Enabling environments, enabling organizations

Since its early beginnings, ergonomics has set its goal as fitting jobs, environments, and machines to the human. The symposium that led to the creation of the International Ergonomics Association, which took place in 1957 in Leyden, the Netherlands, was entitled “Fitting the job to the worker". Today, this goal certainly remains commendable – but is it enough? Can ergonomics remain content with a limited and static view of adaptation, a view that would restrict its goal to designing systems that are suited to work as it is defined at a certain point in time, to workers as they are at a particular moment, and to organizations as they operate here and now? This presentation advocates a constructive and developmental view of ergonomics. Individuals as well as teams progress by interacting with the world, and by acting upon it. Human work is always, simultaneously, productive and constructive. It is the constructive and developmental activity of subjects that constitutes the driving force of learning, transformation, and performance. In contrast to a defensive approach to ergonomics, which would view work mostly as a source of constraints, and the role of ergonomics as reducing these constraints, the goal of constructive ergonomics is to eliminate obstacles hindering success and development. Constructive ergonomics aims to maximize opportunities. The objective of ergonomics must be development (Falzon, 2014). The development of individuals, based on setting up situations of action that lead to increased success and to the acquisition or construction of know-how, knowledge, and skills. The development of organizations, based on integrating, within these very organizations, reflective processes that are open to the workers’ own capacity for innovation. Fostering the development of individuals as well as the development of organizations is only possible if individuals have sufficient operational leeway and freedom of action. This freedom of action includes the ability to continuously build and rebuild the rules of work. Consequently, the stake for ergonomists is to develop the enabling potential of organizations, so that they might contribute simultaneously and sustainably to improving the wellbeing of employees, to encouraging the development of skills, and to improving performance. Any organization has a more or less promising enabling potential. However, this potential is often underused, unknown, or unrecognized. In some cases, it may even be hindered by the organization itself. The goal here is not to create a new “enabling” task that would complement existing tasks, but to organize existing work so that it will enable individuals and organizations to make some progress (Falzon & Mollo, 2009).