What best describes creativity: a lightbulb or a lightning bolt?
Answer: neither.
These are how most people see creativity. However, both metaphors are just the final step or even the result of a whole process. And all this process takes time.
Creativity researcher Zorana Ivcevic Pringle from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence explained what this process looks like:
“First, people have to regulate expectations of the creative process. They have to understand the nature of the creative process. (Creativity is hard! But sometimes what has to be done is also boring.) It helps to know what kinds of obstacles might be encountered during creative work.
Second, creativity requires exploring ideas before committing to something; self-regulation is necessary so that people don’t get fixated on one avenue, strategy, tool, procedure, or idea prematurely.
Third, creative achievement benefits from setting appropriate goals: ones that are challenging (to enable something original to be done) but still within a person’s reach.”
These functions are what William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace described as “the less good idea”:
“Often, you start with a good idea, it might seem crystal clear at first, but when you take it off the proverbial drawing board, cracks and fissures emerge in its surface, and they cannot be ignored. It is in following the secondary ideas, those less good ideas coined to address the first idea’s cracks, arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognize those things you didn’t know in advance but knew somewhere inside of you.”
Of course, there is much happening between the lines and it can slightly differ depending on the person or domain. But, in general, we all face these same steps during the process.
Pringle and colleagues identified that creators may have different sets of expectations, strategies, and intensity and concluded that
“People have to invest effort in an activity to reach high levels of achievement. (…) Importantly, there isn’t one best way to manage creative work. As we consider how to teach skills of creative work beyond coming up with ideas, we need to find ways to teach coping with the creative process and its surprises and frustrations.”
Creativity is an arduous path that we need to take. But if we are willing to face the hard times, we may reap the rewards – like our own personal hero’s journey.
“[To do the work] we need to rest, to read, to reconnect. It is the invisible labor that makes creative life possible.” – Bonnie Tsui
If you’re a leader trying to motivate your team to innovate or a teacher stimulating your students to think differently, be sure to give them time. You can’t rush it; otherwise, you will be stuck in the same-as-usual.
Have you ever faced these challenges of the creative process?
What are your strategies to overcome possible obstacles during the process?