The Creativity Cookbook — Feeding your brain

As a creative agency, we get called in by clients to spice up their communication with our creative ideas. Right? Yes and no.

We love coming up with killer ideas to help our clients’ work get the resonance it deserves. But as creativity professionals, we also know that any team can learn how to be creative and generate ideas. It’s a process that requires the right tools rather than an innate gift.

You know the proverbial wisdom about teaching someone how to fish instead of giving them a fish? Well, we thought that instead of just drawing the fish, we could hand out the pencils this time.

We believe that creativity makes for better workplaces, so we decided to share our creative toolkit and spread the joy of seeing new ideas and creations come to life.

What would be the best way to make available our creative know-how?

We think that organising a creative session works a bit like cooking. It’s not an exact science, but there are proven practices we have developed, trialled and refined over the years.

That’s how the idea of the Cartoonbase Creativity Cookbook was born.

Together with Luc de Brabandère, co-founder of Cartoonbase and the ‘godfather’ of creativity who has facilitated over 2 000 brainstorming sessions around the globe, we compiled our best recipes and the theory behind them.

The result: a practical creativity manual with hand-drawn illustrations that can be applied by virtually anyone – and is fun to use, of course!

We wanted to make our cookbook really useful for a diverse audience of amateur ‘cooks’. So we put ourselves into the shoes of people working outside of the creative industries who are generally quick to assert that they are ‘not the creative type’.

So we aimed for a change of perspective. By combining theory on how the minds works, tips and tricks to get the creative juices flowing, and practical recipes to try out in meetings or on teambuilding days, we showed that creativity is not a quality that sets some people apart, but rather a muscle we can strengthen.

We also aimed to make it easy to just dive in and try something out by highlighting which recipes to use for which type of challenge or practical question.

Available in French and English, we sent the cookbook to all our clients and partners as an end-of-year gift. We know how creative they can be – so we wanted to share inspiration and tips for harnessing that energy!

The print version of the actual book was combined with a digital platform giving access to a selection of recipes for instant use.

We were happy to see that interest in getting creative is spread across widely different kinds of organisations – from NGOs to consultancies, and from local small businesses to large industrial corporations.

The reactions we received were overall positive and sometimes along the lines of “so long and thanks for all the fish”.

We hear the in-house creative sessions we helped inspire turned out to be a lot of fun and resulted in new food for thought. Q.E.D.!