Once upon a time, a wise corporate trainer devised an exercise for a class on agile principles.  As you might know, reducing risk by “failing faster” is a core principle of any agile method … but that’s getting ahead of my story.

The exercise was pretty simple in nature – take 25 pennies, flip them heads-up/tails-up/heads-up in succession and make sure they ended up in date order with Mr. Lincoln facing the same way.  There were a couple of other rules designed to leverage lean principles and the goal was to progressively beat the time it took to complete the exercise over the course of three iterations of the tasks. Continue reading →