Part of digging in to the depth of great creativity and leadership is asking questions.
Life is fast and busy so we often accept the first answer that is given…even if it is not the right answer. “Better to have an answer than have no answer”…but is it?
Kent Healy is a blogger and author. Kent has a theory that he has spent over 10 years developing. His theory is actually very simple; the world can be divided into 3 categories:
- The uninformed
- The misinformed
- The informed
Like all good theories, and creative ideas, this theory has been developed to solve a problem: “The sources of our greatest problems are twofold: One, a lack of information and two, perhaps most importantly, a plethora of wrong information.
It is not very hard to be uniformed…you have no information and you are not really looking for any information.
It is actually very easy to be misinformed. We become misinformed when we accept everything at face value. When we trust everything that is said and never prove or dig on the data. Misinformation is dangerous and causes us to react and not respond.
The informed work hard to be informed and understand that it takes work to figure things out. They also actually develop ideas that matter and create solutions that work. They do so by not jumping to conclusions, they use sources and question the masses. They ask questions about the answers. The informed are not afraid to challenge everything, including themselves and their own beliefs.
As a creative problem solver and a leader you have a choice. Will you be uninformed, misinformed, or informed? We need you to be informed.
How do you personally stay in a posture of gathering information and questioning the answers?
