Stages of creative thinking.

Wallas’s (1926) proposed a classification of stages involved in creativity. He proposed that creativity involve four stages, as described below:

 Stage I: Preparation This is the stage of collecting raw material about the problem at hand. One needs to familiarize oneself with the previous work, gaps, and problems of previous solutions in order to understand the task at hand. This process motivates to work more on the problem. In this stage, divergent thinking plays an important role.

Stage II: Incubation During the process of finding the solution, the person may feel stuck as he is not able to come up with the solution. During this stage, the person is not thinking about the problem consciously, but his mental processes are involved in finding a solution unconsciously. Studies show that many creative ideas come during the incubation stage when the person is in an idle state and not working actively on the problem.

Stage III: Illumination It is the stage of ‘Aha’ or ‘Eureka’ moment. This experience is the result of an immediate solution or insight into the problem at hand. The famous story of ‘Archimedes and golden crown’ revolves around this illumination stage, where s/he suddenly understands a previously unsolved puzzle.

Stage IV: Verification: Evaluation and Elaboration During this last stage, the worth or value of the insight is judged by the person. It is a fully conscious stage, in which the person evaluates the worth of the solution he comes across during the illumination stage. The creator banks on his existing knowledge to verify the arrived solution. Studies on creativity have suggested that it is not necessary that the creative insights will always be appealing in reality, sometimes it may turn out to be bad ideas.

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