Hey there, fellow digital warriors! 🚀

Welcome back to the Forge of Unicorns! In our last post, we delved into the importance of evolving over transforming with the replay of my talk at XP2024. Today, we kick off a new block of articles focusing on why an organizational assessment is crucial and why stopping transformation isn’t just an option but a necessity.

The Misunderstood Nature of Transformation

Many executive boards and venture capitalists pump money into organizations expecting a predictable ROI 💰from digital transformations, often by implementing SAFe. While the intent to scale agile is commendable, the execution often misses the most crucial element 💸: the human beings behind the transformation.

Transforming is often perceived as a process driven by Newtonian laws—predictable actions and reactions. But people, especially at scale, are far from predictable 🤯. As I’ve said before, transforming people isn’t as straightforward as transforming materials like water 💧to steam or metal to molten form 🏭. People require a different approach—an evolutionary 🌱 one.

The Garage Analogy

To illustrate this, let’s look at my garage, my personal sanctuary filled with motorbikes, top-notch tools (Beta, Usag, Milwaukee, etc.), and the all-important Manufactory Workshop Manual with all the dataspecs to do the right job. I have the training, practice, and experience to handle everything from disassembling to reassembling every component, achieving high performance. I learned from the best, my fellas Ferrari F1 mechanics! But if I decide to scale up my garage business, hiring two ’normal’ mechanics and expecting them to perform at my level without proper training and support, I would be setting them up for failure 😣. They need awareness of the goal 🎯, the necessary training 🏫, a safe environment to practice 🔬, and the support to evolve 🌱 into the ideal employees—a Formula 1 mechanic with the support of a Formula 1 engineering team and the right R&D to develop top-performance race bikes.

Applying This to Scaled Agile - SAFe

For this reason, expecting human behavior implementing SAFe to be predictable in a scaled social system using Newtonian laws is a time 💣 bomb!

Human beings are not provided with a manufacturer manual 🙀, making decoding predictable outcomes difficult even on an individual level - no tech specs are provided buddy 🥺! Expecting canonical behaviors and outcomes in a so complex scaled social environment is the reason behind failing Agile & SAFe implementations. Organizations need to evolve to Agile and Scaled Agile by decoding the human manufacturer manual with the help 🤝 of specialists like me and BriX Consulting. Experts like us in behavioral engineering and digital excellence, typically deployed after the purchase and implementation of SAFe by the book, can save you 💸💸💸 MILLIONS 💸💸💸 of cash!

Here’s the roadmap we suggest to stop wasting your money:

1. Awareness Goal: Perform an organizational assessment to understand the gaps to your company’s north star. Establish OKRs toward the north star, aligning OKRs from Capital Venture and the board to the teams rather than cascading them (big anti-pattern!)..

2. SAFe by the book: Complete the SAFe implementation with your certified SAFe suppliers and trainers to provide the necessary foundations ‘by the book’.

3. Evolve SAFe with your DNA 🧬: Let your SAFe implementation run in the so-called ‘robot 🤖’ mode, and onboard our experts to support the organization in going beyond by-the-book learning, evolving scaled agile practices based on your company’s DNA. Deploy multiple Dojos and our KBI framework from the Unicorns’ Ecosystem to allow all the SAFe players to do the necessary experimentation to evolve SAFe processes, moving the company toward its north star. This OKR-behavioral-driven evolution keeps the board aligned with the right capital venture indicators, showing progress toward the mission with increasing accuracy and speed.

4. Community of Practices: Use the Dojos and the KBI framework to scale the right working archetypes that evolve employees into role models necessary to move the company toward its north star. This part is the game-changer to quit costly, fake-predictable digital transformations.

Conclusion

The key takeaway is that

SAFe isn’t the problem; it’s the approach to implementing and tuning it to the company’s DNA 🧬.

Organizations need to evolve rather than transform, supporting their people through training, upskilling, practice, and a community-driven approach with the right coaches, experts in behavioral engineering, agility, and modern software engineering.

Start your organizational assessment (it takes 2 minutes!) and discover our method to move your organization toward excellence. After all the money you wasted following Agile Copy&Paste, the worst that can happen is you keep wasting money. But with our track record of 5-star reviews, your investment is most likely to be well spent. 🚀

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