Creative Process - By: Pudim Brancão

Among all the ways and possibilities an individual can use to approach creativity, comes the theory of looking at creativity as if it were a course of action. Like a routine of assignments following a time frame. A number of diverse patterns were built to preserve this process approach, with steps and stages that creativity would follow from the starting point of an idea to its realization.

But if you stop and start to go deep into each stage within these systems, you can associate every step to each of only 2 categories, 2 opposite skills that must be applied on each of them at certain level. Those are convergent thinking and divergent thinking.

Divergent thinking is the process a person uses to obtain the larger number os ideas to a given problem. For problem, let’s think of any circumstance that could require a creative action - the will of painting, taking a picture, writing a sonet, preparing a dish, the job of creating a product from scratch, fulfilling a market need, establishing marketing strategies, anything. Is doesn't matter how artsy, businesslike or technical this activity really is, in a given part of this process, to achieve creativity at its best, you'll need to think freely and let your mind fly, creating a pool of references. Create random associations with the problem - or your creativity trigger - without worrying about how uncommon or pointless they might seem in the first place. This is fundamental for the creative process because useful, exceptional ideas can come up to you in pieces, shattered. You can uncover that two pieces of relatively poor ideas can wind up becoming a excellent one, solving the problem you're dealing with.

Convergent thinking, the other side of the coin, does the filtration system, the selection within the creative process. It's a rational, more analytical step of the whole scheme. It's by using procedures and techniques of convergent thinking that we narrow down all the ideas that were created, confronting them with the world as we know. How handy, reasonable, practical, and worthy those ideas are. Instead of focusing on the quantity of thoughts or suggestions, we now pay attention to the quality of them. We take one step out of the abstract, fantasy world - where almost any idea can be fantastic - into the real world, in which every idea will suffer from other rules and limitations, like time, gravity, legal aspects and so on.

Even though the divergent thinking techniques might seem more into creativity than the convergent thinking ones, both of them are equally essential to the creative process, as one is useless without the other. Without analysis, ideas become too abstract and random to be implemented. Without 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.

Both methods of thinking need to do their part of the work, without interfering with each other. Once you're in a divergent thinking activity, you have to avoid being judgmental and give space to every single idea. Let your imagination go. 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.

About the Author

If you want to go a bit deeper right into creativity, or divergent thinking, make sure to visit Creative Gibberish

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