Closing The Science-Practice Gap With Columinity

What makes a team effective? How does the mindset of a team shape its effectiveness? Out of the hundreds of factors that influence team effectiveness, which are most important to invest in?

If you work with teams as a coach, HR professional or as a team member, you likely have answers to these questions. The same goes for academic researchers who study teams scientifically. Both groups can clearly benefit from each other, but this is not as common as one might hope. On the one hand, relevant scientific insights don't always reach professionals, or they do in a language or form not useful to them. On the other hand, emerging challenges for professionals do not always reach academics in a timely fashion.

We founded Columinity with the ambition to bridge these gaps to the betterment of both scientific research and professional practice. It is a living research project where academics and professionals collaborate on relevant challenges. In this post, Anna Rook and Bente Schreiter share a concrete example of this. They recently visited the academic XP2026 Conference in Brazil to present a scientific paper on the Agile Mindset based on data from Columinity (Rook, Schreiter & Verwijs, 2026). It nicely illustrates how Columinity bridges the gaps between professionals and academics. It also presents a nice personal story of the ups and downs of the scientific process.

Three gaps between science and practice

We firmly believe that scientific insights can help practitioners make better decisions, while at the same time informing scientists of what is practically important. In the paper we presented at the XP2026 conference, we observe three recurring challenges and how Columinity attempts to address them: 

The Time Gap

Research takes time. Collecting data, validating models, publishing findings. All of this is necessary, but organizations often cannot wait years for insights. But teams make decisions every day:

• How do we improve collaboration?
• Why are we struggling with alignment?
• What makes a team effective? 

In practice, people often rely on intuition or personal experience because scientific findings arrive too late or are difficult to apply immediately. Columinity tries to shorten this cycle dramatically. Teams receive immediate feedback on their data, can reflect on patterns in real time, and continuously iterate on their ways of working. Research comes alive instead of remaining static.

The Transfer Gap

Even when relevant research exists, it often stays inside academic papers, conferences, or frameworks that are difficult to translate into daily work. Many scientific insights are incredibly valuable, but practitioners rarely have the time to decode academic language or transform theoretical constructs into actionable team conversations. That is why Columinity focuses heavily on translating these insights to practice:

• actionable recommendations,
• team-level insights,
• and iterative learning cycles.

The Theory Gap

In many organizations, theories and models remain disconnected from everyday reality. They are often discussed conceptually but rarely tested continuously in real working environments. At Columinity, teams work with shared, theory-driven research models that help them evaluate their current collaboration and effectiveness. At the same time, those models are continuously refined through the data teams generate while using them. This creates an ongoing feedback loop between theory and practice. What makes this especially valuable is the flexibility of the approach. Teams do not always need to reassess everything at once. Depending on the interventions they are currently working on, they can focus on selected dimensions while still remaining grounded in the broader research model.

A personal story

When we first started working on our paper, we did not fully realize where the journey would lead us. What began as an idea quickly developed into weeks of intensive writing, discussions, revisions, and learning. As master's students in Business Psychology and Industrial Engineering, writing and submitting a scientific paper for an international conference was both exciting and intimidating at the same time.

There were many moments of uncertainty throughout the process. Scientific writing can feel overwhelming, especially when you continuously receive feedback and revise entire sections again and again. At times, it genuinely felt like an emotional roller coaster.

Then came the email: “Your submission has been accepted.”

We still remember that moment clearly. Suddenly, what had started as a research idea turned into the opportunity to travel to Brazil and present our work internationally at XP2026! At the conference, we met researchers, agile coaches, consultants, and practitioners from many different countries. What stood out to us immediately was how open the conversations were. People were genuinely interested in discussing how research could become more relevant and actionable for teams.

There were many moments of uncertainty throughout the process. Scientific writing can feel overwhelming, [...]. At times, it genuinely felt like an emotional roller coaster. Then came the email: “Your submission has been accepted.”

Our paper explored how an agile mindset at the team level relates to team effectiveness. Building on previous research, we examined four dimensions of the agile mindset:

• Learning spirit
• Collaborative exchange
• Customer co-creation
• Empowered self-guidance

Our preliminary findings showed a strong positive relationship between the agile mindset of teams and team effectiveness. Teams with a stronger agile mindset reported higher levels of team morale, team performance, and stakeholder satisfaction.

But what made this project particularly meaningful to us was the way the research was connected to practice through Columinity: Instead of treating teams as passive research subjects, the platform enables them to actively participate in the process. Teams receive direct feedback based on their data, reflect on their results together, test improvements, and continuously evaluate their progress through iterative cycles. For us, this changed the role of research: Research stopped feeling like something distant and abstract. Instead, it became something collaborative, dynamic, and directly connected to real organizational challenges.

Key takeaways

Our first lesson on a personal level was realizing how much can happen when you just give something a try (even if it feels a little overwhelming at first). What started as a spontaneous idea eventually led us to presenting our research in Brazil only a few months later. At the same time, this experience also showed us how important the right support is. Honest feedback, encouragement, and working together with experienced people helped us grow throughout the entire process, especially during phases where things became challenging or frustrating. Looking back, we are really glad that we stepped outside of our comfort zone and kept going even when the process felt difficult. Sometimes, combining curiosity, persistence, and the right support can lead to opportunities you never expected.

The second personal lesson we take away from this experience is how valuable it is to stay close to practitioners and real organizational challenges. What impressed us most was seeing how much richer and more relevant research becomes when it is connected to the people who experience these situations every day. Through the exchange with practitioners, teams, and experts, research is grounded in honest realities instead of purely theoretical assumptions. It also changes the meaning behind the work itself. When research creates visible value for people, by helping teams reflect, improve collaboration, or better understand their challenges, the investment into research feels much more worthwhile. There is a very different sense of purpose when you can see the practical impact directly. For us, this reflects an important idea behind the agile mindset itself: staying close to the “customer,” continuously learning through feedback, and creating value together instead of working in isolation. That is something we definitely want to carry into our future work.

Another important takeaway from our experience was that our preliminary findings strongly support the relevance of the agile mindset at the team level. First, our results support the idea that the agile mindset can be described through four dimensions at the team level: learning spirit, collaborative exchange, customer co-creation, and empowered self-guidance. This suggests that the agile mindset is not just an individual characteristic, but something that can meaningfully exist and develop within teams as a whole. Second, we found a strong positive relationship between the agile mindset of teams and team effectiveness. Teams with a stronger agile mindset also showed higher levels of team performance, team morale, and stakeholder satisfaction. This reinforced the idea that mindset is not only a cultural “nice to have,” but potentially an important factor for how teams perform and collaborate in practice. At the same time, our work is still ongoing. One of the next research steps will be to better understand which conditions help teams develop an agile mindset. In particular, future research will focus on factors such as leadership and work design. We are especially interested in questions like how leaders can create environments that support learning, autonomy, and collaboration, and how team structures and ways of working may strengthen or limit the development of an agile mindset.

Closing Words

In this post, Anna Rook and Bente Schreiter shared how Columinity addresses three gaps between science and practice. They presented a paper at the academic XP2026 conference to share findings on the Agile Mindset model. This post also chronicles their personal journey into the scientific process and professional practice, along with its ups and downs. In short, it illustrates how we try to close the science-practice gap with Columinity, which is to the benefit of both the academic world and to practitioners globally.

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