Some people believe that creativity is inborn; others believe that with training, anyone can be creative. The latter group views creativity as a fourfold process.40

1. Perception involves the way you see things. Being creative means seeing things from a unique perspective. One person may see solutions to a problem that others cannot or will not see at all. The movement from perception to reality, however, doesn’t occur instantaneously.

2. Instead, ideas go through a process of incubation. Sometimes employees need to sit on their ideas, which doesn’t mean sitting and doing nothing. Rather, during this incubation period, employees should collect massive amounts of data that are stored, retrieved, studied, reshaped, and finally molded into something new. During this period, it’s common for years to pass. Think for a moment about a time you struggled for an answer on a test. Although you tried hard to jog your memory, nothing worked. Then suddenly, like a flash of light, the answer popped into your head. You found it!

3. Inspiration in the creative process is similar. Inspiration is the moment when all your efforts successfully come together. Although inspiration leads to euphoria, the creative work isn’t complete. It requires an innovative effort.

4. Innovation involves taking that inspiration and turning it into a useful product, service, or way of doing things. Thomas Edison is often credited with saying that “Creativity is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” That 99 percent, or the innovation, involves testing, evaluating, and retesting what the inspiration found. It’s usually at this stage that an individual involves others more in what he or she has been working on. Such involvement is critical because even the greatest invention may be delayed, or lost, if an individual cannot effectively deal with others in communicating and achieving what the creative idea is supposed to do.