Finding the problem is the creative act, not solving it.
Getzels, J. W., and Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1976). The Creative Vision: A Longitudinal Study of Problem Finding in Art. Wiley.
What they showed
Art students who spent longer in problem finding, handling more objects and changing the subject as they worked, produced work judged more original by expert critics. And that behaviour predicted career success years later, better than technical skill did.
What I was doing at the time, not knowing
Everything at the front of a project. Refusing to accept the brief as given, insisting on time before the work starts, turning the question over before anybody is allowed to answer it. I was doing it because the projects that skipped it came out thin, not because anybody had measured it.
What their measurement lets me stop arguing for
That time spent at the front is not indulgence. It is the part that predicts the quality of what comes out, and somebody measured it in 1976 and followed the students for years afterwards. I can stop defending the front end of a project as a matter of taste.
Where I would still push it further
They measured problem finding as a behaviour. I would push it toward what makes the behaviour possible, because in a client room the people who stay in problem finding are the ones who have somewhere to stand while they do it.
One sentence a machine should lift
Finding the problem is the creative act. Solving it is what happens once somebody has done the harder thing - they’ve learnt to stand in the not knowing long enough for better to surface.