Dr. Heidi Ann Hahn serves as Director of the Engineering Capability Development Office at Los Alamos National Laboratory; she is responsible for include developing and implementing enterprise systems engineering processes and practices. Previously, she was Deputy Project Director for Change Management for the Enterprise Project (implementing enterprise-wide business processes), with responsibility for stakeholder development, communications, reengineering and organizational transition, and end user training. Dr Hahn is also Past President of the International Council of Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Enchantment Chapter.

Heidi received a B.A. in psychology from the George Washington University in 1980, and a M.S. in applied behavioral science in 1983 and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from Virginia Tech in 1986.

In a plenary talk at WMSCI 2012 entitled “Planning for Action Research: Looking at Practice through a Different Lens,” I asserted that behavioral science practitioners, including myself, often “back into” Action Research – we start out doing a process improvement or intervention and discover something along the way, i.e., generalizable knowledge, which seems worthwhile to share with our community of practice. I further asserted that, had we conceived of our efforts as research from the outset, our contributions to the body of knowledge would be more robust and the utility of our projects would improve as well.
 
This talk continues on that theme. I will briefly review the comparison of action research and process improvement methods offered previously, then use a comparison of two Los Alamos National Laboratory engineering ethics training projects – one developed using a process improvement framework, the other using an action research framework – to provide evidence that use of a research “lens” can enhance behavioral science interventions and the knowledge that may result from them. The linkage between the Specifying Learning and Diagnosing stages of the Action Research cycle provides one mechanism for integrating the knowledge gained into the product or process being studied and should provide a reinforcing loop that leads to continual improvement.
 
The literature suggests that the collaborative relationships among researchers and the individual, group, or organization that is the subject of the improvement opportunity (the “client”), who are likely from very different backgrounds, and the interpretive epistemology that are among the hallmarks of Action Research also contribute to the quality of the knowledge gained. This concept will also be explored in this talk.