Small Group Facilitation: Improving Process and Performance in Groups and Teams

What Is Creativity?

Davis (1983) describes the creative process as “combining or perceiving relationships of previously unrelated ideas” (p. 6). Intuition, too, is discussed in terms of relationships among ideas or patterns; these patterns consist of clusters of knowledge acquired by long experience that allow people to make judgments (Simon, 1987). What we call intuition, according to Simon, is information stored in chunks and patterns in longterm memory. During creative or lateral thinking (DeBono, 1968), old patterns are reassembled as a result of experience and revelation in a new way. Steiner (1988), in describing the creative process, says that “up to a point, it may be hard to distinguish from totally nonproductive behavior: undisciplined ...