Hating guided tours isn’t a reason to hate SAFe

One useful pattern in enterprise agile change is the difference between a guided tour and a guidebook. A guided tour makes many decisions for you. It reduces choice, gives you a route, and helps a group move together. A guidebook gives you options, principles, maps, and context. You still have to decide what fits the day you are actually having.

When you visit a city, both can be useful. Some people want a planned route through the highlights. Others want a map, a few bookmarks, and the freedom to decide once they see what is happening on the ground. Most good trips use a mix.

SAFe can be seen as a classic guided tour. It gives mainstream organizations a relatively safe path, a shared language, and a set of practices that other organizations have tried. Seen this way, SAFe does its job well. Maybe too well. As the ecosystem grows, more people present SAFe only as the guided tour, and that turns off people who are looking for principles and options rather than a prescribed route.

I think SAFe can also be used as a guidebook. That is how I often use it. We bring in useful ideas, use parts of it as a skeleton, and adapt based on the organization’s context. Even organizations that want to “do SAFe” still need a customization period, and Inspect and Adapt should keep changing the approach once reality shows up.

The real consulting challenge is not whether I personally prefer guided tours or guidebooks. It is figuring out what would help this client move. Sometimes they need more structure than I would choose for myself. Sometimes they need less. Most of the time, the answer is a mix.

Scaling with SAFe takes more than certification. If you are trying to decide how much structure your context really needs, explore the SAFe advisory path.