How to Leverage Enabling Structures to Fulfill Values
“Security means having some assurance of future stability and the ability to plan ahead.”
— Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity
We're surrounded by seemingly intractable challenges.
Some of these challenges are political, others economic. Some are experienced at a community or national level, others in our daily work and family lives. Intractable challenges—big and small—often arise from a lack of imagination. We fail to dream up novel solutions, and so our challenges become even further entrenched. We see problems through the corrupt values they are built on and inevitably fail to realize the values we cherish through our attempted solutions.
What does it take to extend our imaginations and enhance our capacity for solving our most perplexing challenges?
The Imaginative & Dynamic Helen Chandler Ryan
There is no single answer, of course. But today, I want to look at a concept that can go a long way to changing how we think about our peskiest challenges. To do that, let's step back in time and travel to the young state of New Mexico.
During the Great Depression, the federal government employed 62,000 cultural workers through Federal One, part of the Works Progress Administration. President Roosevelt believed that “inherent in the American Dream . . . was the promise not only of economic and social justice but also of cultural enrichment” (Jane De Hart Matthews, quoted in Bellmore). The answer to the misery of the Great Depression, then, wasn't simply to ensure people had work and enough to eat but to ensure that American life was characterized by a vibrant cultural and artistic environment.
Federal One oversaw five focused projects: the Federal Writers Project, Federal Arts Project, Federal Theater Project, Federal Music Project, and the Historical Records Survey. Each project provided work relief to qualified unemployed people—artists, craftspeople, performers, musicians, archivists, and writers. And while certainly not perfect in execution, the Federal One projects aimed to provide relatively equal opportunity to women and Black workers.
The Federal Music Project, which employed over 17,000 musicians by the end of its first year, had three objectives: first and foremost, to provide work relief for unemployed musicians; second, to promote music appreciation among Americans through free education and live performances; and third, to document the musical activities of American culture.
The founding director of FMP was Nikolai Sokoloff, a Russian emigré who had previously served as the conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. While the federal project under Sokoloff seems to have succeeded in many ways, it suffered from his bias toward European classical music. While the “spirit of the New Deal” emphasized the values, interests, and needs of the “common man,” Sokoloff's preference was toward the cultural elite.
Luckily, Sokoloff's influence was not all-encompassing in the program's implementation. The federal project appointed state and regional directors to administer the program on a more local level. And among these directors, a few prioritized the “trend toward the vernacular” in American culture. They worked to document local folk music and provide music education outside of urban cultural centers.
One such director was Helen Chandler Ryan, the head of the program in New Mexico. Under Chandler Ryan's direction, the New Mexico program thrived and became one of the most successful within the Federal Music Project. Charles Cutter, a historian of the New Mexican program, called Chandler Ryan one of the “most imaginative and dynamic” of the regional directors.
The New Mexican program focused on popular education rather than high culture. Musicians on the FMP payroll taught and directed volunteer ensembles such as the Children's Típica Orchestra of Albuquerque and the Española Community Band. By focusing on education, Chandler Ryan managed to scale the program's impact even with a relatively small budget. This approach also enabled outreach to New Mexico's remote rural communities—a particularly challenging task in the 1930s—and helped avoid the national program's scrutiny.
The broad reach of the FMP in New Mexico also allowed for the unprecedented documentation of folk music and lore. Spanish-speaking musicians (and writers) learned and transcribed the music of the Spanish-American population. Black musicians (and writers) learned and transcribed the music of Black churches and communities. Sadly, due to the emphasis on the assimilation of native populations during this period, Native American music and lore were not documented to the same extent.
What Can We Do to Help?
I'm always struck by the practical creativity of the New Deal Era. Roosevelt and his administration looked at the plight of the American people in the midst of the Great Depression and asked, "What can we do to help?" They saw a national environment rife with misery and recast it as an investment opportunity—one from which the whole country would benefit directly.
The New Deal was a project that created enabling structures. Through its various programs, the New Deal built material, legal, cultural, and philosophical structures based on a vision of what was possible for the American people. New Deal programs and regulations enabled Americans to enjoy retirement, visit National Parks, and rest assured their bank deposits couldn't disappear.
The people behind the New Deal rejected austerity as a solution to the Great Depression and refused to accept the American people's suffering as a necessary consequence of economic upheaval. Cutter notes that “perhaps the most important and unexpected result of the Federal Music Project” was how it catalyzed a love of music across the country. The FMP wasn't only an enabling structure; it was an enriching structure. According to Cutter, “In the first nine months of the project alone, some twenty million persons attended the government-sponsored concerts.” What's more, “hundreds of thousands of Americans, adults and children, eagerly enrolled in various instructional programs offered by FMP teachers."
A more contemporary example of this type of enabling structure is an Irish pilot program called Basic Income for the Arts. In 2022, a lottery was held to select 2,000 artists and cultural workers who would receive an unconditional weekly payment of €325 (about $350) for three years. While not enough to live on exclusively, that payment goes a long way toward enabling culture workers to focus on their craft with more dedicated time and ease.
What is an enabling structure?
An enabling structure is a system that enhances human capacity and extends the imagination. It's a way of prioritizing a value or set of values and constructing a system for realizing that value. An enabling structure creates the conditions necessary for a desired outcome while defining that outcome in terms of a complex human value.
An enabling structure is a system that enhances human capacity and extends the imagination.
For example, public education systems enable the growth and learning of all children. With access to public schools, children can imagine a host of ways they could direct their lives, pursue meaningful work, and forge relationships. Even for those who opt out of public education (e.g., homeschooling or private schools), the public education system influences the goals and standards they work towards. A society without public education is not merely less educated; it is also one with a stunted imagination.
Enabling structures don't only function at a national or even community level. They can be devised and implemented at any size: a family calendar, morning routine, or yoga practice, for example. In other words, enabling structures are everywhere—and we usually take them for granted.
The ubiquity of enabling structures means we often don't appreciate their power. A fully integrated enabling structure seamlessly blends into our perception of how the world works (and, therefore, what we can expect and imagine). It influences how we perceive our roles and responsibilities. It opens some doors and, often, closes other doors.
The modern world benefits from the development and accumulation of enabling structures over history. Democracy is an enabling political and social structure, as are public welfare programs, education systems, and broadcast media. However, due to their endurance, these structures have become unremarkable. We forget that they had to be thought up, constructed, and improved upon. Most of the time, they simply exist.
Becoming aware of these enabling structures is critical, though.
When we recognize them, we can improve on them and even imagine new structures to enable emerging values or meet new needs.
A program like the Federal Music Project, one with a significant impact but a short shelf life, is a good reminder that we can dream up novel enabling structures. Asking what we want to enable and how we want to encourage imagination can inspire new ideas for building systems. And yes, I'm talking about political, social, and cultural structures at scale. But I'm also talking about the enabling structures that exist in our lives, work, and businesses. These, too, are ways to enhance our human capacities and extend our imagination.
A pretty radical shift occurs when we stop thinking about the shoulds and supposed-tos of running a business and start thinking about what we want to enable for our customers or clients. There's a significant difference between ensuring I have the right policies in place and enabling client independence, confidence, and creativity. The same is true for our own work systems; instead of focusing on how I should be working, I can consider what outcomes or affects I want to enable through the structure of my work. Instead of asking whether I've maximized my productivity, I can ask what systems would enable me to prioritize producing the right things. A manager ceases to see their job as one concerned with keeping a team in line and on track and begins to see it as ensuring the team is enabled to do remarkable work.
How We Approach a Problem Determines The Structures We'll Build
Discerning the structure or system beneath a problem or challenge helps us find a solution. Whether politically, personally, in business, or in some other area of life, we tend to approach problems in two ways. We either seek to constrain undesired behavior or we seek to enable desired behavior.
The constraining approach—which, best I can tell, tends to be the default approach—often creates disabling structures. Disabling structures enable the powerful and enhance their capacity for domination or exploitation. At the same time, disabling structures constrain those with less power and prevent them from exercising agency. That sounds pretty dramatic, but we can scale that description up or down depending on the context.
For example, a common parenting style based on discipline and constraint enables the (relatively) powerful parent to exert constraining influence on the less powerful child. On a larger scale, the US campaign finance system enables the ultra-wealthy and corporate agents to exert undue influence over elections. This impacts not only who wins but who decides to run for office in the first place. Instead of everyday people imagining a run for office, the rich and powerful dream up new ways to fortify and grow their holdings.
At work, consider employee surveillance software. The pandemic paved the way for the widespread use of systems that track workers' clicks and eyeballs, enabling maximum scrutiny while disabling worker privacy. This gives management the tools they need to disempower workers, constrain wages, and wield pink slips.
Again, viewing a problem or challenge as the need for constraint is only one approach. Not surprisingly, it's also the approach that tends to achieve short-term goals at the expense of long-term growth.
When Helen Chandler Ryan looked at the small budget assigned to the New Mexico division of the Federal Music Project, she could have done what she was ‘supposed to’ do: hire musicians to put on classical music performances in Albuquerque. In that frame, Chandler Ryan was immensely constrained.
Instead, she saw her mandate as an opportunity to enable generations of music lovers through education and preservation. Those were the expansive and generative values she was trying to realize in her work with the project.
In his history of the FMP in New Mexico, Charles Cutter explains, “Realizing that New Mexico's small allocation of federal funds could not support a salaried professional symphony as in Utah and Colorado, Ryan sought to spread the direct financial benefits around the state to different types of musicians, both performers and instructors.” She built the structures, in this case, social and organizational systems, to make that possible. She expanded the cultural imagination of a whole state (and beyond) because she asked what she could do instead of trying to make do.
Budget constraints are a timeless challenge. Let's look at an intractable problem in today's headlines: content moderation.
Disabling vs Enabling Structures in Content Moderation
Mark Zuckerberg made headlines in January when he announced that Meta would be overhauling its content moderation system. He claimed that this move would help the company get back to its roots (i.e., values) and prioritize free expression. At the same time, Meta dramatically reduced what counted as discriminatory or hate speech. There are numerous ways that these changes don't make much sense business-wise, even if they aim to take advantage of the current political climate.
To be frank, content moderation is a hairy, expensive, time-consuming, and often ambiguous doozy of an intractable challenge. By definition, content moderation relies on constraints and often leverages disabling structures—even with the best of intentions. Either the leader or the group must establish guidelines for what kind of content is in bounds and what is out of bounds. Then, a moderator or the group must enforce those guidelines.
Ideally, membership in a community—whether formal or informal—includes some buy-in on what forms of content are preferred and which are prohibited. Members understand the constraints as tools for maintaining the health, safety, and integrity of the group's social system. Community or network members want to realize the same values as others in the group and adhere to the agreed-upon policies with that in mind.
So, content moderation is an essential system of constraints for online communities. But if the community only concerns itself with constraints on content, then it's missing a huge opportunity. Instead of asking merely what's allowed and what's not, we can ask: What conversations and relationships do we want to enable?
That was the question my team and I asked ourselves when I ran a small business owner support network. Once we knew what conversations and relationships we wanted to enable, we could consider what structures were required to bring them about. For us, those structures were events, editorial strategy, customer service procedures, onboarding, and moderation policies. Every post, email, workshop, or group discussion aimed to enable the sort of interactions we believed best served our members. That's not to say that we always got it right, but that building the organizational, social, and educational structures with that goal in mind meant we were fumbling forward in the right direction.
Critiquing the Structures to Solve Problems
The concept of enabling structures can also be a productive framework for critique. It asks us to refocus on values and get creative with how we realize them.
Returning to the example of content moderation, when community leaders and moderators spot content or conversations that run counter to the community's goals, they often ask: How can we prevent this in the future? And that's a fine question to ask. But we might also ask: What have we done that enabled that breach? What have we prioritized, neglected, downplayed, or encouraged that created an enabling structure for that behavior?
These questions aren't meant to point blame or take on undue responsibility for a problem. But instead, they encourage us to see how existing (or non-existing) structures enable undesirable behavior and promote values we don't align with. Once we see that, we can come up with a plan to alter or replace those structures.
The same concept applies to our individual work lives. If I find myself consistently missing a deadline or unable to move an important project forward, I need to ask myself how my current systems and structure enable my undesired behavior. What is it about how I fill my work time that enables me to do some work while neglecting other parts of my work? What is it about how I track my progress that enables me to blow past deadlines or casually forget about major projects? What values are my current systems promoting, and what values do I want to realize in the way I work?
Again, the point isn't to shame myself into complying with the existing system. I want to see how my existing (or non-existing) systems and structures create the results I'm getting. Once I can see that, I can move on to adjusting or replacing those structures with ones that enable me to be more consistent or prioritize the right things.
Whatever systems we build, they should help us realize our higher values.
Last year, I wrote that values aren't chains; they are wings. Enabling structures allow our values to take flight. When we start with what's really and truly valuable to us—as individuals, as teams, communities, and publics—we are free to build the structures most likely to enable the realization of those values. We can create the systems necessary to channel resources in ways that further enable us to realize our values.
A truly enabling structure is one that helps us realize our responsibilities while freeing us to fulfill them.
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