Four Faces of Creativity

If we’re going to navigate our creative work for a smoother experience and strong results, we need to know more than just where we want to end up.

If a project is long or complex, or just not short and sweet, we want to recognize where we are in the cycle of creative work. A large project isn’t just a lot more of the same thing. The energy of the project, and its obstacles, potholes, and delights, vary a lot.

How can you know that a difficult time is normal for where you are if you don’t know where You are?

What should you do to gear up for what’s coming when you don’t know what’s next?

Naturally, we want a clear view of the territory in front of us. There is no map that can predict our specific creative futures, but we can know where we are in the creative cycle. That knowledge helps us make both sense and success of what’s happening in our projects and how we experience these projects over time.

Since the picture changes a lot over the life of a project, our creative work offers us something new, and wants something different from us, at every stage. Knowing what to expect in the stage we’re in makes us smarter about tools or strategies. Predicting some opportunities and challenges helps us move into each new stage with confidence.

There are four different faces your creative project wears, sort of like there are probable different faces to your week. For most of us, Sunday has its own energy and purpose, pleasures and pains. So do Monday, Friday, and some or all if the other days.

Creative work happens in four stages (1), four faces of your creative project.

All have their distinct energy and purpose, pleasures and pains.

Let’s just get started with an overview. More details and examples will follow in this series.

We will start with your own example. What’s a creative project you have in mind, or on board, whether or not you have been thinking of it as creative?

Now, what face is that project wearing today? Which category best fits what your project looks and feels like now?

SPARK:

Sparking an idea or experiencing a disorienting dilemma that tells me it’s time for change, answers, exploration, invention, or creation. It has my attention, lights me up, compels me, stays with me.

SEARCH:

Searching for footing. Learning what's available to know, to work with. Trying on approaches. Clarifying the goal, defining what's possible now and what must be invented, preparing to plunge into the work of making something new.

SOLVE:

Solving the puzzles and problems of the project with grit and process, ingenuity, and creative insight. This is the long slog of creative projects and change work.

SHARE:

Shaping, sharing, and/or integrating the solutions of the prior stage. Wrapping up. Testing how things work together and out in the world, gathering and responding to feedback, and finally showing or sharing the result of all this work as a new contribution, a thoughtful idea, a shipped product, a completed change.

1. Vogt, D. L., (2012). A holy curiosity: transformative self-directed learning to breakthrough new knowledge in the case of Einstein. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern Mississippi.