At some point throughout our lives, we lost our way. We lost our ability to dream, to take risks, to fail. With all of life’s responsibilities and an effort to protect some type of image that we’ve built, we lost our creativity. It reminds me of the movie Hook when Peter Pan gets old and fat and completely loses his imagination. There is a scene in the movie where Peter Pan meets Rufio and the Lost Boys. Well, he doesn’t really meet them because, at some point, they knew each other until Peter Pan lost his way.
In this scene, the Lost Boys are told he is Peter Pan, but they don’t believe him. At one point, Peter says, “I want to speak to a grown-up,” to which Rufio replies, “All grown-ups are pirates.” Accurate…
Later on in the movie, he doesn’t transform into the “real” Peter Pan until he uses his imagination. Once he starts using his imagination, he can alter the world around him. This movie is an excellent metaphor for how our responsibilities and stresses in life shape us into a version of ourselves that is quite different than our potential. Unless we nurture it, creativity, and our ability to believe in our creative ideas, tends to fade. We replace creative ideas with ideas and processes that have worked in the past. It’s the reason the joke exists of asking why something is done a certain way, and you will invariably get a response of “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Settling for good enough solutions to problems is easy, and many executives have a long to-do list. However, just because it’s easier doesn’t mean it’s better. For really complicated issues or systemic issues, it’s usually not. That’s why most of the top universities teach a customer-centric, empathy-focused, design thinking approach to solving problems. While this isn’t an article on design thinking, many of the steps in the creative process overlap with a design thinking model. Much like design thinking, the more you use the creative process, and the better you understand why creativity operates the way it does, the better you will get at creatively solving problems.
Creativity is a Process
Creativity doesn’t come from a magic ether where musicians and artists are the only people who have the right spell; it’s actually a process. More specifically, it’s a macro process that involves several micro-processes. Although the details of the macro process differ, the most famous example was developed by Graham Wallas in 1926. This four-stage process involves preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification[1]. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these steps in the creative process.
Preparation
The preparation step of the creative process is where you collect information and think about the problem. Since everyone can be creative, this could be anything. It could be researching a customer segment with primary data. It could be reviewing industry trends. It could be constructing empathy maps or buyer personas. In many cases, it can help for the preparation phase to define the problem that you are trying to solve. As many design thinkers will tell you, a well-defined problem is one that is half-solved.
Incubation
Although this is the easiest step, it’s often one of the most challenging parts for many people in decision-making positions to allow. Creativity rarely happens in the board room. It rarely makes appearances in team meetings. It often occurs at really strange times, usually when you are not even thinking about the problem. That’s because creativity requires an incubation period. You have to walk away from the problem and do something entirely different for your neural network to build linkages between other parts of your associative network.
Do you get your best ideas when you are out for a walk or driving home or in the middle of the night to the point where you can’t get back to sleep? That’s the incubation period. It takes time for your brain to fully digest and comprehend the problem to solve it. It’s why I recommend working on large and important projects one piece at a time with a more measured approach rather than working as much as you can until it’s off of your to-do list. You will have better ideas along the way, and you won’t stifle your creativity by not allowing for proper incubation periods to set in.
Illumination
Illumination is the part of the creative process that most people think of when they think of creativity. This is the aha moment. It’s the part where you get the creative idea to solve the problem. You suddenly know what you will do, and you’re kicking yourself for not thinking about this sooner. You may have had this experienced this feeling two days after a meeting, thinking about what you should have said or thought of a better way of doing something that is already done. Regardless of the situation, this is the illumination stage of the creative process.
However, this part doesn’t happen without the other parts. Without the right information or enough, this part doesn’t happen. There’s no magic creative ether. There’s no one type of person that is creative; everyone is creative. Everyone can, and does, go through this process with any complex problem; you probably just don’t realize that you do.
Illumination happens because we’ve allowed the first two steps to start building an associative network. An associative network is our brain’s way of connecting different things.[2] Our brains have a way of categorizing and associating different things together. It’s the reason that when you think of jelly, you probably think of peanut butter, or when you think of cereal, you also think of milk. These linkages in our brains are also helpful in connecting two previously unassociated items to now be associative, and voila, you’ve got creativity. At some point, we’d never associated computers with phones or satellites with navigation, but at some point, somebody joined them in their associative network. Creativity is all just one big process of connecting the dots.
Verification
I hate to break it to you, but your creative idea might be crap. I know, I know…I just spent a lot of time telling you that ANYONE can be creative, and it’s a simple process. Well, it is, but the thing that can hang many people up is the last step in the process, verification. Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and great creative ideas require adoption from other people. Each person has a unique worldview, and while on the one hand, all the freaky people make the beauty of the world, on the other hand, a great creative idea has to have appeal to more than just you to be successful. Not only does it need to appeal to you, depending on the technology, but it might also be something people need to change their behaviors to adopt.
Luckily, we know a lot about how product adoption works too. I’m not going to get too much into this because it deserves its own post. Still, the cycle of product adoption follows a five-group cycle with the innovators, followed by the early adopters, then the early majority, then the late majority, and finally the laggards. Product adoption can vary from continuous innovation, which doesn’t require consumers to adopt new learning, to discontinuous innovation, which could require considerable new learning to adopt a product. In the creative process, the verification of your idea will be dependent on your degree of innovation, the size of your market, your positioning, and a whole lot of other things that are involved with a product rollout.
Everyone Can Be Creative
Let me reiterate this point; everybody can be creative. Well, I guess unless you are in accounting, that’s just called fraud. Creativity keeps everything moving. It keeps things interesting. It allows you to solve problems you might have thought were not solvable. Our creativity adds so much to our lives and will enable us to think in ways that enrich our own lives and the lives around us. The next time you have a complex problem, instead of defaulting to your typical behaviors, try running through the creative process and see what kind of outcome that you can create.
[1] Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
[2] http://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social-cognition/associative-networks/#:~:text=Associative%20networks%20are%20cognitive%20models,may%20become%20linked%20in%20memory.