Creativity may seem like magic. It may seem like it only happens for certain types of people. It may seem like arduous drudgery staring at a blank page for other people.

But the fact is, there are ways we can prepare our thinking and our patterns of thought to be more open to creativity. Developing these patterns through active and passive approaches is a powerful way to adopt creative thinking frameworks into your integrative thinking ability.

The first stage of the creative process involves just such a pattern.

Preparation is the process of gearing up and getting ready to be creative. It’s can involve both active and passive work. It can be done in a few hours, or over a lifetime. It can be highly focused or totally random. It’s the most nebulous, feeling-your-way-through part of the creative process. And, if you can train yourself to be open to it, it’s a ton of fun.

At the beginning of the creative process, we don’t often know a lot of things. We don’t know what we’re going to make, or do, or end up with. We may not even know exactly what the problem is. We may just have a vague idea, or a slight frustration, or we may hear something that tickles our fancy and we want to explore it more. There’s not a typical or usual way that the creative process starts, but however it starts, the first step is Preparation. What do you do once that creative process is getting in motion?

Preparation is the act of gathering everything you’ll need to go through the creative process, whether it’s knowledge, practice, memories, or other things.

If we think of the creative act as a journey, then Preparation is a lot like the things you’d do before you go on a road trip: research where you might go, pack up the things you will need, gather a few things you might need. Plus, you’ll get a little excited about the journey–perhaps a little anxious, too. And as always happens with the best road trips, things will probably go wrong and you’ll have to improvise. Preparation helps with anticipating those things, too, and the same thing happens with the creative process.

We can think of Preparation in a couple of ways. First, there is an active and focused kind of Preparation, when we know what our end goal for our creative process is, and we need to learn a few things to get started in it. This active Preparation can be considered as a kind of research, though it may not look much like the traditional kind of research you’d do for a research paper. We may do some research by looking up articles or books on subjects that will help us, but with the creative act we may also call up an old friend or family member to talk through their knowledge or an old memory. We may visit a place to walk around and get the feel or vibe of it that we need. We may do some observation of how things work, or some people-watching to see how interactions happen. Sometimes we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, but we know that we’re looking, and we’re out looking for an idea.

In this sense, Preparation is the gathering of data. It’s just that the data may not be as clear as the numbers on a spreadsheet.

Engagement

There is a mindset that goes with this Preparation, in which the creative thinker has to be open to experience. In his article “Toward a Theory of Creativity,” author Carl R. Rogers describes openness to experience in this way:

“It means lack of rigidity and permeability of boundaries in concepts , beliefs, perceptions, and hypotheses . It means a tolerance for ambiguity where ambiguity exists. It means the ability to receive much conflicting information without forcing closure upon the situation.”

Being open to experiences is a type of engagement with life in which creative thinkers take in things–lots of things–without judging them or writing them off. They accept these inputs as unique instances instead of blanket statements–in other words, instead of thinking “Tree leaves are green,” the creative thinker may look at a tree and say, “This tree’s leaves are very green, on magnificent branches, that have lived through a lot of history.”

Engagement is a kind of Preparation, but it’s not as focused or active as the earlier goal-oriented research and data collection. Instead, it’s an ongoing openness to things, a passive collection of material that you may not know how you’ll put to use yet (or ever).

Engagement and openness to experience is a lot like a compost pile. Gardeners will throw scraps of food and leftovers onto their compost pile, and then wait and let them decompose. But what comes from these throwaway bits is a massively fertile, rich soil that can grow lots of great flowers and vegetable crops. Being open to experience and having engagement is the same way–the everday scraps of life like funny moments, interesting sights, confusing but intriguing paradoxes, tough conversations, magnificent works of art or engineering that speak to you–those all go into the Preparation you’re doing as a creative thinker. You may not know how you’ll use them, or if you’ll use them, but you collect them in your conscious and subconscious mind by being engaged and open. Sometimes you’ll find that these collected bits come out of nowhere, as a fertile, rich soil, ready to use on a creative act you’re beginning.

Problem-Making

At its heart, the beginning of the creative process is about figuring out what the right problem is, and then coming up with a way to solve it. In “Concern for Discovery in the Creative Process,” authors Jacob W. Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describe the act of coming up with a problem like this:

“Our point of view was to conceive of creativity as a special kind of problem-solving process. Problems can be classified according to answers to the following six questions: Has the problem ever been formulated before by the problem-solver? By anyone else? Is the correct method of solution known to the problem-solver ? To anyone else? Is the correct solution itself known to the problem-solver? To anyone else? There are certain problems for which the answer is “no” to all six questions. That is, they have never been formulated before, and, once formulated, there is no available method for their solution, nor is there a single correct answer to be reached. It is the formulation and solution of these problems that requires creativity. Actually, these are only potential problems, since they do not exist as problems until someone formulates them as such. Thus, in the case of this special sort of problem, the central question becomes “How are new problems discovered?” rather than the more usual question “How are existing problems solved?” The first step in creative activity involves the discovery, or formulation, of the problem itself.”

To do their research, Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi observed 31 artists given the same task, to draw a set of physical objects they’d been given. The artists could arrange and rearrange the objects in any way, choose some objects and leave others out, and weren’t confined to stick to the original directions at all. After the artists went through their Preparation by deciding what and how to draw it, and then completed the activity, the final works were evaluated by a panel of professional painters.

The experiment found that the artists who worked to discover a new problem during the Preparation phase were the ones whose work showed the most creativity. They write, “If creativity lies in the artist’s ability to discover and formulate a fresh problem, then his behavior in manipulating, exploring and selecting the elements of his problem–in this case, the objects to be drawn–should have been closely related to the creativity displayed in his finished drawing . This we found to be true. The drawings rated most original and artistically most valuable by the panel of established painters were the ones produced by students who had handled the most objects , explored the objects they handled most closely, and selected the most unusual objects to work with during the pre-drawing, problem-formulating period.”

What’s interesting here is how the creativity displayed is not tied to skill. “These students were not necessarily the ones with the greatest technical skill or “craftsmanship ” as rated by the same judges. Here, in what we have labelled ‘discovery-oriented behavior,’ seemed to lie a key to the creative process . We interpreted this and similar behavior observed during the execution of the drawing itself as the outward manifestations of a specific cognitive attitude, ‘concern for discovery.'”

In other words, the best creative thinkers aren’t concerned with finding the correct answer and being right and getting 100% on their exam. Creative thinking focuses on figuring out something new, wanting the process to be about discovery instead of mimicking or redoing things the same way they’ve been done before.

As creative thinkers begin the Preparation phase and start gathering data and useful research, while also digging deep into the fertile soil of their Engagement, they also start thinking about the discovery this process can make, and how something new can come of it.

Art versus Craft

Another way to think of this concern for discovery is to think about the difference between an art and a craft. As Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi write, “This concern with discovery set apart those who were interested in formulating and solving new artistic problems from those who were content merely to apply their technical skill to familiar problems capable of more or less pat solutions.”

Craftmanship is, of course, wonderful. There’s something so special about a person who is excellent at their craft. Someone who is excellent at, say, making chairs or bread, knows their craft well and can make these excellent things over and over.

The difference is that the creative act isn’t about making the same things over and over. Instead of making chairs, the creative thinker wonders if there is a different kind of chair that could be made? What if we sat on the floor instead? What if sitting is bad for us and we didn’t sit at all? Is there an alternative to bread? New ingredient combinations? What if the meat was on the outside of the sandwich and the bread was in the middle?

The creative act is not making an excellent thing that’s already been made. It’s about about discovering a new thing, new connections, new ways of doing.