Thanks! And sure can! The main premise behind a lot of what agile tries to achieve is actually to descale the organisation – think flatter structure, less process, more informal communication, push decision making down, increased autonomy, closer to the customer, etc — as opposed to scaling agile up to fit the organisation. Which is often code for making “agile” fit into our existing world rather than allowing it to challenge and change it.

Scaling agile first typically results in added (and often unnecessary) process and frameworks etc, all in the name of making it “fit our current scale”. Eventually this new agile way of working is suddenly bloated and rather than breaking walls down to enable better interactions and collaboration you’ve ended up with something that doesn’t look too dissimilar to how you used to work, just with fancy new titles like “Scrum master” and “PO”.

As Charles Lamdin said once, “an additional step between the team and the customer is an increase in bureaucracy, not agility!”

Hope that makes sense.

Final note: the truth is you’ll likely meet in the middle depending on what size your org is but the idea is to first look at descaling your org before scaling agile. LeSS have a great blog post on this topic (although very LeSS centric the principles stand true for all transformations) — https://less.works/blog/2015/05/08/less-scaling-descaling-organizations-with-less.html