High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 677: Learn How to Build Deliberate Creative Teams with Dr. Amy Climer, Author and Certified Speaking Professional

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Dr. Amy Climer teaches teams and organizations how to increase their creativity so they can maximize innovation. She works with forward-thinking organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Amy is the author of the best-selling book Deliberate Creative Teams: How to Lead for Innovative Results. She is also host of The Deliberate Creative Podcast, where she shares practical advice and strategies to help leaders build innovative teams. Amy has a Ph.D. in Leadership and Change and is a Certified Speaking Professional. In this episode, Amy shares her powerful “Deliberate Creative Spectrum,” and she unpacks her three-part model explains how psychological safety fuels innovation.  Cindra and Amy discuss: Why creativity is essential for organizational relevance and survival The Deliberate Creative Spectrum: from destructive to scalable teams The three essential elements of creative teams Brainstorming guidelines for creativity: suspend judgment, combine ideas, aim for wild ideas, prioritize quantity Tips for fostering psychological safety and handling conflict in teams The leadership insight: to do something new, leaders must intentionally let something go HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE CONNECT WITH DR. AMY CLIMBER  REQUEST A FREE MENTAL BREAKTHROUGH CALL WITH DR. CINDRA AND/OR HER TEAM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MENTALLY STRONG INSTITUTE Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode.    

Welcome to episode 677 of the High Performance Mindset podcast. This is your host, Dr. Syndra Campoff, and thank you so much for joining me here today. I'm so grateful that you're here. And today I'm excited to share with you an interview I did with Dr. Amy Clymer. I've met Dr. Clymer through the National Speakers Association. We're both certified speaking professionals, and I'm just so excited to share with you this really inspiring and thoughtful episode about how to create creative teams.

Now, Amy teaches teams and organizations how to increase their creativity so they can maximize innovation. And she works with forward-thinking organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. She's also the author of a new best-selling book called Deliberate Creative Teams, How to Lead for Innovative Results. And she's the host of a podcast called the Deliberate Creative Podcast, where she shares practical advice and strategies to

help leaders build innovative teams. Now what leader doesn't want innovative teams? She has a PhD in leadership and change and again is a certified speaking professional. In this episode, Dr. Amy shares her powerful Deliberate Creative spectrum. We unpack her three-part model. We talk about psychological safety and how that fuels innovation. We also describe three elements of creative teams and we provide some brainstorming guidelines for creativity that I really appreciate. One of my favorite quotes from this

episode is where Amy talks about this. She says, to do something new, leaders must intentionally let something go. Enjoy this episode and thank you again for joining me. Let's go ahead and welcome Dr. Amy Clymer. Thank you so much for joining me here today on The High Performance Mindset. I have Dr. Amy Clymer here to talk about creativity and teams. Thank you so much, Amy, for joining us on the high performance mindset. I have Dr. Amy Klymer here to talk about creativity and teams. Thank you so much, Amy, for joining us on the show today. Oh, thank you.

I'm excited to be here. I am excited after reading your book, Deliberate Creative Teams. I'm really excited about just talking with you about it and providing some really good value to everyone listening. So my first big question is, why should people continue to listen to us to talk about being, you know, and creating deliberative creative teams?

Yeah. So I focus a lot on creativity in teams and I use this phrase deliberate creative teams because creativity does not happen by accident. It is, it only happens through intentional work and effort and there's a process that I teach a whole system. And I think creativity and innovation are really important because if you don't strive to be creative or innovative, things around you will change so much that eventually you become stagnant and wither away. And you're no longer relevant, you're no longer able to connect with your clients

or customers or the people that you're working with. And we've seen in even just the recent history of our country and globally, people, organizations who we never would have guessed would have gone out of business, and now they are, because they just got complacent. And this can happen on a small scale, like little businesses, big businesses, colleges, universities, all sorts of organizations. And creativity is often what makes the difference between an organization thriving or withering away, sliding away. Absolutely. Yeah.

And so I'm hearing that it's being creative and innovative is essential for survival and not staying stagnant in terms of as a person but as an organization. What does the research say about the importance of creativity and innovation to the bottom line or to any of the other outcomes that you might have done research on? Yeah, it's critical. I think it's also so deep in our DNA, like that we as humans, it's just part of who we

are. And if you just look, you know, evolutionarily at our human history, but if it wasn't for creativity and innovation, I don't know if we would have gotten much past the wheel. You know, it's like we just constantly are inventing things and creating things. And it's what we do. We can barely help ourselves. And in the clients that I've worked with, just they come to me often with some

pretty big problems and depending on the company. But for instance, I worked for this manufacturing company recently where the problems they had were costing them tens of millions of dollars a year. And so we went through this creative process and we were looking at some solutions for them, or they were coming up with their own solutions, and implementing any of those solutions would have easily saved them, or will save them, because this is just pretty recent, millions of dollars a year, or make them millions of dollars, depending on which angle it is.

So I think what the research says over and over is that when you are creative, you're able to solve problems in a new way, that leads to really strong results. Whatever results might be financial, whatever you're measuring. Yeah perfect you know I was actually had a coaching client this morning who works at a big-time university doing research and innovation. And actually she actually said like, I'm not very creative. And we debunked that a little bit because I was like, you know, when someone says I am not, I try to push back as a coach. And so what would what would you say to people who are thinking, well, I'm just not a creative person. That's

like not in my DNA. Yeah. The first thing I do is I usually ask them what they mean. And a lot of times they say, well, I can't really draw that well. And so right there really helps identify one myth that they have, that creativity is related to your ability to draw, which it is not.

These are two separate skills. If you want to be a good drawer, you it is not. These are two separate skills. If you want to be a good drawer, you can. There's great resources and trainings you can get to become better at it. And creativity is the same thing. It's a skill. It's also a process that we can get better at and develop. And usually when I start asking that same person, have there been a time where you solved

a problem in a new way? And they're like, oh yeah, I do that all the time. Like, oh, okay, that's all the creativity is. And sometimes I actually can just see them physically relax, like their shoulders drop. I'm like, oh, okay, I am creative then. And so I think a lot of it is just a misnomer of what creativity is. I like how you define that, solving a problem in a new way. Yeah, and the definition that I use for creativity is, creativity is novelty that is valuable. Well, you just created something new, unique, different that provides value in some way. It could be financial, it could be emotional, aesthetic, you know, however you're defining value. It could be financial, it could be emotional, aesthetic, however you're defining value.

Could be anything. That's really helpful, I think, for people to really understand exactly what we're talking about. And one of the questions, one of the things I really loved about your book, Deliberate Creative Teams, How to Lead for Innovative Results,

is you talked about your creativity system and your spectrum Actually, I'd love to learn more about your spectrum And if you could just tell people about that spectrum and why that matters go ahead and just share that with us sure Yeah, so what I've noticed over the years and working with a bunch of different clients is that teams fall on a spectrum of being creative together. And let me back up and share that when I started this research study, what I really was curious is why for me personally, I had been on teams that were highly creative and teams that were not.

Like I felt less creative just sitting at the table with them. And I was really curious about this spectrum and I wanted to dig into what made, what was the difference there? Anyway, so I figured that out and we'll get to that in a few minutes. But the spectrum that I saw, I tried to codify these levels. And so if you imagine five levels, kind of like a ladder going from bottom to top, the bottom level is teams that are destructive, meaning they're not necessarily intentionally or maliciously,

but just that they destroy creative ideas, they destroy creative results. And on the graph, when you see it, is this also on video? Yes, yes, you can compare this. So I'm gonna show you a visual for those of this also on video? Yes, yes. Okay, cool. So I'm going to show you a visual for those you watching on video. All right, so here's what the graph looks like. And you'll see on the left side, as you go up the scale, the impact increases. So the destructive teams,

I say that they're negative one X, and X would be whatever's fitting for your organization. So for some organizations, $50,000, that would be a huge change. For others, it would be a half million or 50 million or whatever. So you put in the appropriate X. So a destructive team is causing enough harm that they're costing the organization negative 1X. So we'll just say they're costing the organization $50,000. We move up a level. We've got the stagnant team. The stagnant team is stagnant from a creativity perspective. That doesn't mean they're stagnant as a whole.

There are certainly plenty of teams that don't need to be creative. If you have a team and their job is maintenance, like your job is just to maintain whatever this thing is, the situation, it could be a machine, it could be whatever. We don't need you to be all that creative. And then I feel like even as I'm saying that, I could like argue against myself for that. But anyway, we're going to stagger team and the impact they have on the organization is zero from a creativity perspective. We then move up one level to the sporadic team. And the sporadic team is a positive 1x. So with this example, we'll say $50,000 that they, let's say in the previous

year, were able to do something that implements a change that led to a $50,000 in more revenue. But if you ask them, like, how did you do that and could you replicate it? They wouldn't be able to answer. They had kind of some luck basically. But if you go up one more level, now you have the sustainable team. And this is a 3X impact.

Now the sustainable team is like the sporadic team in that they're producing some results, but they understand exactly what they did. They understand the process, the system they use, they know how to replicate it. And so now we're looking at 50,000 times three, so $150,000 worth of impact. The very top level of this deliberate creative spectrum

is the scalable team. The scalable team is a 5X impact. Not only do they understand creativity for themselves, but they're able to influence throughout the organization. So they're able to teach other teams how to be more creative, they're able to influence leaders, whatever the situation is. So they're able to teach other teams how to be more creative. They're able to influence leaders You know, whatever the situation is they're basically able to scale what they're doing And so that's the top level and in this diagram in the book, which is on page 37, by the way

If anyone has the book the top two levels have a box around them and those are the levels that I consider as deliberate creative teams. And then your goal as a team, if you're trying to be creative, is to get to one of those top two levels. Awesome. Awesome.

I like how it goes from destructive to scalable, and then minus 1x and destructive to 5x scalable. I like that you can quantify it and so our goal right is to to be deliberate and to be intentional with our creativity we want to be more the sustainable and scalable team so as you can imagine my next question is going to be like okay how do we do that? All right, let's get into the good stuff. Yeah. Okay, so I mentioned earlier that I was like comparing these two teams, these two different experiences I've had.

And what I found in the research is that there are three elements that teams need if they want to be creative together. And so here's the visual. This is a Venn diagram. So teams need to have a clear sense of team purpose. They need to have strong team dynamics, and they need to know and use a creative process. Whoops, I did that backwards. And so in the book, I break these down in a lot of depth, but we can get into them now if that would be helpful. Absolutely. I think people want wanna know the how-to,

so I appreciate that. Where do you wanna get started? All right, we'll just sort of start at the top of the Venn diagram, which is team purpose. And I feel like this is actually the easiest, the most direct one, the most straightforward. Basically, what's the purpose of your team? Like, why do they exist?

Why do they meet on a regular basis? What are your goals? And that your team members, everyone needs to know what that purpose is and be aligned with that purpose, committed to that purpose. A very simple way that you can assess this is at your next team meeting, pass out like note cards or even just scrap paper to everybody and ask everyone to just quietly write down what they think the team purpose is.

Don't give any like preface, don't tell them what you think it is as the leader, just have them write it down and then put all those in the middle of the table and sort through and look at are these like, are they different? And if they're alike, great. Thumbs up.

You can move on. If they're different, though, or if they're just not that aligned, then there's a deeper conversation that needs to be had. And this can be a lot more powerful than just the leader saying, hey, everyone, I just want to reiterate what our purpose is, because that doesn't invite conversation. and then you're not sure if they're with you or not or so very simple.

I feel like it's kind of a common coaching type of practice as well. Yeah. And do you think a team should have like a written purpose statement? Would that be helpful? And if so, do you have any thoughts on like how to write that? I don't know if it's that important. I don't... I mean, I think something, but you know,

it's really just for your internal use. This is like say a mission statement might be like on the website of the company and that's the company's mission, not the team's mission. So an important distinction there. If the team feels like it would be helpful, I would say, yeah, go for it. I'm also a little biased because I'm someone that finds crafting those types of statements really tiring. But there's probably somebody on the team that loves that stuff. And so, cool, let them run with it and then come back and have a couple iterations. But yeah, I think whatever is helpful.

Perfect. So that's the first part of the three parts of the creative system. How about let's dive into the team creative process? Okay, so team creative process. This is the one that most teams don't understand. They don't know about it, they don't even know there could be a creative process. And basically what this means is just,

what's the methodology you're using to being creative together? So there's a number of processes out in the world, creative problem solving, design thinking, human centered design, synetics, tris, like there's a dozen or so. They're all good. I haven't found any that didn't make sense yet.

I'm sure maybe they're out there, but the one that I teach my clients that I use the most is called creative problem solving. It's very simple, four stages. It's based on how we as humans naturally solve problems. So most people when they hear it, they're like, yeah, I've done that before. Like, yes, you have, you've done it actually a lot in your life. So those four stages are clarify, like clarify what's the problem with the situation we're trying to do. Ideate, generate lots of ideas, develop, take those best ideas and develop them further,

and then finally implement. So that might, I usually recommend starting small, prototyping, piloting, that kind of thing. And it's a cycle, it's cyclical. So you can do it over and over again. The whole process could take five minutes, or it could take days, weeks, months, years, just depending on the depth of the problem and the situation.

I like that. And I'm thinking about guidelines for teams around IDA. And maybe even like, I'm thinking about teams in a business, but sports teams, even like family teams, when I'm thinking about solving a problem with my family. One of the things I've seen that can happen is, people might shut down what they perceive as bad ideas. Do you have any thoughts on how to start that conversation around ideating and like what could get in the way of people actually sharing their ideas?

Yeah, definitely. What you described happens all the time. And I would say usually when someone is shutting down an idea, very rarely are they doing it out of maliciousness. They usually are doing it from good intentions. And then they have this worry or this fear that that idea is going to get implemented and they think it's a bad one and they're just trying to protect the organization or the family or whatever it is. And there's better approaches. So one thing I suggest is actually having a conversation first about how you're going

to ideate together. And even talking about, so the process of ideating is a type, we're using a type of thinking called divergent thinking, where we're kind of going in all these directions and we're all over the place. And then when we're evaluating the ideas, we move into what's called convergent thinking. And there's some guidelines for divergent thinking that are really helpful here. And you've probably heard of them. They're sometimes called the brainstorming rules. They came out in 1948 from this guy, Alex Osborne, and four rules, very simple. Suspend judgment.

So it is important to judge the ideas, just not yet. So we're just suspending judgment. Combine and build on ideas. it is important to judge the ideas, just not yet. So we're just suspending judgment. Combine and build on ideas. So you share an idea, someone else shares an idea, and then I might say, yes, what if we take both of those and then do this? And you're combining and twisting and making them even better. And then the third is aim for like wacky wild ideas, because sometimes that can lead to really cool things. And then finally, go for quantity. Quantity over quality.

So we're just starting to get as many ideas as we can before worrying about the quality of the ideas. And so if you could have a conversation with the team, like these are our guidelines, we're going to be in a divergent thinking mode for a few minutes, might just be five minutes. And in that mode, follow these four guidelines. Then we'll take all the ideas we've collected and we'll evaluate them.

And that's when we can start getting critical. And if you could just separate those two things out, the divergent and converging, that's gonna make a huge difference. Then I'll add one more layer. After you've done that, don't start with the classic brainstorming. Instead, give everybody, you know,

Post-it notes or a piece of paper or something, and tell everyone to quietly write down ideas, as many ideas as they can. And sometimes I set a timer, three minutes, five minutes, keep it pretty quick. And then after everyone's written the ideas down, then start sharing the ideas. Still in that divergent thinking mode,

but by writing down the ideas first, you prevent people from, like let's say you start off with an idea, and I had an idea that was a completely 180-degree opposite of yours, but I can see that your idea is actually like, okay, this is a pretty good idea. I might then not share mine because I feel like, oh, we should go in this direction that you just started.

Sure. And so it prevents the diversity of ideas that we're really looking for. But if you do it all in writing, you kind of bypass all that. And so it prevents the diversity of ideas that we're really looking for. But if you do it all in writing, you kind of bypass all that. I think it also gives people some time to think. Because people might not, I'm thinking actually about this person

I was just coaching this morning, who again, her perception is she doesn't think on her feet very well. I don't know if that's actually true, but that's her perception of herself, right? So if you're giving everybody three minutes to think, it's like, I have a moment to actually brainstorm myself before bringing that idea forward. I really appreciate that part. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that quiet thinking, it helps both introverts and extroverts. And it's really nice.

Excellent, okay. Hi, this is Syndra Kamboff, and thanks for listening to the High Performance Mindset. Did you know that the ideas we share in the show are things we actually specialize in implementing? If you wanna become mentally stronger, lead your team more effectively and get to your goals quicker. Visit freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call

with one of our certified coaches. Again, that's freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free call. Talk to you soon. So what do we do once we've shared those ideas? Okay, so once you've shared them, you might want to do a few rounds of them. Or there's some other techniques. I talk about some other techniques in the book you can bring in. And then you want to evaluate the ideas and decide, okay, we've got 20 ideas here. We obviously aren't going to do all of these. Which ones feel like the best ideas? And there's a

number of ways you can do that. Sometimes it's helpful just to give everybody three little sticker dots and tell everyone, vote for your top three ideas. Like before we even get into talking about it, just put a dot on one of your favorites. And then it's just a way to see what rises to the top. I don't like to use this as like, well, this one has four dots and this has three,

so we're gonna go with the four. No, this is not a true democratic process. This is just to see what's getting elevated. And then say there's like four ideas that have dots on them. Okay, let's just talk about these four and forget the other ones for right now. And then you can actually take all of those into that develop stage. And there's a process that I teach in the book that is a way to kind of evaluate each of those ideas or to build them out a little further to see, well, if we did implement this idea, what might happen? And that can be really helpful to look excellent. Yeah, that's wonderful. I'm thinking about all the different ways that people can use your system of what we've talked about so far, right? And I'm thinking about maybe there's a part in your business that you're really struggling

with or there's an issue in your family that you need some creativity around. How have you seen people implement your process since you've published the book? Well, the book came out about six weeks ago. So it's really new. I've been using this process. I developed it in 2016, but the creative problem solving process,

which is part of that creative team creative process, that has been around for decades longer than I've been alive. So I've been using that for probably since 2012 or so. And yeah, I've seen so many ways actually, you know, you've mentioned family a couple of times. I know that's not the primary focus here, but I will share a story of a family that use this process that I had. Perfect. Awesome. And they were making a decision about if they should move across the country.

And they didn't want to move, but they felt like they needed to in order to support one of their sets of parents. Okay. And what had happened is that they kind of got stuck on the option of do we move or not? So there was just really one choice they were looking at of, you know, do we take this one idea of moving or not moving? And so I sat down with them and we did this whole process and we generated some more ideas and they realized, well, there were some other options. Like, I think what they did end up deciding to do was the husband, he went out there once a week for our,

once, one week a month for a number of months or maybe years just to like help out his parents and do what was needed without actually having to move there completely. And he was able to talk to his employer and his employer was amazing. It was like, yeah, absolutely, let's figure this out. And they ended up with this really great win-win situation that they would never have come up with if they had a process.

Very cool. Yeah, it was pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, that's very cool. That has to make you feel like proud too, you know, that something that you developed can really change people's lives and make their lives even better. Yeah, it was exciting.

Yeah, I felt really good about that. Okay, so we've been talking about the three parts of the creative system. We've talked about team purpose so far. The steps you're talking about is during the team creative process. What about team dynamics, the third part? We I don't think we've got to that yet. Yeah team dynamics is I think it's the the circle that most people get but it's

probably the most complex to implement. It's the hardest. So team dynamics specifically is those behaviors and interactions we have with each other. And the three that seem to have the biggest impact on creativity are trust or psychological safety. Yep. Communication. That one's probably pretty obvious. Like we need to be able to communicate well. And then the third is conflict and that we need to be able to engage in a

positive type of conflict called creative abrasion. But they were not in either too much conflict or too little conflict, but we need to have some, some that's healthy. So those three tend to make the biggest impact, trust, communication and conflict or creative abrasion. I've read a lot about psychological safety. just because it's part of my work in sports a lot and obviously read David Horsocker's work on trust and all the books that he has there. I think Amy Edmondson was the person who coined the term psychological safety, if I'm correct

on that. What do you think that we can, what are the things that we must do to create psychological safety and trust within teams? I think one of the biggest things is you want to create an environment where people feel comfortable being themselves, being their best self. I'm not saying people get to show up and be a jerk, but that they can show up and be their best selves, but specifically they can throw an idea out on the table and they're not gonna get smacked out. Now, it doesn't mean the idea is gonna be accepted.

I mean, maybe the idea is not a good fit and that's fine, but that they're not going to be personally attacked for that idea. And we see this all the time in ideation sessions. I mean, I know you've experienced this, I certainly have, where the team starts it on their ideation sessions. I mean, I know you've experienced this. I certainly have where, you know, the team starts it on their ideation and about the third idea, someone says, oh no, no, we can't do that. We tried that 15 years ago and it was exactly faster. Right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, just chill out. Right? And then it shuts down

the conversation there, at least it can. Exactly, yeah. I mean, once in a while there's a really resilient team that can like work through that, which is awesome. But you know if that person, if you've introduced the divergent thinking guidelines and that person knows like, oh I'm gonna get to evaluate the ideas soon, just I can hang back, they're gonna relax a little bit and be able to you know be part of the divergent process, be part of the divergent process and be part of the ideating. And then that person who threw out the idea isn't going to get shot down. And so I think there's such a tight connection between process and dynamics.

And so if you are having, if you have a team where these dynamics are showing up, where people are shooting down each other's ideas, I would suggest what process can you change that would even eliminate that from happening? So using Post-it notes or starting with writing, that kind of thing, that's an example of a process or a technique. And sometimes even just that little change can help increase trust and increase psychological safety in a team. I appreciate that. And then the other thing that I think can get in the way of creativity, which you just said, was conflict. And again, another coaching session I had today, I helped coach some family members who run a business,

and they had a lot of conflict because they're growing their business. And one of the family members under stress that completely shuts down. In my work, we would call it level one energy that they just become really self-focused and they kind of freeze, that bite or freeze kind of idea. The other family member kind of tends to fight,

you know, level two energy is what I would describe. What can we do to work through and just maybe even create healthy conflict? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, it's so interesting too, because I'm just thinking about like the systems within families and how, you know, so often I feel like with families,

you revert back to this behavior you had when you were like 12 or 15. And so- Exactly. Yeah, when you're working with a family, you have to get past that and work through that behavior in a way you might not have to do with non-family members, which-

So true. Yeah, it just creates a whole other challenge. Can be really positive though. Sorry, I got distracted. What was the question? Oh, I was just asking about conflict. And I don't know, is there a healthy conflict? I'm assuming there is, but just what guidelines

you might give to people who go through that conflict process during the creative session or the times where they need to really be creative. Yeah, I think there's a couple layers to this. I am a big fan of first off, do what you can to pay attention to yourself. And notice, yeah, like if someone says something

and you're being triggered, like a quick pause of were they actually being a jerk or does this have something, nothing to do with them and this is just some baggage that I'm bringing in? And you know, if it's some baggage you're bringing in, maybe you can in the moment sort of set that aside and take them at face value that they're not trying to, you know, bring in something else. Like I said before, that can be harder with family.

At the same time, you're paying attention to yourself, and at the same time, you're also paying attention to how your behavior might be impacting other people. That's hard. I mean, that takes a lot of intelligence. So hard. Does it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's what I've seen is one of the critical factors of a really good leader is that they're able to do both, monitor their own behavior and monitor the team's behavior and make adjustments accordingly. And sometimes what I'll do if I'm both as a part of a team or if I'm facilitating and I notice there's one or two people maybe that haven't spoken up as much, I might sort of gently invite them into the conversation. You know, hey, Mary, you haven't said much lately. What are your thoughts or what are you thinking right now? Or I noticed the look on your face. Do you have something you want to add? You know, just something like that, that I think all of us can do that as team members, especially, well, I don't know if I should say especially, but those

of us who might be more talkative and it's easy for us to jump in to change it up. Don't always be the first person to respond. Make sure that at least every other time, you're not the first person, that you're the last person perhaps. Or, and then I think on the flip side, if you are someone that doesn't, that does tend to hold back, are there moments where you would be able to jump in? Or might you like throw into the group like,

hey, could we just like, before we all share, maybe just take like one minute to collect our thoughts? And so you're building in this silence that can really shift the energy, which can be cool. But I think those are just some little things to think about when conflict, which, it's interesting too, I think, even the definition of what are we calling conflict.

It doesn't need to be like these big bash and like this big disagreement in this argument. It could just be you share something and I say, huh, I'm curious how you see that might work. Or I'm having a hard time seeing how we could do that. Can you say more? Yeah. And so I'm bringing in not even a disagreement, but just kind of an alternative perspective. And I'm inviting more conversation. And so I think sometimes like the questions and just our ability to kind of ebb and flow a little

bit in the conversation can be really powerful. Those about. And those ways that you just said that, you know, Mary, I'm curious what you're thinking or I'm having a hard time visualizing how that might happen, say more. Like those are also those statements are really inclusive and it's allowing people to add instead of, you know, judging what they said is good or bad. Yeah. Yeah. Amy, I'm curious if you could share with us a way that you've used your own system, maybe how you've applied creativity to your own business. Because I could imagine you, because you're an expert at it, you use it frequently.

Yes, I try to at least. Gosh, there's so many cases. Just, okay, I'm gonna think about creative process for a moment. And so I have this product, I think you've seen it, called Clamour Cards. Yes. Okay. I've seen it, yeah, at a National Speakers Association event. I remember seeing them on tables. They're very cool.

Yeah. So for people who don't know them, it's just this is the deck of cards that are designed for just different ways to deepen conversations. And so the in there's I have two decks, but this first deck was created in 2012. And they're just like all of these little drawings, these little watercolor paintings that I did with very iconic, simple images like there's a butterfly, a fishing pole, a tent, a boot, et cetera. And the way you use them is you would spread them out on the table and then ask a question of the group.

So actually, since we're talking about conflict, we could just talk about that. Like, pick a card that represents your definition of conflict. And then everyone picks a card and talks about it. And that is a really interesting conversation. Oh, I bet. Yeah. But I've used the creative problem solving process to develop these cards. And then I used them again in 2023. I produced a second deck. I mean, it had been like 11 years and I haven't people kept asking me for another deck. It's like, okay, okay. So I finally made a new deck and really thought through clarifying like, okay, what is this deck? How is it going to be different? What is it going to do that this first deck isn't doing or can't do or how do I add it? I want to repeat the same thing. And so had conversations with people

about what was missing or what did they need. And some of the feedback on the first deck is that the images were like too happy and positive, which I guess is just maybe a little bit of my nature. And so the next deck, I tried to bring in like some darker images with like more range of emotions and so, you know, was taking these ideas that I was getting and implementing them and then just went through the whole process of developing, you know, just from the painting of the images to scanning them in to, you know, uploading them, sending them to the manufacturer, all the things that are part of that develop slash implement

stage. So yeah, I've used that. That's one example. Outstanding. Yeah, so they're all your artwork. Yeah. That's very cool. That's awesome.

And I saw that on your website, you can actually get a download on how to use the Climber Cards. And like, so tell us a bit more about where we can go and get that because I thought that was a really great resource for people who are leading teams and maybe want to use the cards to be able to do that. Yeah. So you can get Climber Cards at climbercards.com andimber, my last name, which is spelled C-L-I-M-E-R.

And if you just go there, scroll to the bottom of the page, there is a free activity guide that you can download that gives you a bunch of activities to use with teams. And I talk about the Climber Cards activities in the book, Deliberate Creative Teams, because there's a lot of ways you can use them to generate new ideas, to help teams connect at a deeper level, to build those team dynamics. And then on that same website, climbercards.com, of course you can order a deck.

So yeah, definitely check it out. Or both decks. Yes. Although at the time of this recording, deck two is out of stock, so. Okay. We're working on that. All right, hopefully by the time it goes live, you Two is out of stock, so we're working on that. All right, hopefully by the time it goes live, you'll be able to get both of those stocks.

Yeah. Amy, what do you think has been one of the biggest lessons you've learned, either personally writing the book about creative teams or maybe even just working with creative teams? One of the things that I've been thinking about this a lot lately is teams, when they're trying to do something creative, something new, it means it is something new.

They're adding to their plate, basically. And in order to do that well, they've got to let something go. And a lot of times I talk with teams and they're like, Amy, I really want to do this. I want to be more creative, but I don't know the bandwidth for it. And I'm feeling that now as I just personally, as I finished writing the book and now I'm promoting the book and it's a lot. And I'm thinking about, oh, I need to let some things go. What do I have that I can let go?

And so I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that leaders and organizations make is they don't think about letting go of anything. And my guess is you could do an audit and you can look and see, wow, this one thing that we spend 10 hours a week on brings in 1% of our revenue or some very small percentage or it's actually having no impact anymore or let's let that go or let's figure out how to automate that or to spend an hour a week on it rather than 10 hours a week on it. I think if we can do that, just that little,

well, I shouldn't say little, that could actually be a very big shift. But if we can make that shift, it will free all of us up to be more creative than anything else. I love it. I love it. So this is Dr. Amy Clymer, Deliberate Creative Teams. You can go get her book, How to Lead for Innovative Results. So Dr. Amy, where's the best place we can go get your book and just learn more about your work and your keynote speaking and your coaching? And obviously you told us about theclimercards.com, but where else can we go find your book and all the other

resources you have? Yeah, you can go to my website which is climberconsulting.com and again climber is C-L-I-M-E-R and I'm also on LinkedIn. You can find the book Deliberate Creative Teams anywhere books are sold to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, bookshop.org. Yeah, I'd love, yeah, reach out if there's anything I can do to support you in your work. Excellent, well, I thought, Amy,

the most helpful things about our conversation today was like the deliberate creative spectrum, and how you talked about how that went from destructive to scalable, and really helping us think about how can we be sustainable and scalable as a team. I also appreciated the three parts of the Deliberate Creative System, the team purpose, team creative process, and team dynamics, and even the way that you kind of the four parts of the creative problem solving. Clarify, ideate, develop, and implement. Just like give us really tangible things

that we can start doing. And when we're ideating, you know, how can we brainstorm and also suspend judgment so that everybody's ideas are shared. I love the idea of like writing on a note card or taking three to five minutes to write it on a little sticky note so people can get really brainstorm.

So I just wanna say thank you so much for being on the high performance mindset and delivering such great value today. What final advice might you have for people who want to be more creative or want to lead their teams in a more creative way? Cool. Thank you so much. I love that little summary they provide. That's really cool.

The closing advice I have is be deliberate to be creative. That has become my mantra because creativity will not happen by accident. Awesome. Mic drop. All right. Thank you, Dr. Amy. I appreciate you.

Thank you. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe. And you can head over to Dr. Syndra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers where you get access to videos about mindset each week.

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