Outcome Columinity Client Day

On July 1st, we hosted the first edition of the "Columinity Client Day", bringing together clients to share experiences, exchange ideas, and connect with one another. With around 30 participants from 18 different organizations, it was also a great opportunity to gather feedback.

In this article, we’ll share the insights we collected during a Shift & Share session, in which we asked everyone to discuss and complete six sentences. If you joined us on the day, consider this a recap of the conversations and key takeaways. If you're exploring Columinity, I hope it offers a glimpse into the experiences and lessons shared by our clients.

Why Columinity?

"A core reason we use Columinity is (or could be)…"

👉 Improve team effectiveness
Organizations use Columinity to understand what helps or hinders their effectiveness, so they can improve together. Instead of guessing what needs attention, they can focus on the factors that matter most.

👉 Enable meaningful conversations
Rather than relying on assumptions or opinions, Columinity helps teams have structured, evidence-informed conversations about what's really happening. This creates a shared understanding of both strengths and opportunities for improvement.

👉 Gain insights from multiple perspectives
By combining feedback from team members, stakeholders, and supporters, organizations build a richer picture than they would from a single viewpoint. This helps uncover blind spots and reveals patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.

👉 Track progress over time
Teams use Columinity not just as a one-off assessment, but as a way to monitor development, evaluate improvements, and support continuous learning. Repeated measurements help them see whether their efforts are actually making a difference.

👉 Strengthen teams across the organization
Beyond individual teams, participants saw Columinity as a way to strengthen collaboration, leadership, innovation, and organizational performance at scale. The greatest potential lies in identifying patterns across teams and using those insights to guide organizational change.

Taken together, these five reasons highlight that Columinity is about much more than measuring teams. It's about creating a shared understanding of what helps teams thrive, using multiple perspectives to guide meaningful conversations, and turning those insights into continuous improvement. That's exactly the purpose we had in mind when we developed it.

Columinity's strengths

"A strength of Columinity for my organization is …"

👉 Scientifically grounded
Participants appreciated that Columinity is built on scientific research rather than opinions or trends. That gives them confidence in both the questions and the insights the platform provides.

👉 Creates meaningful conversations
Rather than generating another report that ends up in a drawer, Columinity helps teams have open, constructive conversations about what really matters. The dialogue is just as valuable as the data.

👉 Makes patterns visible
Columinity helps teams identify strengths, impediments, and recurring patterns that might otherwise remain hidden. This creates a shared understanding of where improvement is needed.

👉 Gives everyone a voice
By collecting input from everyone involved, Columinity ensures that quieter voices are heard alongside the loudest ones. The result is a more balanced and inclusive picture of the team's reality.

👉 Turns insights into action
Participants valued that Columinity doesn't stop at measurement. The insights provide a practical starting point for deciding where to focus improvement efforts next.

What I find most interesting is how these strengths reinforce one another. A scientific foundation builds confidence, multiple perspectives create a richer understanding, and meaningful conversations turn those insights into action. Ultimately, Columinity isn't just about measuring teams; it's about helping people make better sense of their reality so they can improve it together.

Columinity's challenges

"A challenge we had (or have) to overcome in order to use Columinity effectively is …"

👉 Securing management buy-in
One of the biggest challenges is gaining and maintaining support from leadership. Without active sponsorship, it's difficult to create lasting momentum for improvement.

👉 Turning insights into action
Collecting data is only the beginning. The real challenge is translating insights into concrete actions and ensuring teams actually follow through on them.

👉 Keeping the momentum going
Initial enthusiasm is often high, but sustaining engagement over time requires attention. Teams need regular moments to reflect, learn, and revisit their progress.

👉 Demonstrating business value
Organizations want to know whether the investment pays off. Showing how team improvements contribute to organizational outcomes remains an important challenge.

👉 Making it part of the way you work
The greatest impact comes when Columinity becomes part of existing ways of working, rather than an additional activity. Integrating it into regular team and organizational rhythms is key.

Together, these five challenges describe the typical implementation journey. First, you need to create buy-in. Then comes the hard work of acting on the insights, maintaining momentum, demonstrating business value, and eventually making it part of how the organization works.

What struck me most is that almost none of the challenges were about Columinity itself. Instead, they were about implementing change. That probably says something about where the real work begins.

Lessons learned

"Our biggest lesson in using Columinity effectively is …"

👉 Start small and learn as you go
Rather than rolling out Columinity everywhere at once, participants found it more effective to start with a small group, learn from the experience, and expand from there.

👉 Secure sponsorship early
Having an engaged sponsor makes a significant difference. Leadership support helps create momentum, remove obstacles, and keep improvement on the agenda.

👉 Connect it to existing ways of working
Columinity works best when it becomes part of existing team rhythms, such as retrospectives, quarterly reviews, or improvement cycles, rather than being treated as a separate initiative.

👉 Communicate the purpose clearly
Participants learned that people are much more likely to engage when they understand why Columinity is being introduced and what they can expect from it.

👉 Be patient—meaningful change takes time
Teams rarely transform overnight. Lasting improvement comes from regularly measuring, reflecting, experimenting, and learning together.

These lessons describe what experienced users learned along the way. They show that successful implementation isn't just about choosing the right tool, but about introducing it in a way that helps people learn, improve, and sustain change together.

Recommendations for other organizations

"A recommendation I would make to other organizations is…

👉 Start with the "Why"
Before introducing Columinity, make sure everyone understands why you're using it. A clear purpose creates engagement and helps people see the value beyond completing another survey.

👉 Start small, then scale
Don't try to transform the entire organization at once. Begin with a pilot, learn from the experience, refine your approach, and expand with confidence.

👉 Secure an active sponsor
Successful implementations rarely happen without visible leadership support. An engaged sponsor helps remove barriers, maintain momentum, and demonstrate that improvement matters.

👉 Treat it as a way of working, not a tool
Participants repeatedly emphasized that Columinity delivers the most value when it's embedded in existing improvement cycles and team routines, rather than being used as a standalone platform.

👉 Learn and adapt as you go
Every organization is different. Don't aim for the perfect implementation from day one. Experiment, gather feedback, and continuously improve your approach.

Taken together, these recommendations describe a thoughtful implementation strategy. Start with a clear purpose, begin small, secure active sponsorship, integrate Columinity into the way teams already work, and keep learning along the way. None of these recommendations is particularly complicated, but together they greatly increase the chances of long-term success.

New opportunities

"An unexplored potential I see in (how we use) Columinity is..."

👉 Support organization-wide change
Participants saw opportunities to use Columinity not only within teams, but also to guide larger transformation and change initiatives.

👉 Reveal patterns across teams
Rather than looking at teams in isolation, organizations can identify recurring strengths and impediments across departments, domains, or the organization as a whole.

👉 Involve leaders and stakeholders more actively
Several participants saw opportunities to more deeply involve managers, leaders, and stakeholders in the learning process, creating greater alignment between teams and the wider organization.

👉 Expand beyond Agile and IT
While many organizations started with Agile teams, participants believed the approach could create value in leadership teams, business units, and non-IT environments as well.

👉 Connect team insights to organizational outcomes
Perhaps the biggest opportunity lies in linking team health and collaboration to broader organizational goals, helping leaders make more informed decisions about improvement efforts.

Taken together, these opportunities point in one direction: from understanding individual teams to understanding organizations as a whole. That's an exciting perspective, and one we'll continue to explore together with our customers.

Closing

Looking back at all six questions, one thing stood out: participants consistently described Columinity as an enabler of better conversations, better decisions, and continuous improvement.

Across every discussion, the same ideas kept resurfacing: creating a shared understanding of reality, learning from multiple perspectives, and using those insights to continuously improve together. Interestingly, the biggest challenges and lessons learned weren't about the platform itself either. They were about leading change, creating engagement, and embedding improvement into the way organizations work.

For us, that's perhaps the most encouraging outcome of the day. It suggests that Columinity has become what we always hoped it would be: not just a diagnostic platform, but a catalyst for learning, collaboration, and organizational improvement.

Finally, a sincere thank you to everyone who participated in our first Client Day. Your openness, ideas, and willingness to share your experiences made these insights possible, and they'll help shape the future of Columinity. You rock!

Disclaimer on AI usage: This post was written manually by Barry Overeem. Grammarly was used to check for spelling and grammar. AI helped analyze the sticky notes and identify recurring patterns. I then reviewed the results, selected the final top five, and wrote the accompanying explanations. The banner at the top was created by ChatGPT using an original, unmodified picture of Lisanne Lentink.