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Five Steps to Guaranteed Creativity

Take Advantage of How Your Brain Really Works

High-performing software development teams require innovation and highly creative solutions to problems. “Creativity” isn’t just something you can buy. However, it is something you can cultivate and practice. In fact, you can become a highly creative person (in any field, not just technology) by following these five steps:

1. Gather the raw material
2. Work it
3. Forget the whole thing
4. Eureka! (Or, “my that’s peculiar…”)
5. Develop

Each of these steps takes advantage of how our brains really work — not how we’d like them to work. For more on these topics, see Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactor your Wetware by Andy Hunt:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Let’s take a look at each step and see what it means and how to do it well.

Step 1: Gather Raw Material

To start any creative endeavor, you must first gather the raw material for your project…