Deliberate Creative Teams: How to Lead for Innovative Results

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 her PhD dissertation The Development of the Creative Synergy Scale. Her model for team creative synergy to be a powerful anchor to many of our team innovation workshops.

So, you can imagine our delight when she condensed her theory, wisdom and many years of experience into her new book Deliberate Creative Teams. We even got into the pre-launch party group. Thanks, Dr Amy!

Fan-girling aside, this is a book we highly recommend.

This isn’t just another “be more creative” guide. Climer’s book contains something rarer, a clear-eyed, field-tested system for building the kind of teams that consistently produce fresh, effective ideas.

And as we turned the pages, I kept thinking: All our clients need to read this!

Why this book matters now

Creativity has left the realm of “nice-to-have.”

Strategy decks, product roadmaps, even team meetings all hinge on whether people can generate and integrate fresh ideas at speed. Climer argues (persuasively) that accidental creativity is too slow for today’s pace. We've been seeing this in our clients' organisations and in the latest research as well. Deloitte surveyed 14,000 business and human resources leaders across many industries and sectors in 95 countries. 82% of CFOs said their teams must “innovate at pace” to stay relevant, but only 30% felt equipped to do so.

The Creative Synergy Model

Dr Amy Climer's antidote is a Deliberate Creative Team System built on three interconnected gears:

1. Team Purpose:  a shared, living answer to “Why do we exist  together?” plus commitment to that purpose.
2. Team Dynamics: the psychological safety that enables people to share an idea that's a bit 'out there' plus the willingness to sharpen each other's ideas (healthy friction.) 
3. Team Creative Process:  an actual method for solving problems together, more than just "let's do this"; we have found that very few teams have a deliberate creative process and most teams converge too quickly on a way forward and often skip over certain parts of the process to get it done faster or because they're not creatively engaged enough.

Treat these elements like a three-legged stool: if one is too short or a bit wonky, you’re not on a steady seat and may even fall off. 

What you'll find in the book

• A refreshingly readable tour of the neuroscience and social science behind team creativity (no PhD necessary.)
• Lively case stories (these are pure gold; it’s so helpful and encouraging to have real life scenarios.)
• Dozens of workshop-ready exercises, from “Purpose Sprints” and “Conflict Mapping” to Climer’s own visual-thinking deck, the Climer Cards.
• Practical scaffolding for leaders: checklists, facilitation tips, and built-in reflection questions.

What I loved (and you might too)

• Coach-like tone. Climer writes the way a good facilitator speaks: straight-forward, encouraging, and occasionally cheeky. (“The question isn’t ‘Are we creative?’ but ‘How deliberately are we practicing creativity?’”)
• Evidence with empathy. Each tool is backed by research and tempered with stories of real humans wrestling with conflicting calendars and egos. Lots of great case studies to refer to.
• Helpful tools. There are so many practical tools and exercises to apply straightaway, in tiny teams or large corporates. 

Who should read it?

• Leaders who want to champion the shift to a more creative culture.
• Managers who need fresh thinking, renewed energy and more innovation coming out of their teams.
• Scrum-masters and project managers who suspect “retrospective” could mean more than swapping Post-its.
• Any individual contributor yearning to break out of a rut.
• HR and L&D professionals designing creativity curricula.

The bottom line

Deliberate Creative Teams earns a permanent spot in the Creativity Wake-Up bookshelf. It’s a practical, research-rooted toolkit that proves creativity isn’t reserved for lone geniuses or late-night epiphanies. Creativity is a team sport that can be trained, measured, and, yes, celebrated.

We recommend you pour yourself a cuppa, crack open Climer’s book (or pop on the audio version), and, as she implores us, be deliberate to be creative.

(P.S. When you try one of the exercises, let us know how it lands, our inbox loves a good success story, and we’re always collecting fresh tales for the next newsletter!)

At Creativity Wake-Up, we help you rewire your thinking for work and for life. Let’s get creative about solving the real problems together.

📚 Get in touch to discuss training for your team: [email protected]
🎧 Listen to the Deliberate Creative podcast with Dr Amy Climer
💌 Share this with a friend, colleague, or parent who needs it today

* Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2024/organizations-must-focus-on-human-creativity-in-the-age-of-ai.html