The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social skills.

—Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

Reaching the Tipping Point

This is article one in the SAFe^® Implementation Roadmap series. Click here to view the entire roadmap.

Changing the way of working in a large organization, including its habits and culture, is hard. Many enterprises report that implementing SAFe was one of the toughest and yet most rewarding change initiatives that they have ever done.

People naturally resist change, and it is common to hear phrases like, “That’s the way we’ve always done it around here,” or “That won’t work here.” Accepting change means accepting the possibility that individuals and organizations are not currently doing things the best way, or it may even challenge a person’s long-held beliefs or values.

In the same way, people will naturally keep their old behaviors unless there is an exceptionally good reason to make a change. This reason must be so compelling that the status quo becomes simply unacceptable. The motivation must be so strong that change becomes the only reasonable way forward to success.

In other words, the enterprise must reach its ‘tipping point’—the point at which the overriding organizational imperative is to achieve the change, rather than resist it [1].

Details

The Need for Change

Organizations arrive at the need for change from a wide range of starting points.  The current context may be a highly regimented waterfall environment marked by strict phase gate reviews and quality checks, separation of concerns, and sophisticated resource management procedures.  Or perhaps the organization has developed an ad hoc approach, mixing a variety of team-level Agile methods with more traditional project and portfolio management techniques.  Regardless, before a successful change effort can begin, there must be a clear and compelling impetus for change: a general acknowledgment that the current ways of working are inadequate to deliver the performance needed either now or in the future.  Organizations who are able to establish such a shared awareness typically meet one of two conditions:

• A burning platform – Sometimes the need to change a product or service is obvious. The company is failing to compete, and the existing way of doing business is obviously inadequate to achieve a new solution within a survivable time frame. Jobs are at stake. This is the easier case for change. While there will always be those who are resistant, they are likely to be overcome by the wave of energy that drives a sense of urgency for mandatory change through the organization.
• Visionary leadership – In the absence of a burning platform, leadership must drive change proactively by taking a stand for a better future state. Lean-Agile Leaders must exhibit what Toyota [2] would call “a constant sense of danger”—a never-ending sense of potential crisis that fuels continuous improvement. This is often the less obvious reason to drive change, as the people in the organization may not see or feel the urgency to do the additional hard work that comes with change. After all, they are successful now. Why should they assume that they won’t continue to be successful in the future? Isn’t change risky? In this case, leaders must create a clear and compelling vision for change that answers why change is needed [3]. They must constantly communicate and impress the need for change on all, making it clear that maintaining the status quo is simply unacceptable.

In rare instances, organizations have both a burning platform and visionary leadership with the courage to lead the change. With SAFe as the blueprint for scripting the change, such organizations can experience a rapid and dramatic turnaround from a bleak crisis to strong, positive business results and a bright future with strong, positive business results.

Establish the Vision for Change

While necessary, a compelling and well-understood reason to change is insufficient for an organization to reach the tipping point.  A clear vision for the future is also critical. Kotter notes that establishing a vision for change is a primary responsibility of leadership [4]. The vision for change provides three key benefits:

• Purpose – It clarifies the purpose and direction for the change and sets the mission for all to follow. It avoids the potentially confusing details and focuses everyone on the why, not the how, of the change.
• Motivation – It starts to move people in the right direction. After all, change is hard, and pain is inevitable, especially in the early stages. People’s jobs will change. The vision helps motivate people by giving them a compelling reason to make the change. Perhaps most importantly, it underlines the fact there is really no job security in the status quo.
• Alignment – It helps to start the coordinated action necessary to assure that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people work together toward a new and more personally rewarding goal. With a clarity of vision, people are empowered to take the actions necessary to achieve the vision without the constant need for management supervision or check-ins.

In the case of a SAFe transformation, the vision for change must be rooted in an understanding of the Lean-Agile Mindset and SAFe Principles. It is also critical that leaders understand that how they lead has a direct correlation to whether or not employees buy into the change and contribute to its success.  The Lean-Agile Leadership competency article describes the leader behaviors that create a positive environment for change.

Take an Economic View 

Whether reactive or proactive, the primary reason to drive change in an organization is to realize the business and personal benefits that the change is intended to deliver. SAFe Principle #1 reminds us to always ‘Take an economic view.’ In this context, leaders should articulate the goal of the change in terms everyone can understand. Dozens of case studies show that enterprises can expect to see benefits in four major areas, as Figure 1 illustrates.

Change leaders should communicate these intended benefits as part of the vision for the change. In addition, leaders should describe any other specific, tangible objectives they hope to accomplish. This should include baseline metrics that illustrate the current state, why the current state is unsustainable, the target future state for the same metrics, and the strategy for how the change will achieve those targets. Measurable improvement on these key performance indicators will provide the fuel necessary to escape the inertia of the status quo.

Getting There – Leading SAFe

Too many change initiatives die before they begin by getting ahead of themselves. While training people and forming Agile Release Trains (ARTs) may feel like progress, these efforts inevitably stall in the face of organizational inertia unless supported by a senior leadership team with a shared reason and vision for change that has reached the tipping point.

The most consistently effective way for organizations to reach the tipping point is the shared experience of leaders and key influencers attending Leading SAFe.

While it can be challenging for senior leaders to commit two days of dedicated time, evidence from hundreds of implementations demonstrates that this course is critical to establishing a truly shared reason and vision for change.  Leaders must take the time, as a group, to collaboratively explore, analyze, and validate for themselves the challenges facing the organization. They must evaluate how the current system contributes to those challenges and learn the mindset, principles, and practices they will need to adopt to achieve the transformative results they envision.

Addressing SAFe Implementation in Government

A growing list of published case studies and experience reports (such as the ones for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and Pole emplôi) show that the principles and practices of SAFe work just as well in a government context as they do in a commercial setting. However, the challenges of organizational context, culture, and governance in public-sector programs are truly unique. Government acquisition processes and laws are intended to create a fair playing field among potential providers, but they can also create bureaucracy and delay. In addition, government agencies do not have the competitive market dynamic and profit motive that drives rapid change and innovation in a commercial environment. Instead, funding is typically provided by legislative bodies in politically-charged annual appropriations processes that move slowly. Even the concept of value in a government technology program is often difficult to conceptualize and measure.

To help government agencies get past the tipping point and make the decision to adopt SAFe, there is specific guidance in the framework that directly addresses the most frequent impediments to embracing Lean-Agile in government and provides practical solutions for overcoming these challenges. Read more about these recommendations in the SAFe for Government article series.  In addition, the SAFe for Government course orients learners to the best practices for implementing SAFe in a government context. Like Leading SAFe, this course can be used to help decision-makers ‘go SAFe.’ It can also help orient other agency and industry partner leaders to the recommended patterns for aligning budgeting, forecasting, contracting, governance, compliance, and much more to Lean-Agile principles and practices.

Moving Forward

A clear vision and compelling reason for change are wasted if not accompanied by a powerful guiding coalition to carry the vision forward [4].  The tipping point is just the start of forming that guiding coalition.  SAFe is a proven framework that has delivered transformative results for hundreds of organizations in every industry across the globe.  Given a compelling reason to change, the next step is a commitment from leadership to build a transformation team to gain knowledge and explore possible pathways to launching the SAFe implementation.

Therefore, the next critical move is to Train Lean-Agile Change Agents.

Learn More

Additional Resources

SAFe Executive Workshop Toolkit

Last update: 27 September 2021