Unlocking Creativity: The Five-Step Process to Generating Powerful Ideas

Creativity is often considered the realm of the creative genius. But anyone can come up with valuable ideas, and everyone would, if only they had a straightforward process for generating them.

What if we told you that process exists?

It’s a five-step approach originated some 50 years ago by James Webb Young, and still used (consciously or unconsciously) by creative thinkers today. 

Who is James Webb Young? 

James Webb Young was a journalist who worked on Madison Avenue when the advertising industry was rising. James was asked by a colleague to explain where creativity came from. James, unable to provide a succinct reply, made it his task to find the answer. A few years of persistence later, he published the book A Technique for Producing Ideas, which still forms many agencies’ processes for generating solutions to challenges.

The five-step process goes like this:

Step 1: 

Gather as much information as possible. This may include creating buyer or user stories, testing the product or service, conducting interviews with industry experts, or examining insights and data; basically, anything that provides a deeper knowledge of the challenge. 

Step 2: 

With the information gathered, get all your first ideas out of the way. They are not the answer. They are simply the first ideas that have yet to fully engage the faculty of the mind, with its unrivalled capability to fuse seemingly random thoughts to create a novel solution. So, get the first ideas out of the way, throw them in the bin, and move to step 3. 

Step 3: 

Thanks to evolution, the human mind can find novel solutions based on its knowledge and apply vast amounts of computation to connect seemingly random ideas to form a solution. You have to wait for the grey matter to perform its task, and the good news is that once you have understood the challenge, the brain will go to work trying to solve it for you. It will do this quietly and diligently — even whilst you sleep.

Step 4:

When an idea presents itself, usually at the most unlikely time, it must be captured. Right there and then. Everything associated with the idea must be recorded, or you risk it slipping away, never to be recalled. Some ideas will be great, some ideas not so good. That’s OK; the skill is in recognising the ones that show promise and are ready for the final step.

Step 5: 

Any idea, like a raw diamond taken from the ground, will need to be cut into shape and polished so it is fit for purpose. This means ensuring that the explanation is clear and easy to understand when your idea is presented. I usually start with the challenge, walk through the solution in no more than five slides, and then open the floor to questions. It doesn’t matter how complex the need or the solution: brevity rules. Creating a twenty-slide deck explaining everything is always quicker than crafting a five-slide deck because the shorter deck requires carefully removing everything that isn’t necessary to take the recipient on a logical journey to understanding the idea’s value.

I have learned over the years of running workshops with clients that whatever solutions are generated, new thoughts will come along and need to be added by the time they have been developed and discussed. So, you have to be ready to develop the idea — and possibly pivot. It pays to be agile and prepared to listen to what others have to say. 

It’s not over when you come up with a good idea; it’s over when the thing you come up with bridges the gap between where the client was, and where they want to be.