People who have studied the psychology of creativity understand that “Creativity” is an umbrella term that tries to capture a wide variety of actions that creative people take. People who see creativity as a single step are left with no action plan. Creativity isn’t something you can “DO” because it’s not actionable. The more specific you get about the creative process, the more actionable creativity becomes.

Scientific theories of the creative process attempt to capture the most important stages of creative thought.

One of the most important scientific theories on the creative process is known as the Geneplore Model of Creativity. It’s a very simple, 2-step process. Geneplore gets its name from combining the 2 stages together. Gene, stands for generate and “-plore” stands for explore. Putting it together, the creative person continually cycles through a process of generating ideas and exploring their implications. This is the most basic way of looking at the creative process, yet it’s incredibly useful in daily life.

The first phase of Geneplore is similar to divergent thinking. You want to create a wide variety of ideas to test. These aren’t fully thought out ideas. These are best guesses. You’re generating candidate ideas that have varying degrees of creative potential. Some feel promising while others are on the short-list to be thrown away if they can’t prove themselves worthy.
The second phase is exploration. The most important action a creative person takes here is thinking about the implications of each idea. It’s like an “If… then” question. You’re asking yourself, “If I do X, then what would that mean?” What would be the consequences of that action? Do I need to modify my idea? Should I elaborate on the idea and begin adding more details? What does it all mean?

The second phase is similar to convergent thinking. In convergent thinking, you want to end up with fewer ideas than you started. You want to converge on the best answer. The best candidate idea from the generation process. This is what happens in the second stage of generplore, you’re elaborating and exploring the implications of many ideas. Many of those ideas will naturally fizzle out, which leads to convergence. Some creative people don’t like this stage because it doesn’t feel as creative as the divergent thinking half where you get to be wild and crazy. It’s true that this stage requires more logical, linear thinking, but it’s also true that great creativity requires being able to do both.

After narrowing down your list of candidate ideas, the process repeats itself. Thus, geneplore continually cycles through a process of generating many ideas and choosing the best. This is how ideas evolve over time. Not just on a personal level, but throughout history, as well.

As you’re creating today, you can use the geneplore model simply by asking these two questions: “What can I try?” And “If I tried that, what might happen?” Sometimes your project will require divergent thinking where you can think up various ideas, but other times it’ll require straight-forward, logical thinking. Your job as a creator is to accept what’s in front of you, even when it’s not your favorite part of the process. Ignoring the part you don’t like will doom your idea to failure. Not spending enough time generating interesting and diverse ideas will result in fewer ideas that are all relatively similar to each other. Not spending enough time exploring the implications of ideas will lead to to accepting ideas that should have been rejected. Be flexible and do what needs to be done .