Hint: You can win a Lego set!

Chapter 1: Most IT-Projects Never Made It!

Imagine you’re building a house. You draw the blueprints, buy the timber, and start construction. By the time you reach the roof, you realize the walls are in the garden and you’ve burned through your entire budget.

In the 1990s, this wasn’t just a bad day. It was how software got built.

The 1994 Chaos Report revealed a brutal truth: only 16.2% of IT projects were successful.

We kept failing. Spectacularly. For years.

Chapter 2: The Uncomfortable Truth

To understand why we still struggle, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alexandra Teynor took us back to the source. She showed us why the “Waterfall” trap is so tempting and so destructive.

Then, she made us live it.

The task was simple: build a LEGO model in the “Waterfall-style.” First, we had to write down a perfect plan. Once we started building, no changes were allowed.

A timer hit the screen. 1:12. The room went quiet and bent over paper.

When we started building, the instructions that made sense to the writer made no sense to the builder. It was a disaster.

Watching this fail at a table of four people felt uncomfortably familiar. I see this at my internship at KUKA all the time. This made me wonder: “If it breaks down between four people in one room, how can a project with 50 people across three countries ever work?”

The 17 developers who wrote the Agile Manifesto asked the same question.

They realized you don’t ‘build’ software like a static bridge; but you grow it like a living organism.

So they proposed a new set of values to replace the old chaos:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over heavy documentation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

It sounded like the perfect cure. But here is the uncomfortable truth: We adopted the mindset, we held the daily stand-ups, and we embraced the iterations. The projects still fail in big rates. Agile became a new set of rules, but the underlying human struggle remained. Even with better tools, we are still caught in the same traps.

Chapter 3: The Neuroscience of Failure

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alexandra Teynor showed us the “broken houses” we build. Then, Prof. Dr. Barbara Eschner (Market and Consumer Psychology) stepped in with a much harder question: “If Agile gives us the right tools to build better, why are we still so bad at using them?”

Her answer wasn’t in a management handbook. It was in our biology. She walked us through neuroscience to show that our resistance to failure isn’t a lack of discipline, but a survival mechanism. We are hardwired to crave certainty and fear the unknown. “Waterfall-thinking” feels safe because our brains are designed to avoid the very things that Agile requires.

Study 1: Your Brain Shouts “ERROR” and Whispers “Success” !

Barbara Eschner started with a simple game: counting in pairs, replacing numbers with “Yeah!” and “Knock!”—the room collapsed into laughter within seconds.

The moment you slipped, what happened inside you?

The jolt you feel when you slip is real. It’s called the ERN (Error-Related Negativity). That jolt has a name: the ERN (Error-Related Negativity). Gehring et al. (1993) and Olvet & Hajcak (2008) showed that within 50 to 100 milliseconds of a mistake, faster than conscious awareness, your brain fires a sharp alarm. There is no equivalent signal for getting something right. The ledger is rigged from birth.

To prove it, she had hidden a typo in her opening slide: “WELKOME.” A room full of experts saw the error but chose silence over the social risk of speaking up. The alarm fired, and our social instinct told us to stay quiet.

This is not a flaw. It’s evolution. A mistake once meant a predator. The alarm still fires like it does. You can decide to be calm about failure all you want; the signal fires anyway.

We’re not bad at failing. We’re just human. And we proved it in the first five minutes.

Study 2: Being Excluded Feels Like Being Punched!

We were handed slips of paper. “Player 1: Includer. Player 2: Includer. Player 3: just enjoy the game.” Player 3 had no idea what was about to happen.

The ball went around. Then quietly stopped going to one person.

The excluded person looked around. Glanced at the others. Waited. The ball kept moving, just not toward them. Afterwards, one student said it plainly: “That was genuinely mean.” Not angry. Just honest. Hard to argue with when you’ve spent 40 seconds being made invisible by people you know.

What made it weirder: Most of us had watched it happen, and still felt something. A faint collective guilt. The observer who didn’t intervene.

Eisenberger (2015) mapped this in brain scanners: social exclusion fires the same brain regions, that process the affective component of physical pain.

This proves a point: When leaders say, ‘We have a safe culture,’ they are just making announcements. But our nervous systems don’t care about announcements; they need evidence.

We don’t hide our mistakes because we’re lazy or dishonest. We hide them because being cut off from the group triggers the same pain in our brain as a physical burn. We are simply trying to protect ourselves.

Study 3: You are the Worst Person to Learn From Your own Mistakes !

Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach (2019) ran a simple experiment. Participants answered questions and got feedback, one group only on what they got right, one only on what they got wrong. Then both groups repeated the test. The failure group learned less. They even remembered their own previous answers worse.

The ego is the bottleneck. When you fail, it floods. The bruised ego engages, the ERN fires, and the brain shuts down the parts that would otherwise extract the lesson. Watch someone else fail, however, and you stay calm enough to actually learn.

“Fail fast, learn fast” is only half the story. The other half: watch your teammates fail carefully, and treat their mistakes as free data.

Chapter 4: Agile Is a Biological Workaround

This is where the sessions with Teynor and Eschner clicked together. Agile’s core practices aren’t just “good management”- they are biological workarounds. Viewed through the lens of neuroscience, they act as direct counter-mechanisms to our brain’s primitive fear responses:

Brain Problem	Agile Answer
Shouts “Error” and ignores success	Making wins loud: Sprint demos, customer praise, and “win logs” to give our brain the success signal it normally lacks.
Registers social exclusion as physical pain	Making failure small and safe: Using MVPs and tiny prototypes so that a “fail” is just a pixel, not a threat to the group.
Blocks learning due to a bruised ego	Making failure about work, not people: Using blameless retrospectives to separate the mistake from the person, protecting the ego so learning can actually happen.

The 17 developers in Utah had no access to this research. Their frustration led them there anyway, creating a system that honors how our nervous systems actually function.

Conclusion: The Biological Limit

Agile is 25 years old, yet success rates remain mediocre. We’ve been trying to solve human problems with management manuals, but we ignored the hardware: our own brains.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Before this session, “good error culture” felt like a choice—we thought we just had to be braver. But as the LEGO exercise and Prof. Eschner’s research showed, the “flinch” we feel when we fail isn’t a decision…

… it’s biological. When we hide mistakes, we aren’t being dishonest; we are protecting our nervous systems from a threat that registers exactly like physical pain.

We see this gap every day: German corporate culture values precision, while Silicon Valley pushes for speed. Neither has fully mastered the human side of the equation. We start in school, where grades train us to fear mistakes, and we carry this instinct into the workplace. We stay silent and let projects spiral because nobody wants to be the one to admit it was wrong from the start.

Agile as a Biological Hack

Agile doesn’t ask us to be superhuman. It works only when it functions as a biological workaround: it makes failure smaller, less personal, and less public, so our internal alarm systems don’t have to fight the environment every step of the way. Athletes get better faster than corporate teams because they treat performance as data, not as a reflection of their self-worth. If we want to move past our fear, we must do the same.

The Four Questions We Must Face

1. Can we train our brains? Is the ERN alarm a permanent feature of being human, or can we dampen the noise through practice?
2. Who benefits from silence? If the pain of failure is universal, who actually profits from our “culture of silence”?
3. Why focus on defense? If observing others fail is the fastest way to learn, why do our retrospectives still focus on individual defense instead of collective data?
4. Are we fixing the wrong thing? At what point do we stop blaming “bad processes” and admit we are ignoring the human biology at the center of every project?

Resume

Agile gave us the manual to build “living” software. Now, we need the courage to build “living” teams…

… teams that understand their own biology, protect each other from social pain, and treat every mistake as a data point rather than a threat. We are hardwired to struggle, but we have the ultimate tool: the ability to shift our perspective. So we come to the conclusion:

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"Agile doesn't answer that question. But it's the first methodology that admits the question exists.

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Hack the Brain, Win the Brick: Final Kahoot Challenge!

Ready to see how your own system reacts under pressure?

👉 Kahoot Challenge — “Test Your Error Mindset”

(Play before 22.07.26 and see where you land against the rest of the class and leave a comment. If there is a tie at the top, we will draw the winner by lot – to decide who wins the LEGO set. God luk!

You can win the following lego set:

No worries the instruction weren’t written in 1,5mins during class but by so called professionals)

Further Exploration

• 📖 Pragmatic Thinking and Learning — Andy Hunt
• 📖 Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
• 🎥 Baby learning to walk — the “Fail Forward” reference Eschner opened with
• 📄 Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach (2019): Not Learning from Failure — The Greatest Failure of All, Psychological Science
• 📄 Eisenberger (2015): Social Pain and the Brain, Annual Review of Psychology
• 🃏 Hack Cards from Prof. Eschner: The Win Log, The Pre-Mortem, The Wingman, The After-Action Review