They have a word for that
Winkletter • 29 Jun 2025 •
Schools teach literacy and numeracy (reading, writing, and arithmetic) but they often overlook “operacy”. This term was coined by Edward de Bono to describe the basic skill of acting in the world. If anything, schools suppress the development of operacy. They emphasize following instructions–don’t act out, and don’t talk in class. They prioritize compliance and passive consumption of information over active engagement with the learning process, individual agency, or collaborative problem-solving.
Parents can overlook this as well. My mother was high in operacy, but she usually let me slack off because she didn’t want to be a harsh taskmaster like my grandmother.
And then modern life renders us more inoperative.
- Routines and Specialization: We specialize more and more and leave most aspects of work and life to other specialists.
- Passive Consumption: It’s so much easier to consume than to create.
- Fear of Failure: People leave garbage comments on your creative work because they didn’t like your haircut.
- Loss of Diversity: Even when we go out in the world, we’re surrounded by McDonald’s, Starbucks, and other branded experiences.
What do you think are the key ingredients of operacy?
Comments
- Understanding the nature of tasks, projects, and achieving goals
- Recognizing our fight, flight, or freeze response (many people don’t realize they’re exhibiting a freeze response, which is why they can’t bring themselves to complete a task)
- Associating durations to tasks to better manage them. Otherwise, tasks become abstractions we don’t know how to schedule or commit to
- Cultivating an identity of being a person who’s good at getting stuff done. If we’ve gotten used to others doing work for us we tend to shift into a passive identity and lose confidence in our ability to function well, independently
Ahh a Haider-style question answered by Haider, himself! I got distracted researching the Latin root and correlation of “operacy” and “opera.”
