Creative Caffeine

As we navigate Mental Well-being Month, I've noticed an abundance of advice flooding our social feeds and inboxes. While many solutions are being shared, I want to focus on what we've discovered through years of working with both corporate teams and individual clients: creativity isn't just a nice-to-have skill—it's a fundamental tool for mental well-being.

The unexpected connection

When organisations reach out to us, they're typically focused on business challenges:

•  "How do we spark innovation in our teams?"
• "Why are our people resistant to new technologies?"
• "How can we break down silos between departments?"
• "What's holding back our team's initiative and autonomy?"

What consistently amazes me is how addressing these challenges through creativity unleashes something far more valuable than just business solutions.

Beyond business results

Take Charl van Staden's team at Merchant Captial, a specialised financial services company. Merchant Capital initially engaged us to dev...

It's not often that I set an intention for the year and stick to it.

By the third month, I'm usually marching off on a tangent and by the fifth month, I may even have forgotten that I had intentions in the first place.

This year was different. In early January, both Celia and I captured our aims for the year as part of a vision-boarding exercise with the lovely Isa Gesseau at IbiArt. 

The word that emerged for me was SOAR. When the word first popped into my head, I thought, "Lord let that word not be spelled sore."

Sadly, it has turned out to be a terribly painful year for many people, not least of which for the citizens of Ukraine, Israel and Palestine. Our hearts are indeed sore as we think of the terrible suffering so many people have endured and continue to endure.

Rather than causing us to give up on humanity, geopolitical warfare and our own unstable political climate in South Africa have spurred us on to work even harder. It's clear that the world needs creative thi...