The Creativity Playbook
A hands-on guide to ideas and innovation by Dave Stewart and Mark Simmons, coming in 2027. The brainstorming tools from the book are free to use now.
Updated
Think like an artist
The Business Playground came out in 2010 with a simple message: think like an artist and you bring more meaning and connection to your work. Artists and musicians seem to have creativity in their DNA, and businesses have a lot to learn from how they think and make things.
The Creativity Playbook is the revised edition. It keeps the hands-on tools and adds a world that has changed: fewer, bigger companies, more decisions made by data, and a new kind of instrument in the creative signal chain, artificial intelligence.
Without creativity, we're just another cog in the machine.
Try a tool
The Random Idea Generator turns the book’s Connected and Idea Spaghetti chapters into something you can use in a minute. It is free, runs in your browser and needs no account.
Open the Random Idea Generator
More free tools are on the way, and they are all collected on the brainstorming tools page.
What’s inside
Twelve chapters, each built around one way of getting ideas moving.
Chapter 1
How to Play
Play is how you unleash your natural creative potential.
Chapter 2
Idea Spaghetti
The more ideas you throw at the wall, the better the odds that one sticks.
Chapter 3
Scavengers
Great ideas are lying around. You have to be hunting for them.
Chapter 4
The Answer Is in the Question
Better questions get you better answers.
Chapter 5
Left Brain, Meet Mr Right
Logic and imagination work best as a team. Treat left and right brain as a metaphor, not anatomy.
Chapter 6
Brain Flash
Draw it, picture it, and the solution shows up.
Chapter 7
The Idea Commune
Ideas get bigger when people build on each other.
Chapter 8
Far Out
Think big, then tell a story that makes people want to come along.
Chapter 9
Shoe Swapper
Walk in someone else's shoes and the problem looks different.
Chapter 10
Connected
Smash two unconnected things together and make something new.
Chapter 11
Kill the Idea
Choosing which ideas get your time and money is half the job.
Chapter 12
Blast Off!
The right environment launches ideas. The wrong one grounds them.