FACE TO FACE
people who think in different ways; I helped myself by learning to
think in different ways.”
Some of Tose’s career highlights have involved several nervous
moments: one being his involvement in the FIFA Soccer World Cup
and he was asked to look at the blasting in the demolition of the existing
stadium in Durban, where the professional demolition expert couldn’t
get a permit. Tose was called in to add gravitas to persuade the inspector.
“‘Simon seems to know what he’s doing’ was the verdict and it was an
awesome feeling to see the stadium go down exactly to plan. However,
when demolishing the grandstand, it stayed up for what was the longest
17 seconds of my life, before falling over exactly as it was supposed to.”
Another highlight was blasting 5.7-million m3 of rock in a long
rumbling explosion on an iron ore mine, achieving in three seconds
what had taken seven days of preparation. He once blasted a bare two
metres from an aviation fuel line at OR Tambo airport.
Being chairman of the IOQSA is a career highlight, one that he says
gives him deep satisfaction due to the recognition he gets from his
industry peers.
In conclusion
at the end of that week had an oral exam, which I was stunned
be failed by Botma. I was initially livid but looking back have
realised how it humbled me: I had to go back to the shaft to a
lot of leg-pulling from workers who were delighted that this
know-it-all university graduate had failed what for them was an
elementary test. I realised from this initial setback how important
it is for people whose entire job relates to one activity to be good
at it, and that their aspiration is to be the best at what they do. I
also realised my boss, Danny, had failed me in order to teach me
a life lesson. For me, that was probably the start of why I enjoy
sharing knowledge.
“At AEL a lot of what I do is problem solving on the bench.
The knee-jerk reaction of many quarry personnel is to blame the
product (explosives). Usually, there are more issues at play than
just the product – and I enjoy piecing together that jigsaw of
issues solve the problem of where a blast has gone wrong.
“Within AEL, Claude Cunningham and Pete Halliday have
been my mentors and inspirations, both having the ability to help
one find the answer without feeding it to you. That’s what I also
try do when advising or mentoring – it assists others to achieve a
‘lights on’ moment,” says Tose. The complexity of such problems
has taught him the necessity of having multi-disciplinary teams,
“though not too big”, in order to have varied people on the team
who question each other. “What I’ve learned from the mistakes
I’ve made in life is the need to be prepared to listen to what other
people have to say. The closer one gets to an answer the more
important it is to be prepared to accept that some of the fixed
ideas one has may be wrong, and others may have better ideas.”
Tose has applied the multi-disciplinary concept to his own life.
Wanting to learn more about project management he studied
a diploma in business management alongside retail executives
and studied their approaches to problem solving. “I wanted to
learn to look at things differently from a traditional engineering
viewpoint – from a business viewpoint. One learns about team
dynamics in such a course, that there are different ways of
thinking. In a team dynamic it can be challenging to deal with
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“The industry is changing, and new graduates will be entering the
world of virtual reality (VR). That offers a lot of opportunity to do
mining differently. In my day it was a matter of drilling a hole, filling
it with explosives and firing it. We’re fixated on the drill rig and the
hole: in the future it will be much more about the use of software – a
combining of artificial intelligence and VR which will prevent people
from repeating the same mistakes, through being able to predict what
will happen.
“What the new generation of young engineer will need to bring to
the table is: how can I break that rock differently?” says Tose.
QUARRY SA | JULY/AUGUST 2019_31