Christiaan Verwijs - Columinity Blog

Christiaan Verwijs

Organizational psychologist (M.Sc) at the Lucid Institute of Organisational Research, developer & co-founder of Columinity.

How A Team-Level Agile Mindset Shapes Team Effectiveness

How A Team-Level Agile Mindset Shapes Team Effectiveness

What makes Agile Teams effective? Is it the presence of roles like Scrum Masters and Product Owners? Is it the use of concepts such as Product Backlogs or Sprints? Or it something deeper, less tangible? In this post, we share preliminary findings from an ongoing research project into Agile Mindset

Why You Shouldn't "Measure All The Things"

Why You Shouldn't "Measure All The Things"

With Columinity, you can measure over 50 different factors in and around teams across 3 scientific models, ranging from team conflict to social cohesion and from release frequency to value focus. That provides a ton of potential insights, and it is only natural that it leads some users to wonder,

How To Practice Action Research With Columinity

How To Practice Action Research With Columinity

Columinity is based on a philosophy called Action Research. Its guiding principles have informed the design and implementation of most of our features. Action Research is a systematic approach to problem-solving that involves scientists and practitioners collaborating to collect and analyze data, identify improvements, and implement them iteratively. Initially coined

Does Columinity Work For My Type Of Team?

Does Columinity Work For My Type Of Team?

Can teams that don't develop software use Columinity? YES! Can Columinity be used by teams that don't use Agile or Scrum? YES! Can Columinity be used for teams where people don't always work together? YES! In this post, we explain how to leverage the

How Task Cohesion Is A Pillar of Teamwork

How Task Cohesion Is A Pillar of Teamwork

When is a team really a team? When is it just a bunch of people working on their own stuff in the same physical proximity? As an organizational psychologist, I’ve always been fascinated by such questions. We are on a mission to unleash teams through an evidence-based approach. In

How to Prevent Team Burnout

How to Prevent Team Burnout

In a previous post, we discussed how high-performing teams can burn out. Team burnout is a recognized concept in the scientific literature on teams. While it shares similarities with individual burnout—people are exhausted and can no longer function correctly—it also contains a substantial subjective component of how stressful

When Do High-Performing Teams Burn Out?

When Do High-Performing Teams Burn Out?

“Can a high-performing team burn out?” recently appeared in a community meetup. It's an intriguing question because it starts from a favorable situation. If you’ve ever been part of a high-performing team, you know how exhilarating it can be. But paradoxically, it's also a place

Increase Team Autonomy With Delegation Poker

teamwork quality

Increase Team Autonomy With Delegation Poker

The modern-day workplace requires teams to have extensive autonomy to remain nimble and agile in light of complex challenges and rapid changes. Organizational scientists have long recognized the need for high autonomy (Donmez & Gudela, 2013; Tripp & Armstrong, 2018). While this sounds great in theory, it isn't

"Ugh, not another survey"

"Ugh, not another survey"

When we ask teams to participate in the Columinity, we sometimes hear, “Ugh, another survey”. We fully support this sentiment if you consider how surveys are usually organized. As a participant, you don’t get feedback after you’re done. Nothing happens with the results, and your answers are clearly

5 Creative Ways For Product Teams To Collaborate With Stakeholders

5 Creative Ways For Product Teams To Collaborate With Stakeholders

Stakeholder satisfaction is an integral part of Columinity. But many teams also struggle with this. Who is the stakeholder? How should they be involved? How can they be involved? In this post, we offer 5 practical strategies to improve stakeholder collaboration and satisfaction. Who is a "Stakeholder"? Your

How Social Cohesion Shapes Teamwork

How Social Cohesion Shapes Teamwork

Do you remember the best team you’ve been part of? Can you name the factors that made this team so successful? Chances are, your list will include things like “There was a sense of pride in what we did,” “We really felt like a team,” and “We had each

Why Good Goals Create Great Teams

Why Good Goals Create Great Teams

This post briefly overviews research on (team) goal commitment. We then offer three concrete actions you can take with your teams to improve goal commitment.

"Who is part of this team?", and why teams need to be in control

"Who is part of this team?", and why teams need to be in control

Who decides who is part of a team? Is this decision primarily up to the members themselves? Or does management decide everything? Or is it somewhere in between? This type of autonomy is called team composition autonomy. Many organizations are still figuring out how to provide it, given the increasing

How Does Working From Home Influence Teamwork?

How Does Working From Home Influence Teamwork?

Is working from home a good idea? When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, almost everyone suddenly had to work from home. But since then, many organizations have reverted back to requiring employees to be in the office. A common concern is that working from home harms teamwork and reduces the performance

Is Your Team Actually A Team?

Is Your Team Actually A Team?

"Teams don't work" is the pragmatic conclusion of Richard Hackman, one of the founders of modern-day team research. Based on his research, Hackman concludes that teams generally perform worse than groups of individuals. This conclusion is surprising, given that most modern-day organizations rely on teams and