About

I studied at the Technical University Delft and chose the specialisation “Chemical Engineering”. Then I worked in chemical factories for some years. This was a very interesting time.

In 1974 I met Hans van Mourik Broekman who was an independent consultant on “innovation”.
He used the knowledge - which is distributed amongst the respective brains of people with different functions and disciplines in a company - to guide these people to the birth of an innovation.

I realised that that was a major part of what I had been doing whilst working in the chemical industry.

I discovered that I had more affection for dealing with people than dealing with technology.
We worked together for quite some time.

Before 1972 Hans van Mourik Broekman had discovered a method for speeding-up deliberations on difficult subjects by a factor of 3 to 10, and sometimes more.

He asked me to find out why this method yielded such good results.

Several years later I concluded that:

• the progress of the deliberations in a meeting, in which much information from different functions and different disciplines has to be considered, is limited by the size of the working-memory of a human being, and
• that van Mourik Broekman’s method spectacularly increases the respective working-memories of the participants in the deliberation.

We gave the method the name “OPTOFRONIE” (Greek: “optos” = visible ; “fronein” = thinking).

Further qualifications are presented on the LinkedIn site of Hans Damen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Contact Information

If you are interested in the proposal presented at the “HOME” page of this website please send an email to: