Creative Thinking - An Example Creative Thinking Process

There is of course no precise procedure that would guarantee creativity. But the following informal procedure is indeed useful, even though it seems rather simple.

A typical creative thinking process

Step 1 - Research

A student once asked the Nobel laureate John Nash for advice on getting ideas for his thesis, and the reply was "Have you done your reading?"

When we need to come up with an idea to solve a problem, it would be helpful to do some research to see what other people have thought about the topic. If there are already good solutions that can be used, then we don't have to waste our time to reinvent the wheel. But even if the problem has not been solved, we need to understand more about the relevant topic to obtain more background information. If you are a scientist who wants to design a better robot, you need to know what other people have done and where the current limitations are. If you have to help market a product, you need to know more about the target audience and the product in question, and to learn more about advertising. Whatever topic we are interested in, there is a lot of information that we can gather. Some of the information might be specific, like how much time and money do you have for making the robot. Other information might be general, like the principles governing machine vision, speech recognition, etc.. You need to find some systematic way to gather and organize the relevant material.

Some useful things to do:

• Obtain relevant information from the scientific literature or experts.


• Study the history of the problem.


• Do case studies of people who have dealt with similar problems.


• Think about analogous situations.


• Talk to the people who are involved.

Step 2 - Explore the connections between ideas

When you are gathering your data you are doing some preliminary study to learn more about the problem you have to solve. While you are doing this, or after you have collected a lot of material, you need to examine and reflect on what you have, in order to rank the importance of the different pieces of information that you have, and to investigate whether there are hidden connections between the ideas. Creativity often takes the form of using some idea from one field and apply it to another one. Being able to detect connections between ideas help bring this about.

Step 3 - Relax and wait

Very likely we have had experiences where an idea suddenly pops up while we are taking the shower, or after a good night's sleep. When we are sorting out the connections between ideas it is important that we are persistent and spend an extended period of time in order that we keep lots of different ideas in the mind, some of which remain in the background and some of which might enter into unconscious thinking processes. After a period of hardwork it is sometimes necessary to pull back and relax, to do something relaxing and different to stimulate the mind. Or it might perhaps be a case of allowing ourselves to forget about the less important ideas so that the more relevant ones float to the top. But whatever the mechanisms are, it does seem to be important to allow time for ideas to gestate. If we still can't think of anything, then we might have to do more research and think about connections further.

Step 4 - Apply, review and followup

Once we have obtained some ideas that seem to work, we need to examine them carefully to check that they indeed can help solve our problem. We have to think about whether they can be improved further and we need to see how they are to be implemented. Even when they have proved to be successful, we should review the whole process to see how we can do better next time.