Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

SAFe is a way of decomposing large projects into smaller pieces, assigning those pieces to teams, and creating accountability to ensure that teams complete the work that they’ve signed up to complete. The problem with this approach is that it is essentially a “more detailed plan” approach, and it ignores the influence of uncertainty. SAFe moves teams away from a sense and respond approach and toward a central-planning approach. In effect, it reduces the agile team to a production team, giving them a fixed set of requirements and expecting a specific output to emerge from the end of the assembly line. This approach can be appropriate for high-certainty efforts, but it limits an agile team’s ability to learn from feedback as it goes forward. And again, it’s this learning from feedback that allows teams to navigate in high-uncertainty contexts.