The PENSAR® Method — Part II: design principles and cycle architecture

Abstract

This is the second of three articles presenting the PENSAR® Method as an artefact of organizational psychosocial governance, developed under the principles of Design Science Research. Part I reconstructed the explanatory models of work-related illness and delimited the operational gap the artefact seeks to fill; the present part carries out the passage from gap to design. It critically reviews the literature on the evaluation of organizational interventions and argues that the pattern of null results documented there reflects implementation failure rather than content failure; from that literature it extracts seven recurrent failure patterns, from which it deductively derives seven design principles, stated independently of the artefact so that they may be assessed, criticised and reused in building alternative methods. It then describes the architecture of the six-stage cycle — Research, Understand, Normatise, Simulate, Apply and Review —, organised into three functional pairs each with its own guiding question, characteristic output and passage criterion, and specifies the cadence of the annual macrocycle with quarterly monitoring. Finally, it formulates the model's central conceptual proposition: time as an explicit fourth axis of management, alongside people, processes and results.