Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity

Appendix B

The Research Behind the Eight Steps

The material in Appendix B is excerpted, with modification, from the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of Sawyer (2012). If you are interested in diving into the research in more detail, you can read about scientific studies pertaining to each of the eight steps in those chapters.

Psychologists have been studying the creative process for decades, and they've often observed that creativity tends to occur in a sequence of stages. The simplest model of the creative process, sometimes called the balloon, has two stages—an expanding stage of divergent thinking in which many possibilities are generated, followed by convergent thinking as you converge on the one best idea. The balloon is useful as shorthand, ...