The Way Forward…
In my last article (Choreographing Creative Thinking) I explored how the way we visualize the creative problem-solving process has evolved over the last 70 years. The familiar Divergence/Convergence kite model eventually developed into the popular double diamond model that’s still taught in design schools. The FourSight model, a more recent visualization, is popular in education, especially in primary and secondary school settings. Each of these models conveys useful insights into the creative problem-solving process.
Taken as a whole, the Divergence/Convergence kite model expresses the importance of holding two opposing, contradictory ideas in mind at the same time—a capability that’s essential to creative problem solving. But there are important ways in which the kite model doesn’t align with how creatives talk about the creative process as they experience it. The diagram below should look familiar and also a little different.
Idea Generation/Idea Selection Kite Model
Instead of using the words “Divergence” and “Convergence,” I’m using the phrases “Idea Generation” and “Idea Selection.”* The terms “divergence” and “convergence” have picked up associations over time that skew our understanding of the creative process. Too often, divergent thinking (generating many potential solutions to a problem) is used as a synonym for creativity. But divergent thinking alone (also known as “brainstorming” in team settings) isn’t the same as creativity. It’s just one part of the process.
Convergent thinking is usually described as the process of working toward one solution to a problem. But that definition of the process (and the way it's visualized) overemphasizes the reductive aspects of the later stages of the creative process. Idea selection isn’t just about voting ideas off the island.
In the initial phases of idea generation, we need to suspend our critical judgment and allow our minds to wander freely. Conversely, when we’re in the final stages of idea selection, we need the focus, clarity, and discipline that the executive function provides. Most renderings of the kite-model imply that these two frames of mind are opposite facing, like the two faces of Janus. But in practice, the bulk of the creative process is spent zigzagging back and forth between idea generation and selection, playful imagining and focused work, wild exuberance and quiet contemplation, chaos and order. The movement between the two states is an intricate dance, with the lead constantly switching between the partners as the dance progresses. This is the messy middle of the creative process—the part I call “The Maker’s Workshop.”**
The Maker's Workshop and Emergent Thinking
The Maker's Workshop: A Generative Space Between Idea Generation and Selection
The Maker’s Workshop is a sandbox, a petri dish, a greenhouse. It’s a generative space focused on the formation of new clusters of ideas, new filaments of interwoven ideas, new combinations that are greater than the sum of their parts. These unforeseen possibilities only become apparent when you are actively engaged with your ideas—comparing, contrasting, and combining them. The Maker’s Workshop is where the doors to the adjacent possible get tested and occasionally open.
To successfully catch the currents that run through the Maker’s Workshop, you need to adopt the experimenter’s mindset, make small bets, look for connections and patterns, be playful, improvise, and be willing to accept failure. You must also accept that every so often, your experimenting will send you back to the start of the ideation process. Iteration is not failure—it’s continuing to play the game with a new hand.
The Maker's Workshop Is a Sandbox, a Petri Dish, a Greenhouse
But perhaps the most important skill that you need while you’re in The Maker’s Workshop is a receptive stance—a willingness to surrender control and let the work itself inform your creative process. Artists describe this mindset in many ways: organic creativity, listening forward, and working without an agenda, to name just a few.
The Maker’s Workshop is a black box. We know its input and output, but exactly what happens inside is difficult to describe in a general way because how creators develop their ideas differs from domain to domain. A writer teases out emerging ideas one way, a painter another… The one constant is what happens in the Maker’s Workshop is dictated by our ideas, not us. All we can do is trust our intuition and feel our way forward. Here’s the poet Robert Frost describing what it’s like to work without an agenda, adopt a receptive stance, and listen for the sense and form of a poem:
It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that, there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity.
— Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes” Amherst Graduates Quarterly, 1939.
While this expanded view of the idea generation and selection process is informative, it’s still not detailed enough to help you understand where you are in the creative process when you’re stuck or lost. But one thing is clear—engaging in the work itself, with your ideas and expressing them, is the way to find out.
Make to Know
In his book, Make to Know, the theater director and educator Lorne Buchman explores the concept of “make to know,” the process of moving from uncertainty to invention through the act of making. Buchman writes:
The make-to-know concept has nothing to do with winging it, or making things up as we go along. On the contrary, … there is a deep relationship between discipline, skill, and focus on the one hand and the kind of discovery that emerges through the creative process on the other. The central point is this: the experience and skill we bring to our projects forms the scaffolding on which we stand as we reach for something in a world that is, at that moment, uncertain. Until we are in the actual process of creating it, we can’t fully know what it will be.
— Lorne Buchman, Make to Know
Or, as Bill Watterson, the creator of the popular Calvin and Hobbes comic has observed, “The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.”
I want to introduce you to a new way of visualizing the creative problem-solving process I’ve developed. My Make-to-Know model builds on Buchman’s make-to-know pedagogy, the FourSight Creative Problem Solving model, and The Maker’s Workshop concept I introduced above.
The Make-to-Know creative problem-solving model includes four stages:
Framing the project
Generating new ideas
Developing your ideas
Producing your final work product
But what’s different about this model is the four stages of the creative problem-solving process revolve around working with your ideas. The Maker’s Workshop is the center, the heart of the Make-to-Know model:
The Four Stages of the Make-to-Know Model
To be a useful roadmap and compass, the model needs additional detail. The 12 steps in the Make-to-Know process (three in each stage) guide you through the creative process and help you re-orient yourself when you’re stuck or lost.
The Four Stages and 12 Steps of the Make-to-Know Model
What follows is a brief tour of the stages and steps of the Make-to-Know model.
Frame the Project
The Framing the Project stage includes the following three steps:
Explore - Exploring the initial idea, question, or problem that’s the catalyst for the project. Clarifying the goals and objectives for the project. Making sure you understand the resources, constraints, and dependencies associated with the project.
Document - Defining and documenting what you’re trying to accomplish, including the project goals and success criteria.
Plan - Developing your initial project plan as best you can, given what you know at this point in the project. Include the resources you’ll require, the major milestones with target dates, known constraints and dependencies, and any significant known risks.
If this all sounds a bit daunting, don’t worry! The project framing exploration process, documentation requirements, and initial planning requirements differ dramatically by domain and setting. For an artist working on their own, a few notes may suffice. For a designer working in a creative agency, a formal creative brief and presentation may be required. What’s important is that the goals, constraints, success criteria, and plan for the project are clear and accepted by everyone involved.
Generate New Ideas
The second stage of the process, Generating Ideas, includes the following three steps:
Research - Researching the initial idea, problem, or generative question.
Generate - Generating an initial set of ideas.
Connect - Connecting ideas—ideas discovered during your research and the ideas that surfaced during the Generate step.
While there’s some research involved in the project framing stage, the research you do in this stage supports your ability to generate ideas. For example, you may need to read about the properties of new building materials as you explore alternatives to the materials you’re already familiar with.
Once you have a pool of ideas, you can begin exploring how they might connect to one another—all of which may send you back to doing more research, generating more ideas, and more exploration of potential connections. You may even find yourself going back to the project framing stage with questions about the project definition or plan.
Develop Your Ideas
The third stage, Developing Your Ideas, focuses on the following steps:
Select - Selecting the ideas that seem most promising
Integrate - Combining and integrate your ideas into clusters
Arrange - Arranging and organizing your ideas and clusters into the initial expressions of your solution
As most creators know, the Develop stage is the most intense workshopping stage. It’s when there’s the most experimentation, trial and error, frustration and occasionally, surprise and success. This stage is also where craft comes into play, but not in the way you might expect: when we have mastered our craft, we can set it aside, sublimate it in order to make way for intuition. Paraphrasing Frost, we have to give the material the freedom it needs to find its own arrangement and meaning.
Produce Your Final Work Product
The fourth and final stage of the Make-to-Know model is Produce. This stage focuses on the steps required to express and share your solution. The three steps are:
Express - Fully express or implement your solution in your chosen medium.
Refine - Refine your work.
Share - Share your work.
You’ll note that I’ve included sharing your work as the final step in the creative problem-solving process. As Seth Godin notes in his book The Practice:
When you choose to produce creative work, you’re solving a problem. Not just for you, but for those who will encounter what you’ve made. By putting yourself on the hook, you’re performing a generous act. You are sharing insight and love and magic. And the more it spreads, the more it’s worth to all of those who are lucky enough to experience your contribution.
— Seth Godin, The Practice
You may be producing your creative work simply for your own pleasure, but never doubt the importance and potential impact of shipping your work if that's your ambition.
Finally, you may have also noticed that the Make-to-Know model preferences bottom-up thinking over top-down thinking. It is purposefully centered on the generative space at the heart of the creative process where ideas collide, spark, sometimes fuse, and occasionally fade away. Creativity is, by nature, iterative: a new idea creates a new frame of mind, a new way of seeing that instigates a reevaluation of all the creative decisions that preceded it. The Make-to-Know model accounts for this. It’s dynamic and fluid. It asks that you only remember one thing: The way forward is always through the work.
Footnotes
* The words "divergence" and "convergence" are now often used to describe psychological states associated with communication accommodation theory and psychotherapy. As a result, some psychologists are using new terminology to describe divergence and convergence as they relate to creativity.
** I've shared earlier iterations of this model in the courses I teach and referred to this stage as "The Maker's Threshold." I've changed the word "threshold" to "workshop" for reasons that will become apparent in the sections that follow.