Agile in a conservative enterprise often becomes "Waterfall with Sprints." You change the vocabulary, but you haven't changed the velocity.
In my years at Gartner, I saw a recurring trend: large-scale enterprises adopting the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) not because they wanted to be agile, but because they wanted a way to manage complexity that still felt familiar to their existing PMO.
The result is what I call "Agile Theater." You have the PI Planning sessions, the Scrum of Scrums, and the colorful Jira boards. Yet, decisions still take three weeks, and the "Agile Release Train" is consistently stuck at the station waiting for budget approvals from executives who aren't even in the room.
The Three Pillars of "Agile Theater"
Proxied Empowerment
Product Owners are given the title, but not the checkbook. If every backlog priority needs to be validated by a Steering Committee that meets once a month, you aren't agile—you're just documenting your delays in two-week increments.
The Tooling Trap
Leadership often mistakes Jira implementation for cultural adoption. Focusing on "the tool" before "the team" results in high-fidelity reporting of low-value work. Real agility is measured in outcomes, not ticket throughput.
Output-Driven Metrics
Conservative enterprises love predictability. They measure "Say-Do" ratios and Velocity. While these are useful for teams, they tell executives nothing about value. You can have 100% velocity and 0% business impact.
How to Strip Away the Theater
If your SAFe implementation feels like a compliance exercise, it's time to return to high strategy. We focus on three interventions:
- Decision Latency Reduction: We measure how long it takes for a decision to be made. If it's longer than a sprint, the governance model is broken.
- Lean Budgeting: Moving from project-based funding to value-stream funding is the "final boss" of enterprise agile. Without it, the theater continues.
- Outcome over Conformity: Stop grading teams on how well they follow the SAFe manual and start grading them on the business metrics they move.
In a recent engagement with a public sector agency, we found that 40% of their PI Planning time was spent on "dependency management" with external vendors who weren't even using agile. We stopped the theater, redesigned the vendor contracts for agility, and saw a 3x increase in feature delivery within two quarters.
The Bottom Line
SAFe is a powerful tool, but in a conservative organization, it can easily become a shield for the status quo. Real agility requires a level of transparency and decentralized authority that is uncomfortable for traditional leadership.
The question for you is: do you want the appearance of agility, or do you want the results?