Graham Wallas: The Creative Process

Graham Wallas proposed one of the first formal models of the creative process. Simple and insightful, this model has continued to inspire creative people throughout the world. This article reduces Wallas’s description of that process to just a few paragraphs designed to introduce you to this model.

Graham Wallas, around the time he wrote The Art of Thought (1926) [1].

Graham Wallas (1858-1932) was an English scholar and co-founder of the London School of Economics [1]. Wallas’s area of expertise was social psychology, the study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by social situations [2].

Near the end of his professional life – after 40 years as a teacher, administrator, and after the publication of multiple influential books – he published his last major work: The Art of Thought [3]. His goal was to uncover the ‘natural thought process’ of creativity, and teach it to others. In the preface Wallas states: “If my book helps a few young thinkers in the practice of their art, or induces some other psychological inquirer to explore the problem with greater success than my own, I shall be more than content.”

Wallas met his goal, and more. The Art of Thought has influenced many thinkers worldwide and has been the foundation of significant continued research on the creative process.

The Creative Process in Wallas’ Words

In seeking to discover “the ‘natural’ thought process…”, Wallas said “We can … take a single achievement of thought – the making of a new generalization or invention, or poetical expression of a new idea – and ask how it was brought about. We can then roughly dissect out a continuous process, with a beginning and a middle and an end of its own.”

Doing exactly that, Wallas refers to a 1891 speech made by German Physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz, who was known for contributions in energy, electrodynamics, and thermodynamics, during which the physicist described his process for creating new ideas [4].

In the speech, Helmholtz said that after previous investigation of the problem “in all directions… happy ideas come unexpectedly without effort, like an inspiration. So far as I am concerned, they have never come to me when my mind was fatigued, or when I was at my working table…. They came particularly readily during the slow ascent of wooded hills of a sunny day.”

To dissect out a continuous process, Wallas decomposes Helmholtz description into three pieces, then adds a fourth. He says (bullets added), “Helmholtz here gives us three stages in the formation of a new thought.

• The first in time I shall call Preparation, the stage during which the problem was ‘investigated… in all directions’;

• the second is the stage during which he was not consciously thinking about the problem, which I shall call Incubation;  

• the third consisting of the appearance of the ‘happy idea’ together with the psychological events which immediately preceded and accompanied that appearance, I shall call Illumination.

• And I shall add a fourth stage, of Verification, which Helmholtz does not mention here.”

Wallas then elaborates on the meaning of verification by referring to Henri Poincaré, a 19th century French mathematician, physicist and engineer who was known for his contributions to chaos theory, topography, and more [5].

Poincaré was of interest to Wallas because Poincaré had described in detail his thought process relative to two of his significant mathematical contributions. Summarizing, Wallas wrote “In both cases Incubation was preceded by a Preparation stage of hard, conscious, systematic, and fruitless analysis of the problem. In both cases the final idea came to him ‘with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty’. Each was followed by a period of verification, in which both the validity of the idea was tested, and the idea itself was reduced to exact form. It never happens,’ says Poincaré… ‘that unconscious work supplies ready-made the result… All that we can hope for from these inspirations, which are the fruit of unconscious work, is to obtain points of departure for such calculations. As for the calculations themselves, they must be made in the second period of conscious work which follows the inspiration, and in which the results of the inspiration are verified and the consequences deduced. The results of these calculations are strict and complicated; they demand discipline attention, will, and consequently, consciousness.’”

Although Wallas uses just the example of Helmholtz and Poincaré to describe the four stages of creativity, he expresses that his insights on this method have also come from his own experience and “from the accounts of their thought-processes given by poets, by some of my students, and by friends in England and America.”

Wallas’s Creative Process In My Life

Wallas’s four-stage process has played out many times in my career. Here’s how that’s looked for me:

1. Preparation:
   For this part of the process, I am seeking to understand what the problem is, what kind of design freedom is available and what constraints have been placed on the solution. With that understanding, I begin exploring concepts trying to work out a reasonable solution. Often times, I find a solution and jump straight to the fourth step: verification. But frankly, this is typically the case only for mundane, simple problems. For complex problems that require significant creativity to solve, the preparation stage does not generally yield a final solution (Wallas called this stage ‘fruitless’ for that reason). Instead, after working for some time, there is a need to set it aside for a while, and sleep on it.

2. Incubation:
   This is the part of the process where we stop consciously thinking about the problem. For me, this most often comes when I switch to working on another project, when I am walking to and from work, or while I am sleeping. I generally plan to have an incubation period for tough projects, whether or not those projects are big or small. Planning for incubation to be part of my work is important. The projects I do all-at-once are never as good as those for which I build-in time to let things sit before coming back to them. This is one reason why having two or more simultaneous projects is beneficial.

3. Illumination:
   Some designers, especially those in the past, unduly over emphasize that flash of genius where a solution came to them without much work. I believe those moments happen, but not without a lot of work first. That work happens in the preparation stage (stage 1). Thomas Edison is attributed with saying that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration [7]; Spencer Kimball added that perspiration must precede inspiration [8]. Both of these match Wallas’s model. For me, I often experience illumination early in the morning, near when I’ve woken up or when I’m walking to work. I believe this is largely because of the incubation that occurs overnight. Most of the time, the ideas that come to me end up working well. Other times the problems require further incubation, preparation, or even abandonment.

4. Verification:
   Wallas’s words describe this part of the process exactly as I experience it: verification is the stage where “both the validity of the idea [is] tested, and the idea itself [is] reduced to exact form.” For me, this has often involved prototyping and testing (using various product testing methods), and by creating detailed sketches and solid CAD models. Verification also often includes some sort of mathematical calculation to prove the suitability of an idea.   

Ending

Wallas was after the ‘natural’ thought process, which seems fitting for a psychologist. Although we have many prescriptive design processes in engineering, I am drawn to the notion of the ‘natural’ thought process, the one that happens generally with all of us whether we are aware of it or not. Wallas’ natural process, or some form of it, likely permeates most of our creative work, especially as engineers. Even Wallas said: “In the daily stream of thought these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems.” Now knowing more about Wallas’ four stages, I can more consciously guard the incubation time that has unknowingly been a part of my professional life. I can also use the notion of incubation to plan out how I use my time and avoid cramming or just sitting down and doing a tough project all at once, wherein there is no time for incubation.   

References

[1] Wikipedia, “Graham Wallas,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Wallas

[2] Wikipedia, “Social Psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_psychology

[3] Wallas, Graham (1926). The Art of Thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.

[4] Wikipedia, “Hermann von Helmholtz,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_von_Helmholtz

[5] Wikipedia, “Henri Poincaré,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9

[6] Maseena Ziegler, “7 Famous Quotes You Definitely Didn't Know Were From Women,” Forbes, September 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/maseenaziegler/2014/09/01/how-we-all-got-it-wrong-women-were-behind-these-7-famously-inspiring-quotes/?sh=76357a31016f

[7] Spencer W. Kimball, “Seek Learning, Even by Study and Also by Faith,” Ensign, September 1983,  https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1983/09/seek-learning-even-by-study-and-also-by-faith?lang=eng