The four-phase model creates awareness of how creative thinking or dealing with problems and the path to their solution works.
The British social psychologist and educationalist Graham Wallas systematized the observations of the German polymath Hermann von Helmholtz and the French mathematician Henri Poincaré and brought them together in 1926 to form a theory of creative thinking.
The structuring introduced by Graham has endured in creativity research to this day, even though models with a different number of phases have emerged as variants. The boundaries between the individual phases are fluid.
