Scaling is easy if you just let go!

Scaling is about alignment. Focus on balancing alignment! Autonomy and scaling will evolve organically, suiting itself to your organisation

Scaling is a big thing in Agile. Scaling frameworks are big businesses and organisations specialising in scaling are enjoying golden times. Allied Market Research, quoted among others by Bloomberg, predicts almost 20% growth per year globally for the Agile industry, with both the Scrum Master and Agile Coach positions growing significantly across the board.

But why do organisations actually scale? The usual narrative is that scaling is necessary for growth. As an organisation grows, the number of Scrum Teams also grows. Because Scrum focuses on the team it is deemed insufficient to address problems that arise from the increased number of Scrum Teams, such as coordination. Therefore, it needs to be scaled up.

However, the reality seems to be quite different with large organisations. What usually seems to happen there is that an organisation decides to go Agile. A scaling framework is seen as an integral part of the package to achieve this, a necessary part of becoming Agile. A scaling framework is implemented, not to solve the problems of scaling, but to jump-start the organisation into Agile.

SAFe is quite clear about this:

SAFe® for Lean Enterprises is a knowledge base of proven…