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Prior to Osborn, creativity was believed to be present wholly in the subconscious mind. But the subconscious was a sporadic and unpredictable source whose inner workings remained a mystery. Graham Wallas developed creative process model with preparation, incubation, intimation, illumination, and verification as stages.
Preparation: The creative individual begins by intensely concentrating upon the task at hand, may be spending days or weeks trying to solve the problem analytically. It is the preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions.
Incubation: When conscious work provides no further progress, the individual relaxes or pursues something entirely different. During this period of incubation, the subconscious will ferment the problem in other words where the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening.
Intimation: The creative person gets a 'feeling' that a solution is on its way with the internalized process.
Illumination or insight: This will burst upon the individual, full flown or sudden outburst of idea when it is least expected. Thus the creative idea bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness
Verification: This stage requires conscious manipulation of the insight in order to use it. In this stage the idea is consciously verified, elaborated and then applied.
This theory depicts the creative process as a ‘black box’ phenomenon. It shows how an individual may try to use the subconscious, but doesn't provide enough information about its inner workings. Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments.
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