How can practitioners develop greater creative capacity? This research project explores the stages that a creative practitioner moves through as they journey through the creative process and identifies some of the most powerful practices, principles, and mindsets that they can uphold in order to develop greater creative capacity. Our research findings are a result of a design-led inquiry and set of generative interviews with a diverse group of high-performing creative practitioners.

We describe the creative process through the narrative arc of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. We identify six common pitfalls that creative practitioners need to be mindful of as they journey through the unknown world and face unforeseen challenges and temptations. We describe how the practices of discipline and reflection create the conditions for creative practitioners to avoid these pitfalls and describe a set of six principles that act as a system of fail-safes to help creative practitioners navigate the precarious landscape of transformation.

We then look at creative capacity itself and describe the overarching mindset that allows creative practitioners to uphold these practices and principles. We present a model for creative capacity as a dynamic interaction between creative self, creative confidence, and creative craft and describe how practitioners can build greater creative capacity from successive journeys through the four stages of the Hero’s Journey.