SAFe Didn't Scale Agile. It Scaled Bureaucracy.
Image Gary Hamel spent decades asking why large organizations become rigid, slow, and hard to work inside. His diagnosis is simple: bureaucracy is not a symptom of poor management. It is a design, and its purpose is control, not the creation of value. I have been watching this design operate inside enterprise product teams since 2010, and one of its most successful recent forms wears an Agile badge.The teams that struggle most are rarely short of process. They have Release Train Engineers, quarterly PI Planning, Portfolio SAFe layers, and Agile coaches in numbers that would surprise most start