Learning how to think is about something long-lasting, something that will enable you to approach any new idea and determine if it fits your organization, something that will allow you to invent your own ideas. This is about your freedom. Freedom can only come through a mind free to think, ask the right questions, and find answers. If you want to lose the possibility of working toward your potential and in a very real sense your humanity, give up your right to think. If you want to reduce someone else's potential or humanity, severely restrict or take away their right to think.

Thinking throws a light of understanding on the past, gives us clarity about the present, and illuminates the possibilities of the future. The past has happened. It is real but we cannot change it. Our experiences are important only if we use them to move forward. We can learn from experience; we should not be imprisoned by it. Our effectiveness in the reality of the present depends upon our level of awareness and attention. The future is different. It is not real. It only exists in one place--in the mind. It has no substance beyond that. The future is the realm of strategy. The only reason for strategy is to make a deliberate choice about the future. The future is not predetermined; we have choice. We do not have control.

Answers are death; questions are life. We can never get to the future through answers. We can never get to the future if the only questions we ever ask are ones for which we are mostly seeking information. We must divide questions into two simple categories--informational and thought-provoking.

As rapidly as possible when we are dealing with any thinking process, strategic or otherwise, we need to disclose our knowledge so we get to the frontier of what we know, the place where questions should drive us.

In any attempt to grapple with a choice about the future, a challenge that carries its own ambiguities, complexities, and unknowns, we must develop the ability to remain in an answering process. It is not so much equating questions with thinking but the struggle to respond is the place of our thinking. We need the discipline to face our own ignorance, to stand on the threshold of our own knowledge pondering, wondering, seeking. We need to ask the kind of questions where the first response is that small voice inside us that, partially in fear, responds, I don't know.

If we ask questions for which we or someone else already has the answer, then we are taking already conceived thoughts and fitting them to the questions. Questions must generate new thought. Thinking is the pursuit of the right questions so that we will engage in answering processes to guide us to new insights and innovative action. It is not about finding one answer or many answers but having sufficient thought to see the realm of possibilities and then choose a path that we can never know with certainty is the right answer.

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