Do you want to be fully creative? To not only have wild ideas, but to actually create and bring remarkable things to life?
There are four distinct roles to be performed for the creative process to be as effective as possible. Each one requires that you play different characters, with different mindsets and skills.
The roles are: Explorer, Artist, Judge and Warrior.
Learn how they help unleash your creativity and how to master the skills each one requires.
1. The Explorer
Ideas do not come out of the blue. In order to build them you first need to gather the raw materials: facts, concepts, experiences, knowledge, feelings — that’s what ideas are made of. To get all of that, you need an attitude of ongoing curiosity and exploration.
The Explorer is always in search of new things. He is relentlessly curious and never limits himself to a particular area of experience and knowledge. To have ideas is to connect dots. First and foremost you need lots of dots to connect — you need fuel for the formation of new ideas.
How to Develop Your Explorer
Be curious and alert. Poke around in unknown areas. Be like a child, by paying attention to the world and being receptive to it. Rediscover the fun in finding things out.
Seek out as many inputs as possible. Do not limit yourself to the tried and true. Read different books and see different movies from the ones you like. Also, don’t mind going after information “you’ll never use”. Seek many different areas of knowledge.
Talk to a lot of different people. Get to know many different perspectives. Talk to strangers. Don’t limit yourself to expert advice.
2. The Artist
The artist has ideas. He takes the raw materials from the Explorer and combines them in novel ways.
When people say someone’s “creative”, they’re usually referring to the Artist. The Artist has ideas mostly by trying new things. He applies his imagination by rearranging, turning things upside down, stirring things up. He pursues different approaches and finds unexpected connections. He’s playful; he doesn’t care about what people expect from him.
How to Develop Your Artist
Flex your idea muscles. Write down new ideas as they come to you; it stimulates your brain to generate more and more ideas. Also, use idea-generation tools deliberately: Lists of 100, Idea Quota and SCAMPER just to name a few.
Play! We all know it: the most efficient way to have new ideas is by having fun. Don’t always take problems too seriously. Entertain yourself and keep your brain fresh and ready.
Use your imagination. Leave practicality aside; don’t be afraid to let your imagination run wild and visualize new possibilities. Dare to ask ‘what if’ and watch new realities unfold.
3. The Judge
The Judge is all about “getting real”. His job is to analyze the Artist’s wild ideas and assess if they’re practical — in the real world.
The judge questions assumptions; he compares and analyzes. He checks how feasible ideas are. No matter how much the Artist loves an idea, the Judge looks for counterarguments, checks evidence, and makes hard decisions. Combining gut feeling and analytical tools, the judge must only let through feasible ideas.
The Judge gets a bad reputation — but only because people usually invoke him too early. Killing an idea before the Artist can play with it is a pity; killing it later is oftentimes a necessity.
How to Develop Your Judge
Develop critical thinking. Check your assumptions, experimenting with hypotheses, analyzing results and drawing conclusions. Master decision making.
Be aware of thinking traps. Our minds deceive us. Be always aware and vigilant of your own biases. There are more ways than you can imagine that your thinking can go wrong. Really.
Be real. Will the idea give you the return you want? Do you have the resources to make it happen? Are you willing to put the effort to make it happen? Be practical and down-to-earth.
4. The Warrior
As soon as you have an idea ready to be executed you’ll realize the world isn’t set up to accommodate every new idea that comes along. The enemies can be external: competition may be fierce, or people may just don’t “get” your beautiful ideas. Even harder than those, there are more than enough enemies already within you: think resistance, excuses and fear of failure.
The Warrior’s job is to make ideas happen. For that, you’ll need not only a strategy and plan of action but to put in the hours — fight the daily fight.
That means remaining productive, developing the resilience and courage to overcome obstacles and, of course, being able to sell your ideas — whatever’s necessary to materialize them.
How to Develop Your Warrior
Overcome resistance. When you create something new, resistance inevitably creeps in. You need to find ways of overcoming procrastination and staying productive day in, day out.
Be courageous. In order to make things happen, you’ll need to let go of self-doubt and conquer fear of failure.
Market and sell your idea. Are you the only one who thinks your idea is great? Can you convince others of the merits of your idea? If you can’t sell your idea, it won’t get far.
Awareness and Timing are Critical Too
In reality, we all know the path to creativity is not that sequential — explorer-to-artist-to-judge-to-warrior. Usually, there’s a lot of switching back and forth between roles: The Judge may return an idea to the Artist for further development; the Artist may want more data from the Explorer to develop a certain idea, and so on.
This is fine. The main thing is to be aware of which role you’re performing at different points in time. We often get stuck in the Explorer role for too long. Or we may jump the gun and summon our Judge while our Artist is still working his magic. There are so many ways to spend too much or too little time in each role, or to overlap ineffectively.
The lesson is: make sure not only to develop the skill set for each role, but also to play each one at the appropriate time. Be aware of which phase of the creative process you’re in and what you’re trying to accomplish. All roles are equally important: make sure they’re playing well with each other.
Want to Know More? Here’s a Recommendation
These concepts above are not new. The idea of the four creativity roles comes from Roger Von Oech‘s classic work on creativity A Whack on the Side of the Head, as well as the Creative Whack Pack (which is a deck of cards where each of the four roles is a suit — very fun, do check it out too).
I have had this book for ages but only lately have been applying its principles and becoming more conscious of the steps of the creative process. There’s a myth that creativity needs to be wild and unplanned, that one cannot be trained to be creative. I’m increasingly convinced that that is not true and I will expand on this topic as I explore more. In the meantime, A Whack on the Side of the Head and Creative Whack Pack are two truly excellent resources I recommend for those interested in becoming more creative.
This is excellently laid out. It actually reminds me of one method I read in an NLP book called, “The Disney Creative Strategy.” It was created when Robert Dilts analyzed and modeled Disney’s studios. He ended up breaking creativity into 3 personalities – The Dreamer, The Realist, and The Critic. You can probably extract from there what the strategy was all about. He would recommend that you go into each mode and then cycle through each until you had the final product.
I was really impressed when I first read Dilts strategy but honestly I believe yours is even better.
Hi Steven,
I had never heard about The Disney Creative Strategy before. Simple and interesting.
For those interested, I googled it and found this resource. (while there, make sure to check out the more comprehensive PDF as well).
Thanks for sharing!
Another excellent article, or rather, I should say, reference guide. There is so much practical info in a short space, complete with links to more info as the reader desires to expand his knowledge.
Regarding creativity being wild and unplanned: In school I liked art, and was fairly adept, though only intuitively. My art teacher had no idea of the HOW of teaching art. So I thought that only those with a “gift” could really draw and paint. Later I came across the book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” (http://www.drawright.com/). Lo and behold, a methodology whereby even artistic dunces could become proficient if they applied themselves by learning how to “see.”
Many artists would save time and frustration by applying this methodology.
Glad you enjoy the article, buddy!
It’s amazing how people regard creativity as “gift”: either you have or you don’t. I’ve seen many rolling eyes when hearing that creativity can be trained, that you can have a “methodology for creativity”. That’s why I believe it’s important to explore this theme further.
Regarding Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, it’s an awesome book — one of my all-time favorites. I recommend it to everyone.
I can also vouch for the “Whack on the Side of the Head” book. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for years, and I pull it off regularly and always learn some great practical creativity exercises to practice as I go about my day. The way you laid these four categories out is simple and refreshing.
Another excellent post Luciano! Thank you!
Hey Rod,
It’s an amazing little book, isn’t it? My guess is that I can read it cover-to-cover in less than an hour — and yet I always get something new every time I check it out!
Awesome post. I’ve never look at it before in different groups such as artist, explorer etc but a nice point of view makes perfect sense.
My opinion: using frameworks around creativity is super-cool per se — and this framework happens to be one of the best I know.
Loved this post simply because it was unique. You have to are to explore to find your creativity. I find meditation makes me super creative, I have some of my best ideas in meditation.
I’d say meditation is, in a way, a form of exploration. Maybe not a direct way, but when you meditate you clear your mind, shutting the inner noise and letting the ‘creativity raw materials’ show through.
Great take on creativity Luciano. I think it’s cool how you break it down into the 4 categories because it gives you away to control you creative thinking. Sometimes when I find that my ideas are not coming out, I’m challenge for creativity. This is a great way to put process and structure around that. Thanks.
Hi Srinivas,
That’s one of the cool things about breaking down the process in four: when you’re stuck it’s usually easy to pinpoint which role you’re performing poorly and make adjustments.
I completely agree about the explorer part. I think people that go out and find things tend to be creative.
Hi Justin,
In my experience, the Explorer is usually the most neglected role, as the results are rarely immediately apparent.
Hi Luciano, I thought this was really interesting. Many people feel creative but lack the ability to maximize their creativity. Breaking it down like this helps us all to appreciate what’s involved in the process. I love to see complex ideas made simple by laying out the logical progression from one step to to the next.
Hey Jonathan,
Yes, untangling a somewhat mysterious process in logical parts is a great first step to systematically improve our skills in it.
Thanks for stopping by!
I LOVE this article. Really brilliant, thanks Luciano!
My Explorer and Artist are absolutely fine; they’re alive and well in me every single day. However, my Judge comes in too early, like you mention, and my Warrior… well, he’s not much of a Warrior. He’s a bit pathetic, really.
What I need to do is have the conviction, commitment and courage to always be productive and to make my ideas real.
Thanks for helping me focus on the role I need to strengthen!
Thanks for the compliment, Christopher — glad to know you find the article useful!
Being aware of which role you’re performing is a great strategy. If you’re having ideas and the Judge shows up too early, you can say “Go away, I’m in Artist mode; Wait for your turn.”
I am definitely the artist, and it is great to see creativity “types” expressed this way. Creativity isn’t limited to arts and crafts — everyone has it, but we all express it in different ways. Great post!
I love your blog and have gotten so much from it! In fact I included your blog in a list of favorites on my blog. Thank you for your great work.
Barrie
Hi Barrie,
Up to a point in life I also could say I “was” the Artist — and I was quite proud of it.
Now I see it’s very ineffective to “be” any of these roles… a better verb to go for is “invoke”, as you need all four different personalities to be at your creativity maximum.
Thanks for your compliments regarding the blog, Barrie. I really appreciate them!
Many of these thoughts I have expressed myself but in a little different way. I enjoyed reading it.
I have “A whack on the side of the head” and have been re-reading it.But unlike you Luciano, I read it in little snippets, And give myself time to think about and absorb each idea.
Thanks,
Sonja
Reading in little snippets is a great idea. Especially in random order.
And ‘A Whack on the Side of the Head’ is a great book for doing that.
Thanks Sonja!
creativity is all about opening up space for experimentation and free play not to mention free association. it is the complete mixing up of opposite entities and the breaking apart of sacred blocks that refuse to budge. in other words awaken the sleepy and sedate the bug-eyed.
gr8 article Luciano
i also believe that routine kills creativity, a person should have one free day each week where he do unusual stuff in order to unleash his mind’s powers
Hey Farouk, thanks for stopping by!
That’s great advice. Common sense, in fact… but far from common practice! (as most great advice is)
I am guilty myself of having that idea for a long time and not implementing it…
Great post. It seems like I go through different roles during different phases of my life.
Hey Hugh,
Yes, I experience that too. The important thing is to be aware in which role you’re stuck into so you can try to “awaken” the other ones.
It’s usually counterproductive to stay in the same role for too long.
Thanks for the comment!
Great resource for explaining the creative process.
Benjamin Koshkin
As a writer, one of the hardest things is to switch effectively between and among these roles…and to know when I need to!
Tim D
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