What is the path of an idea?
Where does it start and end -if it ends at all?
This is indeed a curious question -and an old one.
Aristotle was one of the first to question it. Back then, he used his own mind as a subject for his experiments. He paid close attention to his thoughts and what path they took during his thinking. Every route and turn was noted. Finally, he concluded that our thinking is somewhat associative: the next thought follows the cues from the thought before.
However, what Aristotle failed to notice was that our thinking does not happen only in our heads.
Crucial aspects of thought do occur inside people’s heads, that’s true, but thoughts cannot be separated from interactions with the world from which the thinking is inspired and through which ideas literally take form. Creative work, including what is generally called “thinking” is, thus, socially, materially, and temporally distributed. It is how we participate in our worlds.
Our ideas go a long way until being ready. In fact, even after they are “ready”, they continue to follow this journey back and forth, in a constant process of improvement and transformation.
If we follow the biography of an idea, it is possible to situate each step of idea development among many contributors, past, present, and future.
At the individual level, there are many models of the creative process, one of the most well-known proposed by Graham Wallas (1926). In a nutshell, most of them are very similar to each other: they contain 4 stages, ranging from the generation of ideas to their implementation.
However, I’ve found an interesting new perspective on this process by Perry-Smith & Mannucci: what was the intention and involvement of the creator through the process?
As they explained, it starts as indirect, passive, and serendipitous (discoveries occur by chance); and ends as direct, active, and intentional.
Basically, people doing creative work organize their resources toward their purpose, which itself emerges through the work: a feedback loop that develops together over time.
In other words, as the person works on the idea, it becomes clearer and with a more objective course of action.
Have you ever noticed how your ideas come to life?
What are the steps present in your creative process?