Creativity isn’t necessarily something that suddenly strikes you. The most important thing is clear structures. How to create some.
Most of them should have grooved in the home office by now. But that also brings problems: If you cook for weeks on your own, at some point you will run out of ideas.
Instead, it takes meetings, brainstorming and maybe a beer after work together to develop creative ideas. Or?
Experts explain how creativity is created, how you can work creatively in the home office, and what to do if you are blocked.
Five phases of creativity
Basically, creativity is something very individual, but most people have something in common: “Everyone needs clear structures in order to be able to fantasize freely within this framework,” says Rainer Holm-Hadulla, creativity researcher and consultant at Heidelberg University. “It is not for nothing that all-important artists, scientists, and politically active people have fixed work rituals.”
So creativity is not necessarily something that suddenly strikes you. According to Holm-Hadulla, creativity is rather a process that consists of five phases:
- First phase: preparation. It serves to acquire knowledge from the area in which one would like to be creative.
- Second phase: incubation. This is the phase of calm, in which the acquired knowledge is sorted and can sit down.
- Third phase: illumination. The aha moment when the idea emerges like a flash of inspiration. “This phase is usually overestimated,” says Holm-Hadulla.
- Fourth phase: implementation. Here is being adjusted, rethought. A strenuous phase that requires a lot of resilience, according to the creativity expert.
- Fifth phase: verification. At the end there is the review – so the question: How does the result affect others? is it about that
And what does that mean for creative work in the home office? In principle, creativity is also possible from home. But:
“Creativity does not arise in a vacuum,”
psychologist and coach Cordula Nussbaum.
“To be creative, we need outside stimuli.”
