John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Smart Decision Making

Idea 80: The creative thinking process

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.

Albert Einstein, German physicist

Creative thinking can be seen as having four phases:

Preparation	The hard work. You have to collect and sort the relevant information, analyze the problem as thoroughly as you can, and explore possible solutions.
Incubation	This is the depth mind phase. Sitting on eggs until the young birds of ideas emerge is a metaphor for the depth mind’s work. We all have a purposive and helpful depth mind; we differ as to the use we make of it. Mental work – analyzing, synthesizing and valuing – continues ...