CONCEPT
Operacy
De Bono's term for the skill of doing — converting thinking into action, making things happen in the world — proposed as the third fundamental competency alongside literacy and numeracy, and the most urgent of the three in the AI age.
Operacy is the capability de Bono considered most neglected by the Western educational tradition. Literacy teaches reading. Numeracy teaches calculation. Operacy teaches the conversion of intention into result — the judgment about what should be done and the capacity to direct the tools and circumstances toward doing it. De Bono argued that schools optimized almost exclusively for literacy and numeracy, producing graduates who could read and calculate but who struggled with the operative work of identifying what to do, evaluating alternatives, and executing effectively in conditions of uncertainty. The AI age has made operacy the most urgent of the three competencies, because the machine now handles the literate and numerate operations at superhuman capability while the operative skill — the capacity to decide what should be done — remains the human contribution.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The term never achieved wide uptake — de Bono's readers tended to focus on the specific