Five Steps In The Creative Process
When you look at creative works, you might be amazed at how simple they are, their beauty and their effectiveness. You might wonder how the creator came up with the idea. How can you use that same creative process in your work and life? Today we will discuss the five steps in the creative process.
Creativity is not magic. It’s a mixture of influence, imitation and your own interpretation. It can be more predominate in some people, but everyone can train themselves to be more creative. It’s not just restricted to art or music or inventors. It comes down to training yourself.
The creative process is different for everyone yet it has the same basic five steps. Each step will be different depending on the person, job, industry, creative medium or other factors. It might take days, weeks or months to get an outcome. The creative process is not predictable or linear.
1. Preparation
The preparation stage is where you gather as much information as possible. You begin becoming immersed with the material. Research is done in this step. Look at the audience, research the brand, gather information and inspiration from other sources.
For example, if you are a writer, this step is the researching of facts and reading other works in the same area. If you’re an entrepreneur you’re researching your audience needs and the demand.
2. Incubation
This is the step that will take time and it’s where the magic happens. After you absorb the information from step one, you begin to examine concepts, look at them in different ways and experiment on how the fit together. This step is when ideas are circulating in your mind. It can be consciously while you are brainstorming or subconsciously and you may have to step away from the idea to do something else that energises and excites you before you come back to it.
3. Illumination
This is the ‘Aha!’ moment, the lightbulb moment, the ‘Eureka!’ moment when the perfect idea hits you. It’s the breakthrough moment. It happens many times when you are doing a completely unrelated activity. This is the moment when you must grab your notebook or sketchbook and jot it down before it gets lost in your brain.
4. Evaluation
This is the reasoning stage. It’s the hard part where you look at all your ideas and narrow them down to the ones that will work and the ones that won’t. For each idea or solution ask:
- Is it worth pursuing?
- Is the idea new enough?
- Are there any changes I could make?
- What do my colleagues/peers/audience think of the idea?
5. Implementation
In this stage you get the work done. It’s where your skill, knowledge, experience and the work all come together to create the solution. The final draft. The artist’s finished piece. The finished product.
Creativity doesn’t have a definitive process, yet it does have general steps in each stage of the process. Use the five steps in the creative process in your work and daily life to help you solve problems, come up with new products and be more creative in your life.
Are you looking to become more creative? Do you want to stop trying to figure things out all on your own? I’d love to invite you to join one of our coaching programmes, take a look and schedule your FREE mini coaching session here: Learn More
