Creativity And Its Process

Among all the ways and possibilities an individual can use to approach creativity, there lies the approach of looking at it as a procedure. A series of activities that take place in a place and within a timeline. Quite a few different patterns were built to uphold this process approach, with steps and stages that creativity would stick to from the starting point of an idea to its realization.

But if you analyze the skeletons of these processes, it comes to attention that all those steps can be filtered into 2 categories, 2 opposite skills that must be used on each of them at certain level. They are convergent and divergent thinking.

Divergent thinking is the process someone uses to acquire the larger number os concepts to a given problem. For problem, we can imagine any kind of situation that demands effort with creativity - the will of painting, taking a picture, composing a song, bake or cook something, the job of creating a product from scratch, satisfying any market desire, establishing marketing strategies, anything. No matter how artistic, technical or business related your activity is, at one part of the process, in order to get the most out of your creative potential, youll have to let your mind go and gather the most references you can. Discover random connections to the problem - or whatever it was that brought on your creativity - no matter how pointless or unpractical they are in the real life. This is vital for the creative process because useful, impressive ideas can come up to you in pieces, shattered. You might find that putting together two or maybe more ridiculous ideas can reveal the best resolution to the question in case.

Convergent thinking, however, does the filtration system, the selection within the creative process. It's a rational, more analytical step of the whole scheme. Its through convergent thinking tactics and skills that we evaluate all the generated ideas by the rules of the real world. How realistic, possible, efficient, concrete the ideas really are. We start to pay attention to the quality values of the ideas, instead of reaching for quantity and numbers. We go from the abstract world - in which most of the ideas tend to be great, unique, superb - into the real world, in which every idea will suffer from other rules and limitations, like legal aspects, cultural values, time, space and even gravity.

Even though the divergent thinking techniques might seem more into creativity than the convergent thinking ones, they are all equally fundamental to the whole process, as one is useless without the other. With no rational and logical filter, random ideas can become too loose and abstract to be used. And again, with no imagination, no one will be able to stand out from the crowd and go a bit further into the solution, coming up with fresh, new ideas.

They both have to coexist and - apart from everything - cannot limitate each other. Once you're in a divergent thinking task, you have to avoid being judgmental and give space to every single idea. Go with the movement. Only after this part of the process is done should you be more rational and logical to filter your raw material. Go to the point. Each piece of the puzzle must have its own, unique place for the process to achieve its most.