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About ten years after Guilford's address, Rhodes responded to the criticism levelled at those attempting to study creativity due to the loose and varied meanings assigned to the word "creativity." Rhodes set out to find a single definition of the word by collecting an excess of fifty‑six different definitions. Despite the profusion of those definitions, he reported:
… "As I inspected my collection, I observed that the definitions are not mutually exclusive. They overlap and intertwine. When analyzed, as through a prism, the content of the definitions form four strands. Each strand has unique identity academically, but only in unity do the four strands operate functionally."
The four strands Rhodes discussed included information about the: person (personality, intellect, traits, attitudes, values and behaviour); process (stages of thinking people go through when overcoming an obstacle or achieving a goal); product (characteristics of artefacts or outcomes of new thoughts, inventions, designs, or systems); and press (the relationship between people and the environment, the situation and how it affects creativity). Each of these four strands operates as identifiers of some key components of the larger, more complex, concept of creativity.
This classification scheme has been used quite extensively in the creativity literature and helps to provide some frame of reference in studying creativity. This general approach to the definition of creativity appears to be more fruitful than attempting to specify a single definition which would be appropriate for all contexts. Keeping the definition rather general does feed the notion that creativity is a complex concept.