Prep Work is the practice of building knowledge in a way that maximizes its potential for
effective use in the moment of creation.
TIPS FOR GOOD PRACTICE
- Expect more: Depth of thinking in prep work enhances retrieval in “the final moment of association.” Make depth accountable by ritualizing feedback and critical testing appropriately throughout the process.
- Frame problems and challenges more abstractly in a collective setting to enhance associations and analogues.
- Practice communicating the essence, the gist of the idea, to facilitate understanding and commitment on the challenge in focus. Expect people to communicate insights and ideas on the fly.
- Hot thoughts are more memorable than cold thoughts: Don’t shy away from heated discussions and projects that resonate with passion. Creative processes that acknowledges and utilizes both negative and positive affect, opens a larger repository of knowledge at the point of association.
- Work in troubled waters, listen to dissent: Be aware of group processes that habitually are drawn towards common ground and consensus, thus ignoring dissent and problems.
- Lower the threshold for logging knowledge and ideas, and lay out multiple cues as you go forward, like simple sketches, notes, scribbles on paper, etc. Active use of physical representations for documenting ideas leaves traces that function as memory enhancing chunks in later stages of the creative process.
- Active rehearsal: Repeated rehearsal is the memory enhancing principle par excellence. Make sure to go over the stuff you are working on repeatedly.
Readings for inspiration
Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973) “Perception in Chess”. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 55-81.
Wallas, G. (1926) The art of thought. London: J. Cape.