SAFe and Kanban: Why They’re Better Together

Innovation management today largely involves a shift from complicated to the complex domain, requiring evolutionary agility at scale. As such, growing numbers of organizations are turning to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for guidance on scaling Lean and Agile practices. The evolution of SAFe has now made Kanban, another popular approach to Agile and Lean practices, a first-class citizen in SAFe, making it possible to scale organizations or work in complex domains. However, unless SAFe practitioners adopt a more evolutionary and pragmatic approach, there is a risk of creating the illusion of certainty by applying a speculative process that's effective in one obvious domain to another that is not comparable.