Failure

If you're having trouble succeeding, fail. Don't know which of three ways to implement a story? Try it all three ways. Even if they all fail, you'll certainly learn something valuable.

Isn't failure waste? No, not if it imparts knowledge. Knowledge is valuable and sometimes hard to come by. Failure may not be avoidable waste. If you knew the best way to implement the story you'd just implement it that way. Given that you don't already know the best way, what's the cheapest way to find out?

I coached a team that had several good designers, so good that each of them could come up with two or three ways of solving any given problem. They would sit for hours, talking about each of their ideas in turn. By the time they were tired of talking, they could have implemented all the alternatives twice. They didn't want to waste programming time, though, so they wasted talking time instead.

I bought the team a kitchen timer and asked them to limit design discussions to fifteen minutes. When the timer went off, two of them would go implement something. They only used the timer a couple of times, but they kept it around as a reminder to fail instead of talk.

This is not intended to excuse failure when you really knew better. When you don't know what to do though, risking failure can be the shortest, surest road to success.