By: Lynda Shaw
Source: Forbes
What comes into your mind when you think of creativity? An artist painting beautiful works of art? A designer with imagination and skills for contemporary architecture? An original thinker of the type lauded as a genius? Of course, creativity is all of these, but creative people also think of valuable and practical ways of doing things. They solve problems on a regular basis by employing creative thought. That is the kind of creativity that is exceedingly helpful in business and an incredible transferable skill for anyone who can master it.
Social psychologist and cofounder of the London School of Economics, Graham Wallas developed a theory of a creative process that I think you may find useful. With observations some years earlier from Poincaré, a French mathematician, Wallas came up with a logical and practical template to harness the seemingly illogical unconscious thinking that can nevertheless be so illuminating and turn into the perfect solution to problems.
There are four steps to this model:
Step 1 – Preparation: Recognize the problem and find out as much about it as you can. Consciously try to come up with an answer.
Step 2 – Incubation: Do something unrelated to the problem, think of something else and allow your mind to unconsciously work on the problem.
Step 3 – Illumination: It is during the incubation period that an unrelated event could give an answer, a sort of realization, an illumination.
Step 4 – Verification: At this point you check the solution you have come up with to see if it will work.
The "incubation" period is the interesting part and this has stimulated much debate over the years. It could be that the information you consider in the preparation phase has itself already undergone some unconscious processing. Some believe that unconscious thinking is faster than conscious thought, so is therefore more efficient in the incubation phase. Psychologists more recently suggest that unconscious processing is more effective than conscious processing because it has no constraints associated with normal concepts, so frees the mind to come up with novel answers.
As is often the case in psychology, there are researchers (such as Weisberg) who disagree and the incubation period model is under contention. Many believe that problem solving isn’t in the least bit mysterious and is a combination of relevant knowledge, factual information and problem solving strategies. In this context, these strategies can include analogical problem solving whereby we use our experiences of similar situations and apply this previously acquired knowledge to find solutions. Be careful however, as there will be different variables to consider, so stay open minded.
But here’s a thought. A recent study by Saggar and colleagues found a link between creative problem solving and activity in the cerebellum part of the brain, which is normally associated with regulating motor movements such as balance, co-ordination and speech. They found that when people engaged the executive-control center, engaging higher order functions such as planning and organizing, it actually impaired creative problem solving. In this instance, thinking logically didn’t help with the task.
So what strategies for creative problem solving do you favor? Are you in the logical camp or do you prefer the four-step model? Perhaps you have other ways in which you work out those sticky challenges. Whichever you prefer, perhaps it’s a good idea to shake up old ways of doing things and consciously try something different and measure its success or otherwise. At least that way you will know what best suits you.