Why do you need Creative Process?
After learning about creativity, I realised that creativity is not about waiting for a eureka moment (you can find my creative development journey here) but cultivating that moment. We can set some plan and process to nurture that moment.
Albert Einstein said:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
This highlights the importance of a plan to create or find solutions. We all are surrounded by important creative projects — to create our own lives, every day. While I was reading a book, “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, I realised that we are a creature of habit in both good and bad ways. So, having a set process, like habits, help us focus our energy on creative activities rather than spare our energy to wonder what to do next. The creative process can show you where to go next in your journey. It makes sense to be selective about where you allocate your time and energy as we have limited time and energy.
I learnt several creative processes, and they are mostly separated into 4 or 5 phases. Based on my observations, all processes go through similar activities from the beginning to the end. The differences are the extend of details that go into each phase and the focus on different applications, for example, art, literature, design, business problem-solving. Fundamentally, the creative process is for everyone who is looking for new ideas to solve problems.
What is creative process?
The first phase is preparation for ideas, or some might say “define the problem”. We ask ourselves “what do I want to get out of the creative process?” This is the phase where we get immersed in a challenge or an opportunity that triggers our interest. Or it could be a challenge or an opportunity presented by others or the environment we are in. In this phase, we do research, frame and reframe the problem and opportunity. We build up our knowledge and resources that later will allow us to create new connections between them for ideas.
Next is to come up with as many ideas as possible through cultivating creative condition and by using creative techniques and tools. In this phase, we put our critical thinking and judgement to rest and encourage open and free-thinking. This thought process is called divergent thinking. This can be done by yourself or with other people. I prefer to generate initial ideas by myself before working with others. I observed a wider variety of ideas generated when we were asked to prepare our ideas before discussing them in a group. In this way, we can explore ideas without influence from others — this helps delay validation and judgement.
The third phase is to evaluate ideas and narrow them down to effective ideas by applying critical thinking and checking against our intention or objectives set in the first phase. Although we need to evaluate ideas, it is important to be affirmative to any ideas and open to novelty and ways to rework ideas. This thought process is called convergent thinking. In this phase, we need to be brutal to cut down ideas. I felt like I was playing a good cop, bad cop while going through divergent and convergent phases by myself. At the end of this phase, we will have one or two ideas to execute.
The last phase is to materialise the ideas. This phase is called elaboration or implementation. In this phase, we give shapes to our ideas and bring them to life. In general, we tend to struggle to implement ideas or take any actions till the end. We need to put some plan and exercise our disciplines to do so. In my experience, this is the hardest part. In the beginning, we are likely to be excited about new idea and possibility. However, our excitement wears out as we progress, and we come across obstacles and difficulties. We then tend to lose motivation. We start seeing new sparkles in different things and feel like the idea we are working on is no longer exciting and worth pursuing. It is when our interests and passions are at the test. If we are not clear why we are doing it, it is difficult to invest time and effort into the ideas at difficult times. So, if we have a strong feeling towards our projects, we are likely to enjoy the process and get over obstacles.
Applying creative process — my experience
Before
I didn’t spend much time generating ideas and take actions. I thought I got inspiration or instinct, and then I acted. I pushed through the messy process to try to make it work, but I often felt I could use my energy better if I planned a bit more at the beginning.
During the process, I often lost sight of initial objectives, sidetracked, which sometimes lead to unexpected findings though, and forgot about what I was trying to solve. I also jumped on a few ideas that came to my mind and decided to pursue them a bit too soon. I didn’t spend time to understand my motivations — asking whys to myself. It may be because of the current tendency of constant time pressure and instant gravitation. I have been in a race of solving problems seeing them as collecting badges or ticking tick boxes to get a sense of achievement. Since I didn’t ask myself about my motivation for generating ideas at the beginning, I sometimes lost interest in the halfway. Then the rest of the creative journey became painful — I just wanted to get it done.
Although this sounds like a wasted effort, these experiences helped me understand myself — what I enjoy and not.
After
I began spending a bit of time thinking about my motivations and how much I would enjoy the project ahead of me. I often write down ideas and leave them for a day minimum before jumping on to work on them. This additional process helped me to test my motivation — it’s like checking if this is love or lust. If this is love, I progress further creative process with the idea. It helped me focus on my energy and time on things I care about most, and I feel happier.
By the way, I would like to highlight one thing. Even though this creative process seems to be linear, it is not a step-by-step process to follow. The creative process is nonlinear and iterative.
I was in convergent thinking to design a food tray to eat while driving in one of the creative courses. Whilst narrowing down ideas based on instructions given, I came up with a new idea to improve some of the ideas further. When I was creating a plot for another exercise, I was synthesising different part of ideas. During this process, a whole new idea occurred, so I went back to the preparation phase.
So, the creative process may not seem to be as clear cut as following step-by-step instructions. You may feel a bit messy or lost. However, having a creative process in your mind help you track progress and navigate your creative journey.
I think the creative process is like climbing a mountain. You pick a mountain you love to explore. On the journey to the top, you seem to go through similar paths and sceneries. All trees look the same, and the sky above you don’t change much. However, as you climb up, you start noticing different trees and sceneries that inspire you with new ideas. As long as you keep moving and step forward, you are moving up and getting close to the summit.
If you feel like you lost in your creative forests, the creative process helps you see where you are right now and what you have missed in your creative journey. You can always go back to where you started with different perspectives. That’s why I enjoy losing myself in creative journey.
