Creativity: best done alone?
Common knowledge these days seems to be that creativity is best achieved in groups. We organize brainstorms, workshops and week long design sprints. But is this the most effective way to create creative solutions?
Now and Then
A sporadically updated blog of thoughts and opinions
9 Articles about team
Introverts and extroverts: meeting each other in conflict
Introverts and extroverts in conflict, a flammable recipe. Are you considering how introverted or extroverted people are when you are trying to resolve a conflict? Those two ends of the spectrum have very different needs, especially in a conflict.
Nice team? Overrated!
How often as a coach do you see a team that looks like all is well from the outside, but you know could be doing so much better? And how many times do the team members not recognise this? How many times does their manager think: “They’re okay, don’t rock the boat.”? And maybe they are right. What is wrong with getting along nicely and getting some work done? More than you might think.
Measuring Psychological Safety
A while ago I wrote a post about psychological safety. My fellow Scrum Master Aernout van den Burg was inspired by it and came up with the idea of creating a way of measuring it in a Scrum team. We put our heads together and each started experimenting. In this post I will explain how I measured psychological safety in one of the teams I helped.
Scrum Teams are like Special Forces
A while ago I held a talk at the Dutch Railways (NS) in which I compared Scrum Teams to Special Forces. Scrum Teams share a lot of the characteristics of Navy SEALs teams or Delta Force teams. They are small, self-organising teams, with a clear mission and guiding values. I think people in Scrum Teams - and their leaders! - can learn from the way these specialised military teams operate and are led.
Tuckman Game explained
Agile tools that help you with visualising your work, with capturing your users‘ needs and with your retrospective are great. Just not an excuse to not have to think anymore.
Psychological Safe Teams
People are no machines. You can not just swap one person in a team with a comparable person and expect the same result. And what is a comparable person anyway? So, how do you replace someone in a team, or compose a new team for that matter?
How Scrum motivates people
In a lot of my Scrum trainings I show this great looking video of a talk by Daniel Pink, the author of Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates people. Pink explains there are three intrinsic drivers for motivation: autonomy, mastery and purpose. I think the roles in Scrum all nicely help in stimulating these drivers.
From sheep to wolves
What to do when a team keeps searching for more information and doesn‘t dare to make a decision based on imperfect information.
© 2025 Martijn van AsseldonkBuilt with Next.js, Chakra-ui, TypeScript and lots of ☕️