“There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.” — Edward de Bono.
Not all songs are going to be hit singles.
Not all canvases are going to make it to the exhibition.
Not all our posts are going to go viral.
That opening observation is more liberating than it might first appear. It removes the pressure of perfection from the creative act and replaces it with something more useful and more honest: the understanding that creative output is a numbers game, and that the only way to produce the work that matters is to keep producing, consistently and without attachment to any individual result.
Who Edward de Bono was #
Before accepting his word on the subject of creativity, it is worth understanding the scale of the man behind it.
Edward de Bono was the originator of the term lateral thinking and developed famous decision-making methods including the Six Thinking Hats, Parallel Thinking, Lateral Thinking and Linear Thinking. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2005 and has written 82 books translated into 41 languages. He held faculty appointments at Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Harvard. He was hailed as one of the 250 people in all of history who have contributed most to humanity. The term lateral thinking, which he coined in 1967, is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, having entered the language so completely that most people use it without knowing its origin. OTB Agency
De Bono argued that we needed to fight against the tyranny of logic; the vertical thinking as espoused by the Greek philosophers, with creative thinking. It is lateral thinking, he said, that creates new ideas; logic cannot change perception or emotion, and it is errors in perception that lead to the most errors in thinking.
Sir Richard Branson, endorsing de Bono’s Lateral Thinking, put it plainly: “If more bankers and traders had read Lateral Thinking and applied the ideas of Edward de Bono to their own narrow definitions of risk, reward and human expectations, I suspect we would be in much better shape than we are.”
When someone of that authority says creativity is the most important human resource of all, it is not a motivational sentiment. It is a considered position from a lifetime of study.
What creativity requires #
My own take on creativity is that a piece of work needs to be informative, entertaining, or educational. Give people an aha moment; that sudden flash of recognition that something has been understood differently. Or prompt the question: just how did they do that?
Both responses signal that the work has done something genuine. It has shifted perspective, even slightly. It has offered something that wasn’t available before the reader encountered it.
But here is the practical question that follows: how does that kind of work get produced?
The answer, consistently, is practice. Keep composing, keep painting, keep writing. Robert Greene, writing on the subject of mastery, makes the point with characteristic directness: creativity is a function of the previous work you put in. It comes to you but only after hours of thinking, researching, reading, and working. The aha moment arrives as the reward for sustained effort, not as a replacement for it.
This is where the creative process framework becomes genuinely useful rather than merely descriptive.
The five stages #
The creative process involves critical thinking and problem-solving skills at every stage. From songwriters to television producers, creative individuals generally move through five steps in bringing their ideas to fruition.
Preparation is the stage of gathering: reading, researching, observing, accumulating the raw material from which ideas will eventually emerge. De Bono’s lateral thinking has its roots here: the preparation stage is where we encounter the patterns we will later break, and you cannot break a pattern you haven’t first understood.
Incubation is the stage we explored in the Unblock and Unplug piece elsewhere in this Hub: the period when the brain continues working on a problem beneath the level of conscious attention. The shower, the walk, the night’s sleep. This is incubation at work: the brain continuing to process even when we are not actively directing it. The 41% improvement in creative output from allowing the mind to wander, found in UC Santa Barbara research, is the scientific confirmation of what every writer who has ever solved a problem during a walk already knew.
Illumination is the aha moment itself. The sudden arrival of a connection, a solution, a new perspective on a problem that had previously resisted direct attack. Aha moments arise from relaxation, curiosity, diverse perspectives, and the willingness to approach problems with a degree of playfulness. They cannot be forced. They can be cultivated: by doing the preparation, allowing the incubation, and trusting that the illumination will arrive.
Evaluation is the stage that separates good creative judgement from mere inspiration. Not every idea that arrives in the illumination stage is worth pursuing. The evaluation stage requires the critical thinking that de Bono distinguished from lateral thinking; the vertical thinking that assesses, tests, and selects from among the ideas that the creative process has generated.
Verification is where the work is made real: refined, tested against the external world, and brought to the standard at which it is ready to be shared. It is the stage at which the hit single is distinguished from the album track, the exhibition piece from the studio study, the post that resonates from the one that gets fifteen impressions and no comments.
Building the creative muscle #
The five stages are not a linear sequence that happens once and produces a result. They are a cycle, run repeatedly, with each pass building the creative capacity that makes the next pass faster and more productive.
This is what de Bono meant by thinking as a teachable skill. Creativity is not a gift distributed unequally at birth. It is a discipline, developed through sustained practice across all five stages. The songwriter who writes five hundred songs in order to find the handful that are genuinely remarkable. The painter who fills sketchbooks before touching a canvas. The writer who posts consistently, for months and years, before the body of work accumulates into something that readers seek out rather than simply encounter.
Not all songs are going to be hit singles. Not all canvases are going to make it to the exhibition. Not all posts are going to go viral. But the hit single, the exhibition piece, and the post that genuinely shifts a reader’s perspective; none of those arrive without the five hundred that didn’t.
Good luck with all your creative endeavours.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-lead approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
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