry in about the early 90s because complying to the laws was no longer a forecast of whether you could or could not remain commercially viable because there was a possibility that you could meet compliant requirements on noise or the environment and actually still be challenged by protesters and blockades and activism.

And it came to be coined to try and describe what are the sets of societal expectations beyond the regulatory that needed to be embedded in the business approach in order to mitigate the commercial threats. And, you know, one of the great little examples that really stuck out to me was one where a gold mining company came to me saying, we have been told we can no longer be any louder than a hairdryer.

And this is clearly a, you know, way beyond the compliance requirements that they built their plant on. And there was no way they could run the plant that quietly. So based on the fact that they can't retrofit it to make it quieter than a hairdryer and they wanted to be able to operate and this would actually stop them from being able to operate, what was their solution? And so we went and had a talk to the concerned communities and noise was one thing.

That was the presenting issue. But the underlying issue was how the company dealt with the threat of noise being challenged. So instead of really listening to the community and trying to work out how to address the issues, they hired a bunch of community relations people that some of the community is described as a mix between a Mormon and a hell's angel. And I said, what does that equal? And I said, somebody that knocks on your door and tells you to bleep bleep off. Yeah.

And I thought, well, okay, so it feels like you're not being heard, they're not responding to your concerns, and what have you done? You've escalated it to the point where they now no longer have a regulatory right to operate. And now they're listening. So now it's a question of what can we do about it? Well, obviously, it's cultural change. It's the way they deal with the concerns.

It's coming to address the outrage of the community and actually starting to operate in quite a different way and having the right to do that. You know, you have to build in totally different governance and accountability systems and, you know, based on that, ideally what the company could or should have done then is change their model fundamentally thereafter. And, you know, the industry has known about these issues. It's been the number one risk of mining industry.

The approval timeframes for major projects, which is a great insight into how significant this social licence issue is, has extended so much that in Australia, it's somewhere between 16 to 20 years to get an approval. Wow. In America, it's on average 29 years. Oh my God.

And the reason why this is so vital for the net zero transition is if you look at America, Canada and Australia combined, the number of major mines that have been gone from being discovered to approved and constructed to operate in a 21-year period for all three countries is 25. Oh, wow. Okay. And if you look at what the International Energy Agency says we need in terms of the supply for the net zero transition, we need 380 new mines by 2050. 380? Sorry, sorry, 2030, not 2050.

Yeah. So the need globally is for 380 mines by 2030? Of critical minerals, yes. Wow. Hmm. Hmm. So which agency is it that says that? The IEA, the International Energy Agency. Yeah, right. Okay. And so how do you – give us some context for those people who say we need to stop mining. Yeah. Can you give some context there in terms of the need versus the need to stop because of climate change?

Yeah. I mean, there are some people that are doing work on trying to drive for a post-consumer metal recycling industry, which I absolutely support. And recently on a critical minerals delegation to America, there were a couple of those on our delegation. And they're brilliant what they're doing. But the post-consumer recycling is just tiny compared to what's required. And while those efforts can continue to be invested in, the scale of the supply required is, you know, dramatically bigger.

And right now, critical minerals is mostly controlled by China. And they declared, you know, earlier this year on the front page of the New York Times that the defense of America was in the hands of the Chinese because they just switched off four of those critical minerals. And stopped the American net zero transition as well as their ability to defend themselves in one reaction to a tariff issue.

So there are significant implications because net zero and defence are now so closely aligned in a way that we had not foreseen maybe, say, 30 years ago. But over time, these two things have sort of come together and as a result, we now have to sort of think through these two lenses. What is in our interest is to advance our net zero position as quickly as possible.

What is in our best interest is to also be able to defend ourselves and to have supply chains of critical minerals and the processing of those critical minerals to be done effectively in the allies, within the allies. Yeah, okay. So I reckon there would be a lot of people like me who, you know, have this view of the mining industry but don't have that insight as to why it's important for the net zero transition. Can you sort of give us some context there?

Like, what are the critical minerals that are critical for that transition? Yeah, I mean, so the kinds of things are rare earths, cobalt, graphite, nickel, copper. So think about things that help transmit energy and then think about, you know, how important the transmission of energy is for a net zero transition, basically. I think that's the simplest way of thinking about it. So therefore, different countries do have different critical minerals listed.

So America, for example, has a very significant agenda called the National Energy Dominance Council, and it's got a range of aspects around how they're going to drive their critical minerals and energy solutions. And Australia has a critical minerals policy and we have more critical minerals than the US does. So, you know, there's a huge opportunity for us to be linking into like a, you know, a net zero tariff arrangement between us and Australia.

So that we can be, you know, going into and supporting their supply chains. There's, you know, and then there's also countries like England that don't have many, any. And so there's a big strategic challenge for them and they're, you know, needing to build supply chains with their allies so that they've got these materials. And so there's a bigger sort of play.

And I guess where we've come to is even though there's this big strategic requirement, overriding communities that are concerned with that significance does not play well in those communities. You know, we've seen that with going into communities with wind farms and solar farms and trying to have companies try and overwhelm them, governments try to overwhelm them by saying, hey, if you're not supportive of this, you're not supportive of climate action.

And that gets their goat even more. Combative approach. Yeah. Well, it's kind of pushing one down in order to push yourself up. It's not really dealing with the concerns they're raising. It's using a way of dismissing them. All of these things, all of these traditional strategies, denial, dismissal, attack, exacerbate and amplify opposition.

So, you know, if we're in a democratic country and we value those ability for us to be heard and engaged with, then we need companies and governments that are capable of doing that more and more effectively. And that is what we're trying to do with Spectrum is prove up that model. It's not a lack of ability to deal with people. It's a lack of skill, business model, structure, systems, and governance. It's a lack of a coherent response to the concerns. Mm-hmm.

Enjoying the podcast? If you're looking for more inspiration, head to our website, thecauseeffects.com.au for more resources on how you can start using your business as a force for good.

Or buy the For Love and Money book. Every copy sold allows us to protect one square metre of rainforest. So how, let's talk about Spectrum then. How does the work that you do through Spektrum, how does it shift the paradigm of how mining approvals and community engagement are done? Yeah, really at the moment, the model is what I'd call technical, political and legal.

So you simply put, you have a tenement, you discover a deposit and there are probably four business strategies that you can then apply. And if your intent is to develop the traditional and most commonly used one is where you would take that brief of what you know about the geology, give it to an engineering company that would then design the most optimized mine processing infrastructure solution from an economic perspective so that you can get the project to look really viable.

And then you would put an impact assessor on in a different company that would then do the impact assessment, bring experts in to do a social impact assessment where legally required. Some people might do it even where it's not, an environmental assessment. Some people are even doing Indigenous assessments. The key here is often it's part of a decide, announce, defend arsenal.

It's a dad arsenal. It's I want to take the technically sound, the impact assessments that show we understand those, but we are seeking, capable of mitigating them. And we're going to package that together. I'm going to sell this project to the government and to the public at large and hopefully address sufficient enough of the loud noises and voices in the community level to overwhelm.

And if we can't do that, then, you know, some other strategies are used, like we won't talk to the ones that are most impacted or most outraged. We'll talk to all of the other people around them and then we can say, hey, 11 out of the 12 Indigenous groups like it. It's just the one that's most impacted that doesn't. Or in some cases, we can say we like, you know, the community likes it around us. It's really just all of those people outside that don't like it.

So all of these strategies are polarizing strategies. And so essentially they rely on the company to be able to have government alignment to get these approved and the hope is that when they are approved all of these concerns will drop away.

But, you know, having worked in this space for three decades I've got all sorts of evidence where even large companies, the biggest companies in the world can have communities near them that every day, day in, day out as they operate cause significant costs and consequences because they were never happy and they were addressed during the approval process. And just like that hairdryer example, it costs money.

But the assumption is always that the amount of money that we make through this model is more than we would make through any other. And that's, of course, what we're trying to challenge. We're saying, actually, that technical, legal, political kind of strategy where you lobby for your answer, that, let's put it as a dad strategy, that's a decide, announce, a defend strategy, that is actually going to amplify all concerns. What about a strategy that's quite different?

And we, at Futureye, the company that I established in 2002, developed a concept called DAVE, which is... I love this. Love it. ...declaring dilemmas from everyone's perspective. That means genuinely getting to know the dilemmas and the invisible barriers and the concerns and the legacy issues and all these psychosocial traumas and other things that are

impacting on people. Yeah. Understanding all of those and what the project might do to the environment and to infrastructure and all of the consequences, understanding those dilemmas from everyone's perspective ensures that we're all heard. But it also enables us from an engineering perspective to not just sort of silo off the engineers.

Our CEO is an engineer because we see the engineers as critical to being able to actually iterate and resolve and create a project design that communities would buy into. And based on that, if they can and we do, then we can actually scope and address impact assessments as a accountability platform.

And what we're trying to do is not just get the project approved we're trying to get the project approved in a way that over time can demonstrate improvements to the community as a whole these are you know concepts that seem logical like if you have free prior informed consent in a community the community is going to like the project better and they're going to advance their communities in a more effective way based on that than if they haven't,

if they traumatized by it, than if they're, you know, distressed about it. So what we're trying to do is to reverse that and actually make it something that is enabling a better outcome in those communities and really not just a traditional model with a bit of an add-on. It's actually a fundamentally different development model. And it's a collaborative model, which gives it legitimacy from the word go, right?

Yes, yes. And, you know, the idea of that being true is where some of the investors and bankers that we've gone to see most challenged, you know, which is, is it even possible for you to bring a community into a collaborative environment? And particularly one where they're opposed and we're trying to set them up into being from opposed to being more engaged and open to a maybe. And that set of steps is something I've done many, many times.

I was going to say, it's not just theory. You've actually done this. Yeah, absolutely. And in my experience, the opportunity to design collectively would be so much better advanced if the company that was the proponent had a culture and a willingness and a governance system that was coherently engaged in doing this transparently and effectively.

Yeah wow it's the way you describe it like it just seems so rational it goes right back to the beginning of this interview right it's about bringing humanity back into opposition actually maybe even avoiding opposition in the first place if if you start well so it's really interesting At the heart of this approach is the idea that, and I've seen you talked about this, is the idea that legitimacy isn't a compliance issue, it's a foundation for resilience and long-term value.

So can you unpack what that means in practice? Yeah, sure. I mean, one of my examples of work that we did at Futuride was that there was a mining company that had a need for water. A lot of mining companies need water, but it was in a drought-stricken area and the farmers were very concerned about it.

They raised their concern, and the company's response was to show a report that demonstrated that a litre of water spent in mining was substantially more valuable than a litre of water used in agriculture. And then they used that to lobby for their use of water over the farmers' use of water, which, as you can imagine, sent the farmers. Yeah. Yep. It very, very... Combat, combat straight away.

And in that battle, it went through the approval process. In that battle, the miners only just won and they got a little bit disturbed by that. And we were brought in to say, how do we actually make sure that when we do the next approval, we don't just almost lose the ability to actually advance our project? And when we analysed it from an outrage point of view, one of the most obvious things to do was to change their attitude and approach to water and water stewardship.

There were other aspects of the strategy too, but if we just zero in on that for a moment, this is where there is an agreed method and approach around how water is allocated on a range of values, not just economic and a set of values that people agree to and then you manage within that. So you are thinking about water at a catchment level.

And the responsibility for the company is at a point where they lose, you know, so much water or there's a drought and they have to reduce the amount that they use in percentage terms, that they have consequences like needing to potentially stop mining or slow down their mining. And generally, in a mining company, that would not be something people would be willing to do. But in this case, when you said, well, unless you actually commit to that, this will just be seen as a farce.

So what are you really willing to commit to? This is where, you know, the rubber hits the road. So they decided that's what they would do. There was a drought. They did have to step down their water use. They did announce to the farmers first because this was the agreement around, you know, engaging first before going out publicly. that they would be stepping down their production.

And the farmers went behind their back to the politicians and the media calling for the miners to get additional water resources so that they could continue to operate. Wow. Wow. There you go. Yeah. That's resilience, right? Yeah. Okay. You have just demonstrated to me that you are serious And I know the consequences of you doing that is so important. And I am so moved by that. I'm actually going to act in your interests.

That's resilience. That's resilience. And that's really the power of we over me. Taking a we approach, you know, the community as a whole over it's all about what I want. Yes. For this, for my company. Amazing. Amazing. I want to go back to Indigenous communities because you said that mining could be a powerful force for Indigenous communities if it didn't divide them. Yes, absolutely. What's neat? Go on.

Oh, well, I mean, so I was just going to say that 60% of critical minerals are on Indigenous land and not being developed. 70% of our critical minerals in Australia have not been developed. And there are a range of reasons why the traditional mining models and financing models aren't working in there, because you can imagine in a large multi-billion trillion dollar mine, you can take 29 years and.

You know, be opposed and one particular mine in that I'm thinking of, they've spent $2 billion over 29 years and they're in the Supreme Court. So with Indigenous communities and, you know, in a critical minerals context, you can't really spend that time and money because these are much smaller deposits on the whole. And therefore, to be able to afford their infrastructure and the investment in them, these timeframes need to be shorter because, you know, long timeframes cost money.

And so shorter timeframes, more discrete, they've got to be able to deliver returns in a much shorter time. So therefore, the challenge in critical minerals is quite different. And if we think about Indigenous lands, and if we're able to get this model right, then there's a possibility that you could actually, triple the net present value of a deposit by tighter timeframes if they were done in a legitimate way.

So they could release a lot of wealth creation opportunities for Indigenous communities, if we were to together agree that that's the model that we want to actually develop and deliver together. And, you know, we're clearly arguing that free prior informed consent and will lead to better socioeconomic outcomes as well. So not only will they be able to get a share of the project, but also hopefully a much better socioeconomic result because they're participating in a very different way.

Yeah. And have you managed to develop these outcomes with Indigenous communities for your clients through Future Eye in the past? Yes. I mean, in the past, we have not been able to change the business model. That is why we're doing spectrum. So the traditional business model is to try and have the least possible cost. And most mining companies haven't done this upfront legitimacy creation in the way that we've described.

And while some have, like in Canada, for instance, under the laws they've been required to, the tribal councils report that the companies don't have the culture and the capacity to actually deliver on the written black and white word. So the intent and the spirit are not being delivered. And so they get challenged. Yep. Yep. And then they blame the Indigenous community. So, if I were to simplify this down for me and listeners, the traditional model back then was really mining without protest.

Years, decades ago, where mining was able to operate without fear of these legal claims, I guess. Would it be fair to say that some mining companies are still in a little bit of that mindset because, you know, that they were able to get their profit from that approach, and yet they're now dealing with a very different reality where they're getting tied up in litigation, but they're still trying to ram through that old model approach?

Yeah, I mean, I've just come back from the US where there has been a very significant commitment from the Trump administration to shorten the approval timeframes to get these projects up because they've heard companies are saying it's the timeframe. And so what they are conscious of is cut the timeframe down. You could end up in litigation for years. And so the miners were frightened of the litigation. My answer to that is litigation is the outcome of not having legitimacy.

So if you can actually build up the legitimacy of the project and resolve those issues together with the people who are currently the opponents, then you're in a much better position. Their response to that is, well, there are people whose whole career is spent actually invested in the litigation. It's a business model for the NGOs. And they're not really interested in this solution. Last year I was asked by a big aid organization at sort of Umbrella One to come and talk.

And I have to say, you know, it is true that maybe say three quarters of the audience really liked what I had to say. But there was a quarter that did feel angry about why are we mining? You know, I don't want it here. You know, all of these sorts of concerns. Why aren't we recycling? And also, I think, fearful about what the change meant to the role that they would play. Yeah, wow.

You know, so there is a need for people to go from hard no to maybe and then, you know, into really being willing and capable to make assessments. And while the approval is one step, it's an ongoing interest and engagement around verifying and ensuring that the outcomes are better and throughout, so that it's an ongoing accountability process and not just to sort of once off add approval. And, you know, there are also pools of money that go into litigation.

And I would be wanting to, through providing some proof cases, to get those pools of money to say, rather than, you know, dealing with the problems at the bottom of the cliffs, because the project is designed badly, the environmental outcomes won't be good, the Indigenous outcomes are awful. Or, you know, rather than being at that end, what about creating pools of development money that actually want to see embedded restorative justice in the project design process and management?

Brilliant. We'll be sort of wanting to bring those pools of money and also help engage and, you know, resolve these issues with all of the parties so that people can sort of see a role. And there might still be, you know, roles for people that just want to litigate, but there might be more roles for people who actually want to see representation for communities and to be in those communities that can really have their power

asymmetry addressed by having good watchdogs all the way through the method. Yeah, wow. That's so interesting. It's so fascinating when you think about those non-profits who fight for litigation. They have a very clear picture of the end result they want to achieve and then you come in with a different way of approaching it. And it's very difficult for them to let go of that vision. But what you're saying is there could be a role for them in that process.

Yeah. And I've started to talk to some of the most successful litigants against mining in America. And there is an openness to say, okay, we do want to see better permitting. We do want to see more legitimate projects. So, you know, so I don't rule that out. again, I bring the humanity to you. I understand why you're distrusting.

I understand why you think it's not possible, but, you know, bring that same rigour to this earlier in the stage, because we as proponents would want you to participate in challenging us then at the front end and see if we can, you know, utilise those insights into making better project designs that don't actually end up in litigation. But of course, if we're not capable of doing that, then, you know, litigate, absolutely. But meanwhile, you know. Part of the solution.

Part of the solution, yes. So you've talked about developing new pools of development capital to shape ethical future fit projects rather than just the litigation side. What would it take to build that movement and who needs to be part of it? Oh, well, I think your audience.

Yeah, I mean, like everything, you need high net wealth people who are willing to step up into this space to sort of, you know, have the clarion call and engage with the large philanthropists, and the large pools of development capital. I mean, in America, the amount of money that these, you know, philanthropic funds have is just, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. We could genuinely change the way projects are done, mining is done. You know, we could change so many things.

But at the moment, a lot of them are sticking to impacts of proven and known things. So we get, you know, green real estate. And not that I'm dismissing the significance of green real estate, but I think we've made the case. Money is made. Why don't we spend some time on things that are more complex and actually see if we can drive catalytic change there? I love the way you just lead from the front, Catherine. You've never waited for permission to lead. Right.

What drives that mindset? I actually made it, I remember consciously making a decision about that when I was really super young. I was like five when I started to think like that because I had all sorts of challenges as a child. I'm bicultural. I'm half Chinese Malaysian. My dad's ethnically Chinese, but born in Malaysia and my mother's Australian and my sister was born deaf.

Well we moved from I was born in Australia we moved to Malaysia and then we moved back to Australia for my sister's education and very early on this kind of set of challenges around how you can see the world and how the world operates in these multiple layers and and and where really quite different outcomes possible depending on you know who you are in which community, that really sort of hits me hard from a human rights perspective.

I mean, it translates to the concepts of human rights, but they're really about humanity. Why is it that my sister, for example, would only be able to be educated based on how much hearing she had? And given she was totally deaf, she couldn't be educated beyond primary school according to what was then education policy in Victoria.

Those sorts of things really shaped my understanding that as participants in our community, we can and do define what is an acceptable way for our society to operate and that each one of us has incredible power to do so.

My mother challenged the education system for deaf people and she brought in education for people that were profoundly deaf and totally deaf like my sister and my grandmother also made significant social change based on the challenges she was confronted with and I you know when I was sexually harassed in a mining company I decided well I better make some changes based on the challenges that are confronting me.

And then, you know, worked together with others to do so. I think that, idea that we can, you know, drive and change outcomes in society was embedded in me from a very early age and through generations of social change agents in my own family. I felt like there was a responsibility to do so. That's so interesting. That's so interesting, that background. And yeah, yeah, there's the Chinese Malay father, did you say? Yes.

Yeah. Even Chinese Malay, the tensions in Malaysia between the Chinese and the Malay. I grew up in Malaysia for a long time, so I know you've got, yeah, some of those tensions between those groups would have meant that you're kind of living between the lines a little bit and then with an Australian mother. And, yeah, so interesting. And it makes sense that you're doing what you're doing. I can see, like, you know, the change that you want to lead.

But you've led public dialogue like you're in the thick of such polarizing issues you're in the mining industry right and there's such polarizing debate on that and you're designing this new business model your approach has been different you know from from your consultancy to begin with my understanding is that what you're doing through spectrum is a world first I believe so. Yeah? Yes. And you've also helped restore trust on $200 billion worth of major projects, which is incredible.

I want to understand, what have you learned about leading in complexity? Well, self-awareness is the number one thing to think about, like how you yourself feel and what you bring to any conversation. And that often people are afraid to really name up what's happening. And we have so many more intuitive levels that you can tap into with anybody. So when you're thinking about solutions and outcomes and behavioral differences and all the rest of it, sometimes my fear, I guess, had been.

Oh, well, you kind of have to meet people in a way that pleases them and or, you know, fear being too confrontational. So this balance between how do you bring forward your own communication, credibility, and quality into an environment that is non-confrontational.

And I just thought, for me, the nonviolent communication strategies were brilliant because they really teach you how to tap into what you're feeling, but at the same time, communicate that and demonstrate your self-awareness and through doing so, create a safe space for the other person to also engage. And you together therefore drive emotional maturity and connection and the more connected you are.

You know, genuinely connected to people, the richer your experience is, you know, the more capable you are of driving, you know, high-performing teams and business culture and, you know, the better life is, frankly. I imagine you must have a model for this from self-awareness to safe space to emotional maturity and connection. It just seems to flow so fast.

You can see that I've spent a lot of time taking things that, you know, a lot of people have thought of as irrational, irrational protest, irrational angry people, irrational.

Actually it's not irrational there's there's a logic to it and I I mean I used to do that myself all the way through my my youth you know just thinking about how the world worked and and how you apply things and and see things and I was very exercised by all of that and my mother would have lots of people in the parent group that she founded and and drove in relation to better education for disabled people.

And so I sort of saw that around me. But in my, I guess, what was it, early, mid-twenties, I met a very influential person in my life, Dr. Peter Sandman, who had codified this concept of risk in two parts, a hazard, the technical aspect, and outrage, the emotional or intuitive aspect. And he had 12 factors that drove the intuitive aspect. And he'd shown that these two parts were barely correlated.

And of course, all companies really pay attention to what they see as the technically sound rational and ignore the aspects that are the emotionally grounded truth about how communities and people think. And so there's this real blind spot. And so I met him and worked with him in one of the mining companies that I worked at. And then after that, he actually called him after I was sexually harassed and said, oh, you can't believe what happened.

This is what's happened. This man has threatened me to ruin my career if I don't have sex with him. And Peter said, oh, some people are idiots. I've actually been wanting to talk to you, Catherine, about coming to be the CEO of a company that I've founded with a risk engineering organization, and we'd like you to be the CEO. And I just said, wow. I didn't even know, what does that mean? You know, how do you run a company? I don't know. I, I, I, yes. I said, yes, good. Let's do that.

Which, which, which do you know what? And I just want to, this is a really important point In the work I do with clients, we always start with who, you know, purpose work. You start with who before you start looking at your why because who you are, what you care about, what you stand for. It absolutely drives your purpose and your why. And what you've just talked about with Dr. Peter Sandman is you attract your people like us. You attract people who share, you know, a similar narrative.

And when you do attract those people, yes is the easiest answer to anything. Yes. I mean, when I started my first day with a piece of paper, a pencil, and computer and I had sort of had all these big company assumptions that I'd have a budget and staff and it was like, no, you've got a computer software and your objective is to set up a company. And I was like, oh, my God, how to do that? You know, luckily for me I was like 28 years old and I figured it out.

Yeah, well, that's what a can-do attitude will do, right? Five to 10 years from now, what does success look like for Spectrum? Well, we have a brilliant 10 years ahead of us. Our goal eventually would be that we are managing these large pools of development capital so that we can identify, target and become the permitting machine to legitimately resolve these conflicts and get these projects into production.

And ideally, within 10 years, we would have sufficient capital that we could ourselves be not just a permitting co-developer, but an actual developer miner. Oh, wow. Oh, wow, that's amazing. And how do you then measure both social and business impact? for love and money? Well, our methodology called development by consent is measuring love and money all the way through, although we're not calling it love, we're calling it social consent or legitimacy.

We are actually assessing that at every stage. So it's a combined analysis. It's not purely a financial analysis where we're then adding the environmental and social as the minimized cost to, you know, get the project across the line. We are actually designing a holistic solution. Yeah, wow. Amazing.

Catherine, this has been just such a fascinating conversation for me and just so inspiring, like to see you lead, you know, where others haven't and to just, you know, make that decision to create something that has not been... It's just not been seen. It's not been considered. And when you talk about it, it blows my mind to think that it hasn't, that this is not how we're doing things. It's crazy. But I love the courage of people like you who go, I see this. I can feel it.

This is how we need to do it. And it's not happening. I can't see anybody else doing it. So that's what we're going to do.

So i'd like you to close out the show actually no i won't say that because i want to open up the opportunity for you to share anything else but i do want you to share with us what is the legacy, you hope that spectrum and also your broader life's work will leave behind i really want a demonstration through Spectrum that engaging and resolving issues as a capability in our own companies but in our societies can create richer and more effective businesses and communities that,

you know, we shouldn't be afraid of different perspectives and we should actually be wanting to engage with that because, I mean, more broadly other than demonstrating through unlocking a lot of wealth in Indigenous communities, I would hope that we can also show that resolving problems is actually better for us as a society and that there is a fundamental reason why democracy could be and should be the best way for us together

as human beings to operate and that we should be making that better and richer and more effective because it's vital to how we feel as well as the kind of environments that we produce and the sort of relationship we have with nature. Bringing in more humanity into opposition, into business as a whole really, isn't it? Yes, and how business operates in public policy sense in terms of relationship to government as well. Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. I love that.

Thank you so much. I'd like to open up some space if there is anything else you would like to share with our listeners. Yeah, I think I just want to tell a story about a man who I met through this work and just sort of bring alive what it felt like for him. His name was Ted Kittle, and he, when I met him, ran a very effective anti-company organization in a company that he had worked with for more than 25 years.

And he was a very proud man who actually would often say, you know, I actually love this company. And yet people treated his opposition as a demonstration of threat to the company and would spit at him on the street and attack him, even try and punch him in a pub one day. He was treated, and so were the other people in the group, as the enemy of the company. And it was a company town.

So I want to tell the story through Ted's eyes about how it felt for him that it took him 20 years of his time to really run a campaign that in the end brought that company to its knees. And the power of that one man and his group was enormous.

And to some they would say that is an example of what's gone wrong with our society and to me i think it's just what is incredible about our society you know there's a person that had been treated like a rat bag but actually what he identified and what he drove at the end of the day was a demand for a company to be more environmentally and socially responsible and by listening to the concerns that he had and addressing those concerns we eventually were able to create a governance

system inside the company that kept on producing better environmental and social results to the point where no longer did the people inside the organization feel like this was a threat but this was actually something that helped them feel more connected to the company and more committed to the environment and to society. And you saw a huge increase in internal productivity because of it.

And furthermore, the companies started to do things that weren't just about mitigating risk, but actually contributing to resolving some of the very significant social and economic issues in a way that advanced their interest, which was to have better employees and longer-term employees. Because they'd had trouble doing that, but they had ignored the multi-generational unemployed in that community.

So through this lens of TED, we were able to grow not just a mitigation of the threat, but an advancement of much better operating business. And TED ended up actually deciding to shut down his activist group and declaring publicly on national radio that the company was now the most socially and environmentally responsible company in the world. And then he was incredibly proud of that legacy that he left. And I was incredibly proud of being able to be part of that process.

And so for me, that story tells me if I was thinking as a board member or as an investor into a company, if there was a company attitude that said those people actually to be dismissed and denied or attacked or overwhelmed, I would say we're investing in the wrong company.

And if we were governing and still thinking that that was an effective strategy at getting the project up or the process resolved, I would hope that more and more board directors would say, actually, there's something amiss here in terms of the cultural strategy and the solution set, because it's not a fit to the democratic future of this nation or this world, this is actually going to cost us and it's going to cost the community.

And so we better start to think differently about what is a solution here. That's such a powerful story, and I think it brings to life everything that we've talked about and what you're doing. And I can't imagine anybody could, you know, could not see the absolute value in that approach. Thank you so much for sharing that story. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the For Love and Money podcast.

And I can't wait to see, you know, the journey of Spektrum Development and maybe you can come back in a couple of years' time and tell us where you're at. Yeah, love to. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of the For Love and Money podcast. If you'd like to take a deeper dive into the purpose movement, visit us at thecauseeffect.com.au. And remember, doing good is good for business. So if you're not doing good, then what are you doing?