Have you ever noticed that a breakthrough idea often comes to you when you least expect it—for example, when you’re taking a shower, during your commute to work, while you are waking up or going to sleep, or just daydreaming. Sometimes it pops up while you’re busy working on another problem. Why does the big idea elude you when you are putting many hours of concentrated, focused effort behind it, but seems to burst forth on its own when you move onto something else?

Graham Wallas, a pioneering theorist on creativity, may have the answer to this question. In his 1926 book Art of Thought, he broke down four stages of the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Let’s explore each of these stages.

Preparation is a crucial stage where you become a sponge and soak up everything you can, focusing your mind on the problem and exploring its dimensions. It’s more than a temporary initiation to a project; it’s life-long learning, expanding a curious mind. The more you put into your head, the more you have to work with. All the conscious work of this stage is what fuels the power of the next one, incubation.

During incubation you take a break from the problem. You step away from it and take a breather. You internalize it, handing it over to the unconscious mind. There are several hypotheses of why incubation helps creative problem solving. One is that the conscious mind tends to add restrictions, biases and rules to the problem, whereas the unconscious mind thinks more freely. Another is that the problem solver may become fixated on inappropriate strategies while consciously trying to solve the problem. The unconscious mind may “forget” some of these misleading clues. A third theory is that the unconscious mind is more adept at combining seemingly incongruous concepts together and forming new solutions. Even with all the hypotheses around the incubation stage, it’s still a mystery exactly how it works. But the important thing to remember is that it does work, which brings us to illumination.

Bang, the idea hits you — that flash of insight that couldn’t be coaxed out of your conscious mind, but came together as the subconscious took all the elements of preparation and floated them freely about during incubation to click into an illuminating new formation. The only down side is that this insight doesn’t arrive at will; it comes when the subconscious is ready to release it. Now that you have your big idea, it’s time for the final stage: to verify that the idea has validity and apply it.

If you are struggling to find a breakthrough B2B marketing solution to your problem, perhaps you need to step away from it and let it marinate in your subconscious. It’ll be worth the wait with little effort (on purpose) on your part.