Why SAFe Exists: The Problem It Was Designed to Solve

“Trust is not blind faith. Trust is built on transparency and shared understanding.”  Stephen M.R. Covey

“Optimization of parts does not optimize the whole.”  Eliyahu M. Goldratt

SAFe was not created because Agile stopped working. It emerged because organizations, particularly large ones, began asking Agile to address problems it was never designed to solve on its own.

That distinction matters, especially for leaders who watched early Agile initiatives struggle once they encountered enterprise funding models, regulatory obligations, and cross team dependencies. Agile worked, and continues to work, very well at the team level. What it did not provide was a practical way to plan, fund, govern, and synchronize work across an organization operating at scale.

Where early Agile began to strain

Team level Agile addressed a specific challenge: enabling small, empowered teams to deliver value faster by shortening feedback loops and responding to change. Scrum teams performed well, Kanban systems improved flow, and retrospectives produced meaningful behavioral change within the boundaries of a single team.

Some scaling was possible. Practices such as Scrum of Scrums allowed coordination across several teams and worked reasonably well when the effort involved a few dozen people. Scaling to 30 or 40 practitioners was achievable. The model began to break down, however, when initiatives required 100, or more people working across multiple products, platforms, and shared services. At that point, coordination challenges multiplied, dependencies became harder to manage, and informal alignment no longer held.

Agile had not been designed with that level of scale in mind.

Why leadership hesitated

The tension increased as these practices were introduced to leaders who were largely unfamiliar with Agile. Concepts such as self-directed teams, daily Scrums, and emergent planning already felt foreign to executives accustomed to formal authority, long range plans, and documented controls.

They were asked to trust a delivery model they did not fully understand, and executives do not trust much anyway. That hesitation was not unreasonable. These leaders were accountable for budgets, compliance, risk, and outcomes far beyond the boundaries of any single team.

At the same time, leadership faced questions Agile could not answer at scale. How do we coordinate work across many teams? How do we fund ongoing development responsibly? How do we forecast delivery, manage dependencies, and meet governance and audit expectations?

Agile had no answers for scaled solutions.

Trying to move forward without abandoning Agile

Organizations did not want to reject a new and innovative way to do software development that was clearly producing results at the team level. At the same time, they faced real structural problems that could not be ignored.

They needed to scale delivery, align investments, and govern complex initiatives without killing the goodness of Agile. What was missing was a framework that addressed enterprise realities while preserving the core strengths that made Agile effective in the first place.

Why SAFe took the path it did

SAFe did not emerge from theory. It emerged from patterns observed as organizations attempted to scale Agile without a coherent operating model.

That history explains why SAFe introduces explicit roles, structured planning horizons, synchronization points, and economic decision making models. These elements were not intended to dilute Agile principles. It can be argued that they directly support the core idea of the Agile Manifesto: early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

By providing mechanisms for alignment, funding, and coordination, SAFe enables organizations to sustain that delivery across many teams rather than sacrificing it as scale increases.

Coordination early prevents failure late

SAFe places deliberate emphasis on early coordination. Events such as PI Planning, along with role clarity and capacity awareness, slow the organization down at specific points by design.

Without this coordination, teams often progress independently only to discover late in the release cycle that dependencies were misunderstood, integration was harder than expected, or priorities were misaligned. By the time these issues surface, options are limited and resolution is costly.

SAFe moves those conversations earlier, when tradeoffs can still be made and course correction is possible.

Heavier than Agile, but enabling at scale

SAFe is heavier than team level Agile, and that weight is intentional. Small teams can rely on proximity and informal communication. Large organizations cannot.

Rather than reducing local freedom, SAFe provides the coordination mechanisms that make local autonomy possible. Clear priorities, shared planning horizons, and visible dependencies give teams the context they need to make decisions independently without undermining one another.

The objective is not control. It is coherence.

What critics often overlook

Criticism of SAFe often focuses on structure rather than purpose. Some argue it is not Agile enough. Others point to poor implementations as proof of failure.

In many cases, the framework was adopted in name while leadership behaviors, funding models, and decision making authority remained unchanged. SAFe does not fix those gaps. It exposes them, and that exposure is uncomfortable, particularly for organizations accustomed to deferring decisions or masking misalignment. It is not evidence that SAFe is flawed. It is evidence that scale forces tradeoffs into the open.

SAFe exists because scaling Agile is not primarily a team problem. It is a leadership problem.

It concerns how decisions are made, how investments are funded, how priorities are resolved, and how accountability functions when complexity cannot be wished away. SAFe does not promise simplicity. It promises coherence.

Where this leads

If you are working in an organization that feels the tension between Agile ideals and enterprise realities, that tension is not a failure. It is a signal.

In the next article, I will explore why SAFe often feels heavy to organizations that have never had to coordinate work at true scale, and why that discomfort is so often mistaken for bureaucracy rather than necessity.

If this reflects your experience, I welcome the conversation. Whether you are scaling delivery, rethinking governance, or simply trying to make sense of where Agile fits in your organization today, the discussion is worth having. Please reach out to me if you would like to discuss SAFe.

Coda

For my subscribers, do you like this new format? I go back and forth between more traditional writing and a "blog" feel with short sentences and broken paragraphs. I am starting to think I shouldn't be constrained by a specific writing style, rather let the content take me to the format it wants. Along those lines, did you know that there are scans you can run against content to determine if AI wrote it? I might explore that more in a future post.

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