Thomas
van Zuijlen

Facilitator of
collaborative
experiences

My name is Thomas and I design effective workshops, host delightful conferences and run creative hackathons for companies & organisations that want to level up.

I'm an energetic MC & facilitator, and as a professional Scrum Master with nearly a decade of experience in facilitating creative collaboration, I am an expert in iteratively bringing about valuable change with teams.

Call me directly on +31621811497.
Drop me a line via thomas@vanzuijlen.com.
And/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

  • Ericsson
  • NOS
  • ThiemeMeulenhoff
  • WeTransfer
  • VPRO
  • Leaseweb
  • Royal Schiphol Group
  • Achmea
  • DIJ Digital
  • Hyarchis
  • Vliegtickets.nl
  • Dé VakantieDiscounter
  • Vodafone Ziggo
  • HIPER Consultancy
  • FindHotel
  • rb2
  • MessageBird
  • Make IT Work

Hosting & MC'ing

I enjoy MC'ing and building hype to create inclusive, enjoyable experiences - online and on-site.

I wasn't just the event host, I was The White Rabbit 🐰 for Alice in Waterland, an all-encompassing epic experience for public water management professionals. Held in BlueCity, the former Tropicana, in Rotterdam in November 2024.

Here's a sample of me bringing my enthusiasm to Agile Day Kaunas, a 120-people Open Space-fueled conference in Lithuania:

Here's the (Dutch-language) aftermovie of The Big Water Hack: Beyond the Horizon, a 60-people social hackathon on the future of water management that I presented and helped design in January 2024:

Here I'm interviewed by Ant Agile Sofos about my work as a C-level Scrum Master and in particular, my work as the host of Agile Day Kaunas 2023:


Medium
The Backlog

My weekly newsletter

Do you work in an agile environment? Do you want to get more out of your cooperation with your team?

Subscribe to my newsletter, 📬 The Backlog, and read along with my encounters in the world of Scrum, agility, facilitation, and development.

I send out a fresh edition every Monday with annotated links to three articles that I've found valuable.

Join in:

People in a video call joining hands for the camera Sharing a connection on Zoom 👩‍💻🙏👩‍💻🙏👩‍💻

Facilitating change

I am an experienced facilitator for workshops, meetings and sessions - both online and in person. I combine goal-based learning design and an understanding of group dynamics to create a flexible space for participants to safely engage with one another. I have an active, confident stance.

I've facilitated roundtables, fishbowls, offsites, trainings, retrospectives, strategy sessions and webinars. Group sizes for my facilitation work have been as widely diverse as ranging from 3 to 123 people.

Workshops

  1. 🥪 The Scrum PB&J is a highly interactive clinic in which Product Owners and Scrum Masters refresh their Scrum knowledge and increase their collaborative gains.
  2. 🙋‍♂️ Distributed Workinar is an engaging online workshop about having engaging online workshops and meetings - it'll help you and your company get more out of working apart together.

Agile Camp NL

Together with Karlijn Moll, I organised ⛺️ Agile Camp NL, a two-day BarCamp event for the agile community at a spectacular location in Utrecht. The first edition took place on Friday 1 + Saturday 2 Nov 2019.

Photo of Thomas

About me

I have a decade-long background in agile co-creation and a knack for working with diverse, distributed feature teams. With a positive outlook on everything and a strong interest in agile coaching, I engage teams to work together effectively.

I'm a political scientist turned front-end developer turned Scrum Master, turned workshop facilitator, with extensive experience in conference and meetup organisation.

I operate in the Netherlands and in Lithuania, and I've been working with distributed teams non-stop since 2017.