Creative Caffeine

A review of Greg Streak's Make the Question Beautiful: Why, in the age of AI, the most creative thing you can do is ask a better question.

By Nina Pearse

A small book has been sitting on my desk for weeks, and I keep picking it up.

It is called Make the Question Beautiful: What Wants to Be Asked by Greg Streak. Understated. Short chapters, simple drawings, lots of white space. And yet it asks something enormous: what does it mean to think creatively when so much of our thinking can now be outsourced to a machine?

I spend most of my working life helping leaders and teams think more creatively, so that question landed squarely in my world. Then this line stopped me:

"The more we automate, the more valuable what can't be automated becomes."

AI can draft our documents, summarise our meetings and produce a polished answer in seconds. Super useful. It also makes it very easy to skip the struggle that usually comes before an original thought. And I will admit, as someone who love...

By Dr Amy Climer (Page Two Books, 2025)

In the hopeful calm of early 2020, Celia and I found ourselves nervously clicking “Join Zoom Meeting” on a video call that felt a little surreal.

On the other side of the screen was Dr Amy Climer, someone whose voice had been a steady companion on our own creative journey. We’d spent hours soaking up her Deliberate Creative podcast, scribbling down insights and building the scaffolding for what would become Creativity Wake-Up. Her way of explaining creativity, grounded, practical, and refreshingly unpretentious, had lit a fire under us.

Now here she was, live and in full colour (with a colour-coded bookshelf behind her… a real one, I believe!), graciously chatting with us about her coaching approach and the nuts and bolts of leading creativity.

That conversation helped us see a new path forward not just for our work, but for how creativity could live and breathe in teams. Since then, we’ve referred many times to our now marked-up copies of ...