Wallas' Four Stages of Creative Thought
If we want to see a greater theory of productivity , we have to recognize first that software development is thinking. Once we get there, we need to understand how we can think better. One aid is to have more information so that we know what to do . In the 1926 book The Art of Thought , Graham Wallas explained that having an idea (a creative solution) requires four distinct phases or steps: Preparation (gathering of theory and data) Incubation (letting the idea "cook" by doing something unrelated) Enlightenment (the emerging of an idea, or "connection") Verification (determining the validity of the idea) Wallas noted that stages 1 and 4 may take minutes, hours, days, years, or decades. We are primarily interested in those that work on the sub-week scale when programming, but the fact remains that we need to allow the brain to work by feeding it information, giving it some time to process, and then verifying the ideas as they come. Wallas refers to the ...