What Is Creativity and How Can You Develop It?
Creativity involves developing new and useful ideas for a purpose. What helps an idea move from a possibility to something worth pursuing?
Creativity is often associated with art, imagination or unusual ideas. In work settings, it is more useful to think of creativity as the ability to develop ideas that are both new and useful for a particular purpose. Generating possibilities is important, but creativity does not end with producing options. Ideas need to be developed and refined before they can become useful in practice. Creativity therefore involves noticing possibilities, changing how a problem is viewed, making connections and developing alternatives. These capabilities matter when familiar approaches stop working, when a problem has been framed too narrowly or when a different approach may produce a better result.
What Is Creativity?
Creativity involves developing something new that has value for a particular purpose or situation. Runco and Jaeger describe creativity in terms of both originality and effectiveness, meaning that an idea needs to be new while also having value in its context.
Creativity can involve a completely new idea, but it can also involve combining existing ideas in a way that creates a different approach. The important question is whether the new possibility has meaningful value for the purpose it is intended to serve.
Creativity Is Not the Same as Imagination
Imagination can produce possibilities without requiring them to be useful or workable. Creativity takes those possibilities further by developing them against a purpose, problem or situation.
Creativity Is Not the Same as Innovation
Creativity is mainly concerned with developing new and useful ideas. Innovation involves putting useful ideas into practice and creating value from them. A creative idea therefore does not automatically become an innovation.
How Does the Creativity Process Work?
Creativity becomes easier to apply when the thinking process is made explicit. The four stages below show how an initial possibility can be developed into an idea worth considering.
- Notice
- Connect
- Generate
- Refine
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Stage 1
Notice
Creativity questionWhat could be changed, questioned, or looked at differently?
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Stage 2
Connect
Creativity questionWhat ideas, experiences, or approaches could be combined?
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Stage 3
Generate
Creativity questionWhat different possibilities could address the situation?
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Stage 4
Refine
Creativity questionWhich idea is useful, workable, and worth developing?
The four stages describe how creativity moves from noticing a possibility to developing an idea with practical value. They also provide a way to examine whether an idea is being developed deliberately rather than accepted too quickly.
What Is Creativity and How Do You Apply It?
Creativity becomes visible when a familiar approach stops producing the expected result. The example below shows how changing the way a problem is viewed can create a different possibility.
The following practices turn the four stages into observable behaviours that can be used at work.
How Can Creativity Be Practised?
The four stages become useful when they are translated into specific behaviours. The practices below show what each stage can look like in everyday work.
Creativity in Practice
Open each practice to see how it works.
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Notice What Could Change
Stage: NoticeCreativity often starts before an idea is produced.
Pay attention to repeated problems, unnecessary steps, unusual results or situations where the current approach no longer fits.
For exampleIf customers repeatedly ask the same question after receiving a service update, the issue may not be a lack of customer attention. The pattern may indicate that the way information is being presented needs to change.
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Reframe the Problem
Stage: NoticeThe way a problem is defined can restrict the ideas that are considered.
Ask whether the situation has been framed too narrowly and whether changing the question would create different possibilities.
A team trying to improve email response rates may ask:
- Narrow“How can we write better emails?”
- Broader“How can we make it easier for customers to respond?”
The second question creates more room for different approaches.
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Connect Different Ideas
Stage: ConnectUseful ideas can come from combining concepts that are not normally considered together.
Look beyond the immediate problem and ask what another industry, process, experience or field does differently. The purpose is not to copy another approach. It is to identify an underlying idea that could be adapted to the current situation.
For exampleA booking system may offer a useful idea for improving appointment scheduling in a completely different service.
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Generate More Than One Possibility
Stage: GenerateThe first idea that appears is not necessarily the strongest one.
Generate several possibilities before deciding which direction deserves further attention. The early alternatives do not all need to be practical; having several makes comparison easier.
This connects with Guilford’s work on divergent thinking, which helped establish the importance of generating multiple possibilities in creativity research. Divergent thinking is useful for opening up options, but it is only one part of the wider creative process.
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Develop and Combine Ideas
Stage: GenerateAn early idea is often incomplete.
Develop it by adding detail, combining it with another possibility or changing part of the approach to make it more useful.
For exampleTwo ideas may each solve part of a problem but have different weaknesses. Combining their stronger elements may produce a more workable approach than either idea on its own.
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Refine the Idea Against Its Purpose
Stage: RefineAn idea becomes more useful when it is tested against the purpose it is meant to serve.
Ask whether it addresses the actual problem, can work within the relevant constraints and offers enough value to justify further development.
This does not mean removing every limitation. A useful creative idea may still require time, resources or further testing. The point is to identify whether the idea is worth developing rather than choosing it simply because it is unusual.
Across all six practices, repeated use of the process can help creative capability develop over time. The skill becomes stronger when noticing, connecting, generating and refining become part of how problems are approached rather than occasional activities used only when inspiration is needed.
Decision Checkpoint
Before developing an idea further, ask:
Where Does Creativity Have Limits?
Creativity does not mean rejecting an established method simply because it is familiar. A proven approach may still be the right choice when it reliably meets the purpose and constraints of the situation.
Knowledge also matters. Understanding a field gives a person material to work with and helps them recognise what is possible, but strong familiarity with established methods can sometimes make those methods harder to question. Dane’s work on cognitive entrenchment suggests that expertise can sometimes reduce flexibility in problem solving and creative idea generation, although the effect depends on the task and context.
Creativity therefore requires a balance between knowing the field and being willing to question established approaches. The answer is not to ignore existing knowledge, but to recognise when familiarity may be narrowing the range of possibilities being considered.
Summary
Creativity means developing new possibilities that have useful value for a particular situation.
Using these four stages repeatedly makes this way of thinking more deliberate and reliable:
- Notice what could change, including whether the problem has been framed too narrowly.
- Connect ideas from other fields, processes or experiences.
- Generate more than one possibility before choosing a direction.
- Refine the idea against the purpose it is meant to serve.
The practical test is whether an idea solves a meaningful problem, offers a workable alternative and is worth developing further.
13 Skill P.A.T.H. Way
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