Practice & Skill-buildingDave; you're right that perceived urgency, or Internet speed, is a cop-out for not thinking through the problem and possible solutions. I like the approach that you used - very systemic and performance-centered. The clone trains gave you all kinds of feedback without degrading business performance.
As for the "sandbox" term, you're right that it wouldn't work well in many corporations. That's why we used the term "professional journal" instead of blog for one of our projects. That small change made acceptance much easier. Perhaps we should rename our sandbox for future projects to corpo-speak in order to sell the idea - like a "performance modelling scenario test-bench" - just kidding ;-)
Really appreciate your comments :-)