In this toolkit episode of Now Go Create, Claire Bridges introduces the concept of the premortem, a powerful technique for anticipating project pitfalls before they derail your ideas. Drawing from her extensive experience in creative thinking and strategy development, Claire demonstrates how asking the right questions early can transform uncertainty into opportunity and help teams avoid costly missteps.

Clare shares real-world examples from organisations including Google, Stripe, Pixar, and Netflix, illustrating how pre-mortems foster honest feedback and more robust creative outcomes. You’ll learn practical steps to run your own pre-mortem, alongside insights into building resilience and healthy collaboration in creative projects.

Key Takeaways:

1. Many projects fail from overlooked risks, not the initial idea.
2. Premortems give permission to voice concerns without negativity.
3. Run premortems when ideas are solid, not in their early stages.
4. The process helps surface hidden assumptions and blind spots.
5. Use individual reflection before group discussion for unbiased input.
6. Pixar and Netflix embed radical candour and continuous feedback in their cultures.
7. Brain trusts provide expert peer feedback, helping refine ideas without hierarchy.

Something to Try:

Before your next project goes live, gather your team and run a pre-mortem. Imagine your project has failed six months down the line, and ask everyone to individually list reasons why it might have happened. Then, share and discuss the risks together, prioritise the most serious ones, and brainstorm ways to prevent them. Finish with a reflection on what you learned. This could be the critical step that takes your idea from good to great.

About Claire Bridges:

Claire Bridges is Chief Spark and Founder of leading creative training consultancy Now Go Create, whose philosophy is that everyone can be creative.

Claire worked as a PR agency Managing Director and Creative Director working with global brands including Starbucks, Kellogg’s, Unilever, P&G and Danone in her previous PR career. Upskilling individuals, teams and organisations with practical creativity tools is Claire’s mission.

She’s one of only 250 people globally to hold an MSc in Creativity, Leadership & Innovation, and authored an Amazon best-selling creative handbook In Your Creative Element based on her academic studies.

Claire and her hand-picked team of experts have worked on thousands of creative projects and trained over 50,000 people around the world since starting Now Go Create in 2011.

Connect with Claire:

Website: https://nowgocreate.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nowgocreate/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NowGoCreate

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/claire-bridges-b6205b14

Produced by winteraudio.co.uk

How do you turn a frustrating workshop into a creative, inclusive space where everyone feels heard without reinventing the wheel each time? In this enlightening episode of Now Go Create, host Claire Bridges sits down with Robert Cserti, co-founder of SessionLab, the go-to platform for workshop and meeting design loved by facilitators worldwide.

Claire and Robert get honest about the art and science of facilitation, what makes a meeting truly work, and why embracing both introverts and extroverts is the secret sauce to group creativity. If you ever find yourself leading meetings, brainstorming sessions, or workshops (even with a little dread), this episode is packed with practical tools, stories, and mindset shifts plus a few laughs around “the dreaded icebreaker.”

Here are this week’s highlights:

1. Robert Cserti shares the story behind creating SessionLab
2. What are the most popular workshop templates?
3. The debate around icebreakers: cringe or crucial?
4. Designing sessions for every kind of thinker
5. What to do when your agenda goes out the window
6. Incorporating movement and mental breaks: Claire’s “cloud walk” and other playful ideas to reignite energy and imagination
7. The rise of facilitation as a professional superpower
8. Behind the scenes at SessionLab
9. The challenge (and chaos) of hybrid meetings
10. Managing your energy as a facilitator.

Try this week:

Next time you plan a meeting or workshop, pick one new tool or method this episode or a simple silent reflection exercise. Notice how it pulls in different voices and improves the outcome.

About Claire Bridges:

Claire Bridges is Chief Spark and Founder of leading creative training consultancy Now Go Create, whose philosophy is that everyone can be creative.

Claire worked as a PR agency Managing Director and Creative Director working with global brands including Starbucks, Kellogg’s, Unilever, P&G and Danone in her previous PR career. Upskilling individuals, teams and organisations with practical creativity tools is Claire’s mission.

She’s one of only 250 people globally to hold an MSc in Creativity, Leadership & Innovation, and authored an Amazon best-selling creative handbook In Your Creative Element based on her academic studies.

Claire and her hand-picked team of experts have worked on thousands of creative projects and trained over 50,000 people around the world since starting Now Go Create in 2011.

Connect with Claire:

Website: https://nowgocreate.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nowgocreate/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NowGoCreate

LinkedIn:

What if your best creative breakthroughs aren’t sitting on your laptop, but waiting for you outside? In this episode of the Now Go Create podcast, Claire Bridges invites you to step away from your desk and into a more embodied creative practice. Claire draws on her own experience running creative workshops, her creative director roots, and insights from psychology to explore how movement, the world around us, and even a simple walk can spark fresh ideas and deeper creative thinking.

Inspired by John Cleese’s quote, “We don’t know where we get our ideas from, but we know we don’t get them from our laptops,” Claire challenges the default habit of expecting ideas to emerge from our teams when they’re glued to screens and instead encourages everyone to embrace a Creative Safari as a way of working and generating new perspectives.

In this episode:

1. The science behind why staying glued to your screen actually blocks great ideas
2. How embodied cognition thinking with your whole body can help generate creative breakthroughs
3. Why “thought walks” and creative safaris are Claire’s go-to approach for teams and individuals to unlock new perspectives
4. Practical exercises you can try: from tuning into your senses on a walk, to noticing new things through your peripheral vision
5. How giving your mind and body space (even just 10 minutes outdoors) enriches your creative process
6. Why noticing, not forcing, is key: letting curiosity and observation lead you to new insights
7. Using themes (Claire plays with the idea of “abundance” in the podcast) to subconsciously expand what you see, notice, and connect with
8. Tools for working alone or with teams including photographing what sparks your interest during your creative safari
9. How the principles of incubation, permission, and curiosity nurture original thinking and help fight creative blocks

Try this week:

Don’t force your next idea. Instead, take Claire’s advice and go on your own creative safari, or take your team on one.

1. Leave your desk, walk with a loose prompt or question, and see what you notice.
2. When you return, ask yourself how your fresh observations might connect to your creative challenge or simply enjoy the wider perspective it brings.

About Claire Bridges:

Claire Bridges is Chief Spark and Founder of leading creative training consultancy Now Go Create, whose philosophy is that everyone can be creative.

Claire worked as a PR agency Managing Director and Creative Director working with global brands including Starbucks, Kellogg’s, Unilever, P&G and Danone in her previous PR career. Upskilling individuals, teams and organisations with practical creativity tools is Claire’s mission.

She’s one of only 250 people globally to hold an MSc in Creativity, Leadership & Innovation, and authored an Amazon best-selling creative handbook In Your Creative Element based on her academic studies.

Claire and her hand-picked team of experts have worked on thousands of creative projects and...

In this short, slightly, scrappy, 10-minute bonus episode, the strategist’s strategist Julian Cole joins me again - this time for a real-time riff on how to devise a usable strategy brief… when you don’t actually have one.

Julian has worked with Uber, Apple, Facebook, Disney and more, and is known for demystifying strategy and making it accessible. In our previous full-length episode, we got so deep into strategy chat that my producer gently told me off for going way over time. So here’s the fun bit we couldn’t bear to delete.

Where to start when no usable brief exists

1. Julian shares his “brief audit” approach — the mandatories, the nice-to-knows, and how to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Live strategy development: The Dog Teeth Whitening Brief

1. Yes, really. We take a fictional vet chain launching a dog teeth-whitening service and unpack:
2. The business problem vs the consumer problem
3. How to explore audience motivations, goals and fears
4. Why aesthetics is never really about aesthetics
5. How social connection, status and even loneliness show up in strategic thinking

Inside Julian’s strategic process

1. We walk through:
2. Defining goals and problems
3. Using goal/fear dynamics to find emotional territory
4. Spotting potential insights
5. Building three “strategy napkins” — quick, rough territories you can test with clients or creatives

Why messy thinking is part of the process

1. Strategy rarely arrives fully formed. This episode shows the real-world expansion phase — the part most people never see.

If you ever need to develop a strategy without a proper brief (which, let’s be honest… is more often than we may like), this episode gives you a practical, human, and transparent look at how a top strategist begins to approach the problem.

About Claire Bridges

Claire Bridges is Chief Spark and Founder of leading creative training consultancy Now Go Create, whose philosophy is that everyone can be creative.

Claire worked as Managing Director and Creative Director working with global brands including Starbucks, Kellogg’s, Unilever, P&G and Danone in her previous PR career. Upskilling individuals, teams and organisations with practical creativity tools is Claire’s mission.

She’s one of only 250 people globally to hold an MSc in Creativity, Leadership & Innovation, and authored an Amazon best-selling creative handbook In Your Creative Element based on her academic studies.

Claire and her hand-picked team of experts have worked on thousands of creative projects and trained over 40,000 people around the world since starting Now Go Create in 2011.

Join our weekly email for free resources and worksheets to go with the...

Are you feeling flat, uninspired, or stuck in a rut with your creative work? You’re not alone and you don’t have to go it alone either. Following on from last week’s episode of Now Go Create Claire Bridges chats to improv specialist and storytelling coach Maria Peters for a lively, practical deep-dive into getting yourself out of a creative slump (and why it’s actually normal to have one!)

Claire and Maria open up about the telltale signs of a slump, the difference between external and internal validation, why creative flow is so elusive, and how helpful constraints, a dash of play, and some improv magic can get you unstuck fast. Plus, they explore tools including the ‘artist date’ and an eye-opening exercise they call the ‘jealousy map’, a fresh way of using envy as a creative compass.

If you’ve ever compared yourself to others, felt your creativity wane, or simply wondered how to nudge yourself back toward inspiration, this episode is packed with stories, and practical micro-actions you can try right away.

Here are the highlights:

1. Spotting a slump: Why comparison and self-doubt are classic signals
2. Internal vs. external validation and how to recentre on your own creative compass
3. The magic (and science) of flow
4. How limits can jumpstart your ideas (and why improv isn’t as wild as you think)
5. “Yes, and”: Using the improv mindset with your own ideas
6. Morning pages, artist dates, and creative ‘micro-doses’
7. The jealousy map, playful exercise to use envy or jealousy as a signpost for your own creative desires
8. Refilling your creative well, why pleasure, play, and tiny nudges matter as much as big breakthroughs
9. How to shake yourself out of autopilot (and what to try if you’re in a rut today!).

Try this week:

Schedule an ‘artist date’ with yourself - two hours (or whatever you can manage) doing something just for fun, no output required.

Do your own jealousy/creative envy check: Whose work, life, or output do you wish was yours? What is it specifically you want? Let that guide your next small creative move.

Do you have a creative challenge or dilemma for a future episode? Email claire@nowgocreate.co.uk or join our weekly email for free creativity resources and worksheets at nowgocreate.co.uk

About Claire Bridges:

Claire Bridges is Chief Spark and Founder of leading creative training consultancy Now Go Create, whose philosophy is that everyone can be creative.

Claire worked as a PR agency Managing Director and Creative Director working with global brands including Starbucks, Kellogg’s, Unilever, P&G and Danone in her previous PR career. Upskilling individuals, teams and organisations with practical creativity tools is Claire’s mission.

She’s one of only 250 people globally to hold an MSc in Creativity, Leadership & Innovation, and authored an Amazon best-selling creative handbook In Your Creative Element based on her academic studies.

Claire and her hand-picked team of...

What do you do when the creative ideas stop flowing? In this episode of Now Go Create, host Claire Bridges gets real about a topic we don’t talk about enough: the creative slump. She shares her own recent experience, and explores why slumps might happen, how they differ from creative burnout or “block,” and why we shouldn’t panic when the creative tide is out. Introducing her practical “Creative CAT Scan” self-check-in, designed to help listeners get curious about their own moods, take micro-actions, and approach themselves with genuine tenacity and compassion. If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a blank page feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or just plain flat even though creativity is part of your job, this is the episode for you.

Here are the highlights:

1. Why creative slumps are different from burnout or creative block
2. What’s really happening in our brains during a slump and why rest helps
3. Claire’s go-to tactics for an immediate energy boost (walks, smoothies, noodling, and more)
4. The “Creative CAT Scan”, a self-diagnosis exercise for Curiosity, Action, and Tenacity
5. Expert insights: practical suggestions from Claire’s creative network
6. Why self-compassion (not criticism) can help you out of a hole
7. Inspiration from past guests and listeners on resilience under creative pressure

Do you have a creative challenge or dilemma for a future episode? Email claire@nowgocreate.co.uk or join our weekly email for free creativity resources and worksheets at nowgocreate.co.uk

About Claire Bridges:

Claire Bridges is Chief Spark and Founder of leading creative training consultancy Now Go Create, whose philosophy is that everyone can be creative.

Claire worked as a PR agency Managing Director and Creative Director working with global brands including Starbucks, Kellogg’s, Unilever, P&G and Danone in her previous PR career. Upskilling individuals, teams and organisations with practical creativity tools is Claire’s mission.

She’s one of only 250 people globally to hold an MSc in Creativity, Leadership & Innovation, and authored an Amazon best-selling creative handbook In Your Creative Element based on her academic studies.

Claire and her hand-picked team of experts have worked on thousands of creative projects and trained over 40,000 people around the world since starting Now Go Create in 2011.

Connect with Claire:

Website: https://nowgocreate.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nowgocreate/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NowGoCreate

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/claire-bridges-b6205b14

Produced by winteraudio.co.uk