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Change Letter | year 9 number 34

The Human Factor

The year 2010 has almost ended. I look back at a year with a lot of new national and international experiences in research, consultancy and education in the field of change management. One of these experiences concerns ‘the human factor’, the theme of this winter edition of the seasonal change letter.

But first of all I would like to thank all assigners, partners, managers and their teams I have worked with in change and transition trajectories in 2010. Especially I would like to thank the core tutors and supervisors of the University for Humanistics for their support and the expatriates of the NTCC-network who participated in my research on expatriates’ everyday lives. I wish you all the best for 2011, cheers!

Human factor
Interest in the human factor in technology or science stems from the military aircraft industry in the mid-twentieth century. Human factors engineering concerns the design of equipment in accordance with the mental and physical characteristics of operators (Perrow, 1983). This field is about input and output and interaction between both machine and man. Machine-man interaction helps us in everyday life when we drive our car, using our lawn mower or cross the sea with a sailing boat. As we all know the human factor also play an important role in an organizational context. Especially understanding the interaction between humans and systems or working methods seems to be interest here. To get more insight in the human factor with the implementation of Asset Management (Pass 55 norm), Delta Change Management in co-operation with Traduco Asset Management Perspective (www.traduco.nl) developed a new instrument the Human Factor MonitorAM.

Human Factor MonitorAM
With the Human Factor MonitorAM we map the mindset criteria (characteristics):  experience, of the involved managers and their teams working on a course of action, in this case the implementation of Asset Management. This mapping takes place in the various stages of the implementation process and from different perspectives: personal, organizational and business. The design of the monitor is based on qualitative research with ethnographic methods and techniques (Atkinson and Hammersley, 1983, 2009), like participant observations and (in-depth) interviews. We focus on examining the experience and meaning of the participants in a real organizational context. The mapped mindset criteria would be abstracted into themes and interventions. Examples of interventions are: to work on shared perceptions and perspectives, to make more sense of existing competencies and/or to develop new competencies. With the Human Factor Monitor we contribute to the effectiveness of work methods and to make sense of human assets.

If you are interested in more information concerning the Human Factor MonitorAM and our experiences with it, please feel free to let me know. You can mail me or contact me via my LinkedIn account.

Martin J. Loeve MBA