Frameworking the creative process for effective idea creation

Resources

Businesses are built on idea generation. An entrepreneur sees a gap in the market, or a niche that’s poorly served, or a user problem, has an idea, and with some hard work, some capital, and effective marketing, they go from startup to fully fledged, fully revenue-generating business. The McDonald’s fast food restaurant grew out of Ray Croc recognising that Richard and Maurice McDonald’s hamburger restaurant was infinitely more efficient than anything else in the restaurant space – his idea was to franchise the concept. Coca-cola was originally a headache cure which didn’t work, but it tasted great, so was remarketed to become the global soft drinks leader.

But what about for existing companies looking to innovate in the space they’re already in? Does lightning really strike twice? Of course it doesn’t. Marketing execs and product designers at the likes of Pepsi and Nike don’t sit around eating picnics waiting for inspiration to take them, they have systems in place to manufacture ideas.

In a similar fashion to the design thinking process, an idea creation process gives you hard systems and processes through which to provide relevant solutions to solve new problems. They facilitate individuals and teams to produce, develop, and communicate innovative ideas for projects.

Adhering to and adapting a framework for idea creation – from a business perspective – can even serve to improve employee engagement. Effective utilisation of creativity is an essential framework for maximising the inventiveness of the people working for and representing a business.

What are the 4 phases of the creative process?

In The Art of Thought, by psychologist Graham Wallas, theoretician in political science and international relations, and a cofounder of the London School of Economics (LSE), 4 essential phases in the creative process are outlined:

Phase 1: Research and preparation

The creative process begins with preparation, which starts with an intensive search for information and intellectual resources. It is also during this phase that you determine the theme of your creation and seek inspiration in all imaginable places.

During this phase, you think about the content, the format, or even the way in which you are going to bring your next creation or project to life. It is both an internal process, when you brainstorm to generate ideas, and an external process, when you gather the necessary data and expertise.

For example, if you were utilising gamification for employee training in your business – which is where you apply gaming mechanics and design principles to increase user engagement, your first step would be to think extensively about what you’re actually wanting your employees to get out of the learning experience. What’s the inspiration for the training? What do you want your people to learn and develop in? While games creation platforms with add-on agency services make game creation very quick and easy, the content and storytelling that goes into making them effective cannot be planned and prepared enough in advance. Relevant books, podcasts, literature, and even other gamified training materials should be looked at and considered in advance to be as effective as possible in the gamification of your human resources (HR) processes.

Phase 2 : Incubation

This is where the ideas and information gathered in phase 1 simmer in the mind. The project grows in your imagination and new connections are formed. During this phase, it is important that you detach your mind from the project as much as possible, in order to give free rein to your imagination. The goal is to leave space for new ideas to emerge and help bring your project to fruition.

Famously, prolific horror author Stephen King said he never wrote any of his ideas down, and that if they were truly good ideas for stories, they would stay in his mind and come back to him. While I doubt he’d taken Graham Wallas’s advice to heart as the inspiration for this process, it’s undeniably an example of a high performing creative utilising an incubation phase.

Phase 3: Illumination

Then comes the moment of illumination. After an incubation period, you have, hopefully, landed on the best idea or solution for your project. Now it’s time for you to get to work with what you gathered in the preparation phase to bring that project to life.

In this phase it is also important to show patience and perseverance, because what you had in mind may not work as well as you expected it to, and you will have to review several points. Before making final decisions you can then test your ideas and your work, which brings us to the last phase of the creative process.

Phase 4: Verification

This phase is the evaluation and critiquing of your achievement. Does it work? Does your solution hold water, so to speak? Does it make sense? Will the target audience get it? In other words, you use your critical thinking and judgement skills to refine your creation and make it align with your real-world goals.

At this point, it’s good to get constructive criticism from multiple sources. This is why it is essential to be open to change and flexible in order to improve your work, even if the opinions of others reverts you back to the previous phases in order to improve your idea, or come up with a better one.

A soft skill that’s especially useful here is to have developed a growth mindset. It can be easy when you’ve just created something to become very personally invested in it, and become entrenched in your view that it’s fit for purpose, and the strongest solution to a problem, however, feedback, whether positive or negative, if given in good faith, should be welcomed for the betterment of the project. Ultimately, it’s part of the creative process. Few great novels make it to the bookshelf without running through rounds of revisions, and none of the world’s greatest movies hit the big screen without spilling days of footage onto the cutting room floor.

The different techniques of creativity

There are many techniques to boost ideation and help encourage the forming of new ideas in business. Here are the most common:

1. Brainstorming

This is certainly the most popular and widespread creativity technique in business. It consists of bringing together the members of the project team who will each express their ideas, without criticism or judgement from their colleagues. This allows you to have an overview of the work to be done and to discuss the different ideas and solutions.

For brainstorming to be effective, it is important that participants bounce off the ideas others come up with to continually hone and refine the best suggestions. It is above all a collective work, not a game of best idea wins. This can take the form of bullet points or a bubble diagram (mind mapping), a visual representation tool to stimulate creativity, or in the form of an idea tree, in which:

• The subject, theme or key element of the project is in the centre
• The ideas related to the subject constitute branches and sub-branches all related to this same subject

Mapping your ideas in this way helps to better understand their importance and relevance to the theme or topic of your current project.

2. Gamestorming

Gamification has the advantage of improving individual investment and commitment through the use of game elements during an activity, work process, or action. Gamification is also known to promote strong social ties and weld employees together, which reinforces the feeling of belonging to the company and being a part of its culture, providing a healthy work environment that encourages the profusion of ideas.

Gamestorming encompasses various problem-solving techniques that are presented in the form of fun and motivating games. Among the main techniques of gamestorming, we have “the anti-problem.” The idea of ​​this game is to turn the problem you are trying to solve in the other direction. We seek solutions to “the anti-problem” to get a fresh perspective. Let’s say you’re running out of ideas to solve the actual problem, by looking for solutions to the inverse problem, you’re seeing it from a different angle, and it allows for fresh ideas, some of which might seem obvious, and can themselves be inverted back again to solve the actual problem.

3. The sketch storm

The idea of ​​this creativity technique is based on drawing simple sketches as solutions to a problem. Visual representations have the power to stimulate our imagination even more than speech and words, and can be especially useful in cases of product or graphic design problems. For example, if an ecommerce web page was failing to convert, because that medium is so visual, assuming all the copy and the coding worked as it ought to, it might be productive to have a sketch storm to redesign it.

While there are many ways to brainstorm ideas within a team, using visuals to communicate concepts and potential solutions works remarkably well. In addition, a drawing can allow you to express a concept that you cannot put into words. This will especially suit workers who are less vocal or eloquent, and are more technical or visual and spatial in their approach to work.

Develop the creative process that suits your business, and suits your industry

Of course, these 4 stages of the creative process do not always happen in such an orderly fashion, and are not necessarily followed to the letter. The creative process is unique to everyone and can sometimes be messy. While one idea creation technique may work for one person extremely well, it might not work so well for another. Similarly, some will be especially helpful in certain industries, but not so helpful in others.

Graham Wallas’s model certainly has its limits, but it can still become a roadmap for your own creative journey by showing you a direction to follow, if not necessarily a final destination. It can also help you become aware of the progress of the project. When the process gets a little too much, and risks becoming disorganised, returning to this framework can help refocus your team on its goals.

Want to know more?