Future inquiry : a participatory ergonomics approach to evaluating new technology

"How is it possible to get agreement to move forward when a community, industry or organisation presents with conflicting opinions, all held equally dearly? How can new technologies be evaluated in such a way that many voices can be heard? How can divergent ideas for change be translated into action that makes a difference? While the importance of stakeholder imvolvement in effective organisational change has long been recognised (Lewin, 1952) and there are numerous processes for engagement available in the marketplace (Holman and Devane, 1999), techniques that enable workable outcomes in the context of conflict and disagreement are not common. Many of the available techniques fail to effectively include different interests and thus do no support true engagement. They can more accurately be characterised as consultative (often interpreted as management informing workers of change) rather than participative (in which many voices take part in the development of change) since they do not provide less powerful stakeholders with real influence over outcomes. This partly results from reluctance to deal with conflict in organisational change processes; unrealistic performance targets, short timelines, historic conflicts and limited experience of participation can all result in processes that seek to avoid confrontation, rather than using different points of view to engender a creative response."--Introduction.