Imagination is like fire. No—strike that. Imagination is fire. By reading this field manual, you’ve perhaps figured out a few ways to make sparks and fan flames. Now comes the question: to what ends shall you use that fire?

Rosamund Zander, the psychotherapist and lead author of The Art of Possibility, forms what she calls “accomplishment groups”—circles of people who meet regularly over the course of a year, each of them committing to pursue and achieve a deep, imaginative goal. The goal can be professional or personal, public or private. Whatever the goal may be, implicit in the endeavor—and reinforced by the norms of the group—is the expectation that the project be good.

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce paints an ominous picture of the surge in skilled labor in China, India, and other emerging economies—juxtaposed against an aging American workforce that needs serious retooling. In every sector, our competitors’ investments in education and technology are eroding the edge that has traditionally justified the pay of American workers. As China and India climb the skills ladder, there is, in the view of the Commission, only one potential competitive advantage left for Americans: our imagination.

When the 9/11 Commission wrote its final report and recommendations, it described a litany of failures: of planning, implementation, follow-through, communication, coordination. But the most damning failure it enumerated was a failure of imagination. The government had failed to imagine that terrorists might strike at America in such a stunningly symbolic, asymmetrically powerful way. Perhaps an analyst here or a case officer there had conceived of the possibility that this could happen. But the government—the collective of analysts and officers and policymakers and citizens—had not conceived of it and consequently did not prepare for it. “Imagination,” the Commission observed drily, “is not usually a gift associated with bureaucracies.” And so its telling recommendation was that going forward, our intelligence agencies had to learn to “routinize imagination.”