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Today, the Chilean mine Chuquicamata operates at increasingly higher costs, due to the lowering of the ore law (from 1.03% to 0.8% average in the last 10 years) and the enormous distances that must go through the giant trucks - More than 300 tons of cargo - to move the material from the bottom of the rake, which is already 1,200 meters deep. Each of the 70 trucks operating at the site runs an average of 22 kilometres on each round trip from the bottom of the mine to the surface and consumes 3,100 litres of oil per day. Therefore, the aggregate cost of this item reaches 217 cubic meters of fuel each day. By 2018 this cost will be unsustainable because other increases, such as energy, inputs, equipment, and labour, will be added in the meantime. Therefore, the change from a configuration of open mineral production to an underground production not only involves the design of a strategy in the management of material energy resources but a profound change in the conception of organizational viability, everything which involves not only dealing with learning with a view to the future, changing practices and operational excellence but also, establishing a new conception of mining.
For the achievement of change, mentioned above, we have aptly applied as tools to support strategic decisions, advances in Cognitive Sciences in general, as well as advances in organizational cybernetic knowledge.
Our strategy was designed based on redefining Stafford Beer's conception of organizational viability given that the VMS model generates a series of pathologies in the organization that respond to a dissociated view of the relational process. This involved moving from a concept of viability to that of systemic relational viability, which fundamentally responds to understanding how sustainability and relational systems are coupled as a conservation strategy for the organization. Therefore, to design, from a systemic relational vision, implies conceiving it as a network of cooperative relations that are structured based on processes with the overall purpose of producing fine copper. The basic relational unit is conceived as the network within a given area and the processes associated with it. It is a fact that each group or network of agents expresses a way of making the decisions that must be carried out daily for the continuity of the processes. Thus, each network legitimates a way of acting or doing with them.
In today's world, intangible assets and values hold the attention of large corporations and governments, most notably knowledge as an essential value, which has been making its way in societies and largely determines production, Governance practices, the processes that are developed and the resources that are used. In this process of knowledge integration, organizations have been forced to introduce new concepts that have to do with the way they conceive of their patterns of action and their dynamics of operation, to be able to propagate their value as an organization, considering, in particular, the complexity and agility that we must face under the current conditions of scientific and technical development.
The possibilities of the propagation of value are directly related to the organizational culture that oversees enabling the channels by which this propagation will be possible, which is based mainly on two aspects: relationships and processes. For this same reason, if current conditions involve considering fundamental factors such as the complexity of relationships, the speed of change and the coherence of actions, management models based on rigid hierarchical structures will limiting and hindering the spread of value throughout the organization and will end up generating within the organization a large amount of what we can call waste, which translates into a chain of errors and bad practices. An example of such waste may be a lack of coordination between areas, repetition of work, lack of commitments by different parties, collapses in planning, preference for non-priority functional objectives and other failures whose cause is usually called “indefinite”.
As we are seeing, the process of evolution of the organizations in the present should be oriented to the development of flexible structures that allow accommodating the qualities that will make possible the propagation of the value in a company, which is created based on scientific and technicians to which they have access, that is, to knowledge. This new way of thinking in the organizations of the 21st century is to begin to see and understand the configuration of networks of relationships, that is, of the foundations that will help us to carry out a good strategy of creation and propagation of value.