Why is ‘enablement’ as a way of thinking so important to people in today’s society?
To understand this, we need to appreciate the term “enablement”. Enablement means strengthening, giving confidence, giving capacity, and giving the “means” for accomplishing a task. This can be seen in the diagram :
Strengthening means that people in the final analysis are able to accomplish an outcome or a goal better/ more effortlessly/ with greater excellence.
This manifests as expanded roles, deepening one’s role, adding new roles, etc.
Enablement is in one sense antithetical to the idea of doing without people – automation, or making people redundant or irrelevant to the task.
Enablement means that human beings are better able to perform work as compared to making them redundant and therefore incapable of accomplishing that goal by themselves.
In today’s society, every major advancement in making lives convenient, reducing effort in certain directions, reducing the role of human labour, must be accompanied by an equal advancement in enablement – giving people the capacity to use new tools, giving people new capacities and new opportunities to leverage their personal possibilities as individuals, and giving people a new vision of their roles in society – in their homes, colleges, factories, services, etc.
Modern society must therefore be seen as a DNA.
Without technology and automation, we would not be able to free humans to realize their possibilities.
Without enablement, we may leave human beings with comfort, but not fulfilment and accomplishment.
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