Event Recap: Learning Event 2024 Leading for Impact: Learning from each other

On 3 September 2024, INSPIRE convened a Learning Event titled “Leading for impact: Learning from each other’. The event was designed to bring into conversation stakeholders from different companies, different sectors (renewable and mining sectors in particular), different geographies, and different parts of society (business, government, academia, civil society). The challenge was to share knowledge and think together in ways that help us advance our collective understanding of social performance:

• EXPANDING our understanding of the discipline;
• INQUIRING about the impact it has within organisations and host communities;
• EXPLORING the ways to lead for impact and to upskill teams and organisations; and
• IDENTIFYING capacity building needs.

While the focus throughout remained delivering impact at community levels, what became clear is that the scope of our focus needed to touch on the very wide ranging set of challenges faced by practitioners to unlocking these impacts: from organisational structuring, talent management and skills development (human resources), regulatory incentives and the costs and benefits of assurance regulatory incentives (permitting), financing, tax and resource planning (finance), managing overwhelm and the personal costs of the work (occupational health and safety), the ideologies and assumptions informing how change happens, and the role business should play (core business strategy).

All the Outputs from the Learning Event

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  The Learning Event Report describing the flow of the event capturing the responses of participants, including in terms of support needs;
  
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  A Sense-Making Report that distils some of the key threads and tie them together into a set of meta-observations about the challenges of working in the social performance discipline; and
  
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  A presentation by Andy Booth of Anglo American on Leading for Impact through Social Performance Skills Development
  
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  A presentation by Synergy and UCT GSB on Defining and Locating Social Performance
  
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  A presentation by Lisa van Dongen from Conversations4Change supporting thinking on the establishment of a Sustainability Skills Map for Anglo American
  
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  A LinkedIn article written soon after the event that responds to some of what was shared there: “Defining Social Performance in the South African Renewable Energy Industry” written by Zakiya Abrahams