For companies facing stagnation, a structured approach to creativity can turn challenges into opportunities.
This is one in a series of articles summarizing the five competencies essential for businesses and employees alike to thrive in the digital age: critical thinking, creative thinking, communication, collaboration, and co-creative leadership. In the December issue of Taiwan Business TOPICS, we explored the value of creative thinking. In this issue, we will turn theory into practical applications.
In essence, creative thinking enables the generation of innovative ideas. In turn, these ideas drive progress through solving problems, shaping product design, and generating wealth.
The best-known framework for creative thinking was first articulated by French mathematician Henri Poincaré. The concept was later refined by Graham Wallas, a co-founder of the London School of Economics, into a four-phase model: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification (see Figure 1).
To understand the applications of this framework in a business context, we will consider the following scenario: You are the sales director of a mid-sized software company specializing in accounting software for startups. Over the past six years, despite a growing number of startups in the region, your company’s year-over-year sales have declined from 27% in 2017 to 2% in 2023. To address this challenge, you hire a consultant to help your team develop sales strategies instead of relying on outdated, template-based plans. In an astounding turn of events, growth in 2024 soars to 19%, demonstrating that the consultant effectively leveraged the four-phase framework to guide your team to restored success.
Let’s break it down.
Phase 1: Preparation
The preparation phase begins with identifying and defining the problem. The consultant systemically guides your team through research, interviews, surveys, discussions, and brainstorming toward a better understanding of the challenges at hand.
The team starts off by analyzing sales data, such as customer acquisition and retention rates, to gain a clearer sense of which company processes are yielding the best results. They then study competitors’ strengths, including pricing strategies, sales approaches, and marketing campaigns. Customer feedback is also collected through direct interviews with first-tier customers and online surveys with second- and third-tier customers to determine which incentives encourage former and potential customers to buy your product.
The analysis reveals three key barriers to growth. Namely, customers perceive your software as too expensive, the sales team struggles to clearly differentiate the product’s benefits, and competitors use aggressive marketing to obscure product differences.
Phase 2: Incubation
In this phase, the challenge is set aside, allowing the subconscious to process it in the background. Aside from open-ended questioning, there is no explicit method to encourage incubation – at least none that I could find during my research on this topic.
Your team initially wants to skip this phase, but the consultant cautions that doing so would lead them to solve the problem consciously, which would result in conventional solutions, contradicting the program’s objective of learning to think and operate creatively.
To encourage incubation, the consulting firm organizes a workshop with a client from a completely different industry – a footwear manufacturer. During the staff’s field visit, product designers from both companies share real-world problem-solving experiences using actual samples of their work. The workshop’s participants are then tasked with reading excerpts from a biography of Leonardo da Vinci to supplement guided discussions on his approach to design and innovation.
The firm also facilitates a brainstorming workshop where the sales and marketing teams generate preliminary solutions independently. They then share their ideas with one another, asking only clarification questions without any criticism to foster open collaboration and encourage creative thinking.
Phase 3: Illumination
The illumination phase is signaled by the subconscious presenting you with an unprompted solution. This is the famous “aha!” moment when everything clicks into place. As with incubation, there is no method for forcing illumination to happen; it occurs on its own. If it doesn’t, the process must restart from the preparation phase.
For the sake of our scenario, luck is on your side. One day, while you are having lunch with a former customer and high school classmate, you casually question his lack of interest in using your company’s accounting software. “Is it because your company has grown to a size that you no longer need it?” you ask.
“Actually, when I tried your app, I really liked it,” he replies. “But the reason I didn’t buy it is because I’m not sure how quickly my people can learn to use it. I don’t have time to teach them, and, frankly, there are already many much easier solutions. True, they are a bit time-consuming, but they get the work done.”
This is your “aha” moment. You realize that price is not the only concern. Like your former classmate, other customers are likely worried about the software’s ease of use. Instead of lowering prices or offering volume discounts, you could offer installation support and free training.
In collaboration with your consultant, your team transforms this insight into several significant initiatives. A free 30-day onboarding support program is made available for all new customers. For new users, a series of short, free training videos are produced to help them get started quickly and maximize product benefits. In addition, your team offers a money-back guarantee if customers don’t save time within 90 days as a testament to the company’s confidence in its product’s performance.
There is no illumination without incubation. These two phases enable thinking beyond conventional solutions, forming the heart of the creative thinking process.
Phase 4: Verification
Not all insights pan out well. Some are wishful thinking masquerading as insights, while others are too impractical. This is where verification comes in so that insights are validated before their full implementation.
Let’s imagine that the consulting firm works with your team to design and run a pilot promotion. Onboarding support will be offered to a small group of low-risk customers and, by providing their feedback, the customers help to refine the program. Your team repeats the process with each new customer until the pilot phase is complete.
The next step is measuring the promotion’s impact. To do so, your team analyzes sales data to verify whether the new approach improved customer conversion and retention rates. Once confident that the program offers an effective solution, the team works with the consultant to create a plan for rolling it out across the region. Scaling the program becomes crucial to successfully implement the strategy throughout the company’s entire customer base.
As the program rolls out one market after another, your team collects and analyzes data weekly. After nine months, the data shows that customers who complete the new onboarding support are 23% more likely to buy and 34% more likely to renew their subscription compared to the previous approach.
Taking it all in
As the above case study attempts to illustrate, for nearly a century we have had access to a framework for systematically producing creative ideas. Yet most organizations remain resistant to large-scale adoption.
Unlike an algorithm, the four-phase framework for generating creative ideas does not guarantee a predictable outcome. Conventional methods produce reliable results and minimize failures. In contrast, the four-phase framework requires returning to step one and starting over when incubation or illumination is weak. Most businesses are unwilling to accept such uncertainty.
More importantly, achieving an iPhone-like breakthrough in business requires deep domain knowledge. Without it, the solutions we generate are often infeasible, uncompetitive, or mere replicas of existing market offerings.
Let’s frame the issue with a thought experiment. Suppose you are tasked with reducing airplane pollution by an order of magnitude. What would you do?
When we pose this question in our creativity workshops, most participants immediately jump to solutions like solar-powered engines or fuel-efficient designs without first defining the problem, as the framework’s first phase requires. Why does this happen? Without deep domain knowledge, it is impossible to pinpoint the fundamental challenge. Identifying and solving that challenge is what leads to breakthroughs, such as a 10 times reduction in airplane emissions.
Creative solutions in business depend on deep domain expertise. However, what may be less obvious – perhaps even counterintuitive – is that too much domain knowledge can hinder creativity (see Figure 2). The research highlighted in The Neuroscience of Creativity by Anna Abraham through the University of Georgia supports this finding.
The good news is that instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, we can invite it using the four-phase framework. The bad news is that – unlike an algorithm – the framework does not guarantee success. Besides domain knowledge, the process remains constrained by serendipity. While this may seem like a drawback, particularly in the age of AI, it may offer us a hidden advantage: some aspects of creativity will remain uniquely human.
—For the last 34 years, William Zyzo has been teaching, training, and coaching executives, senior managers, and physicians throughout Asia Pacific, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. He is the Managing Director of Z&A Knowledge Solutions and serves as the Advisor to AmCham’s Advance Learning Lab.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CREATIVITY?
Recommended books:
1.The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths, Anna Abraham.
2.Creativity: Theory, History, Practice, Rob Pope.
3.Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead.
Free virtual course:
Introduction to Creative Thinking
Paid virtual course:
Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving
For a fully customized, in-person workshop on creativity, contact the author through the American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan.
The August 2024 issue of TOPICS looked at critical thinking in “Futureproofing Your Career in the 21st Century”
The December 2024 issue of TOPICS looked at what creative thinking is in “A Superpower for Futureproofing Your Career in the 21st Century”
