Why Isn't LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) More Popular?
Or Phrased Alternatively: Why Is SAFe So Popular?
Brad Pitt and Edward Norton smoked a joint together right before attending the premiere of their movie at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. They anxiously sat at the back of the movie theater to observe the audience's reaction.
The first joke comes up - crickets.
The second quip is uttered, and the whole theater becomes dead silent.
One of the most scandalous lines in the movie gets spoken: “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school!” and a guy gets up and walks out of the theater.
Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are the only people in the audience who laugh during the screening.
All the jokes are not landing, and when the movie ends, there are boos all around.
After the booing ends, Brad Pitt turns to Edward Norton and says: “That’s the best movie I’m ever gonna be in.”
And then the movie was released, and it completely tanked. It was considered a commercial failure.
What can we learn from this movie's poor box office results, and how does this relate to the world of scaling frameworks?
Please bear with me. I promise to tie it all back to the world of scaling frameworks in the end.
What Movie Are We Talking About?
“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” - Tyler Durden
What movie do you think we’ve been talking about?
Of course, it’s Fight Club.
What few people know is that the movie bombed at the box office, especially considering how good it was. It only made $100.9 million, while it cost $63 million to make.
Nowadays, Fight Club is considered one of the best movies of all time, coming in at #13 on IMDB.
Why did the movie perform so poorly, and what can we learn from it? I believe there are three reasons the movie tanked:
The marketing sucked
The movie rebelled against the status quo the older generation deeply cared about
The movie was too shocking
The marketers for Fight Club didn’t know what to do with the movie. After seeing a first cut of the film, they expressed the following:
“Men do not want to see Brad Pitt with his shirt off. It makes them feel bad. And women don’t want to see him bloody. So, I don’t know who you made this movie for.”
They didn’t know what to do with the movie and didn’t get who it was made for. And when you watch the movie trailers - it shows. I remember seeing the trailer of Fight Club in the movie theater, and I thought what a terrible movie, I will never watch it. I don’t want to see a stupid boxing movie with Brad Pitt. While I was part of the perfect audience for the movie, I absolutely loved it after I watched it.
People who loved boxing went to see the movie and probably were disappointed. And the people who didn’t like boxing movies but were likely to love the movie didn’t see it because they didn’t want to see a boxing movie. As a result, it attracted the wrong kinds of people, and the word of mouth struggled.
As Edward Norton has stated in interviews, Fight Club is, at its core, the same kind of story as the movie The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. The Graduate might sound surprising, but let me break it down.
Fight Club and The Graduate both depict the new generation as rebelling against the old generation. When the older generation watches those movies, it’s tough to stomach. The Graduate was also deeply offensive and subversive at the time, just like Fight Club, with a married mom starting an affair with a much younger man who just graduated.
Older generations didn’t like Fight Club because they felt threatened by its message. People over a certain age struggled with the movie, while the younger generation was able to relate. Despite the generational gap, the movie also just was plain shocking, with many shots of penises that were interjected in the movie, together with conversations about abortions and peeing in the soup of customers.
What Does All of This Have To Do With Scaling Frameworks?
Some frameworks, like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), are extremely popular because they don’t make the same mistakes as the movie Fight Club:
The marketing is great
No rebellion against the status quo
They carefully watch out to not shock anyone with their language and messaging
SAFe tells a story the C-level likes to hear. There is no secret rebellion against the status quo going on. You can keep doing what you’re doing - albeit with a slight twist - and you’ll get better results. It’s perfectly safe!
All the marketing materials and stories are carefully crafted to not shock anyone and fit with their existing command-and-control worldview. It’s like gently slipping into a warm bath, with the hot water soothing and comforting you until you feel relaxed and serene, with some lovely SAFe bath bombs thrown in. Ah, don’t all those scaling minerals make you feel great!
Let’s contrast this with the marketing style of many other Agile scaling frameworks: cold showers are great! Yes, it’s highly uncomfortable and displeasing, but once you get over the coldness and discomfort of the whole ordeal, you’ll feel great. Just stick with it and soldier through, and everything will work out.
Telling someone to take cold showers isn’t very appealing. The problem is that many scaling frameworks rebel against the status quo and tell you to shake things up and do things differently. Their messaging is considered shocking for traditional C-level people who expect big PowerPoints with diagrams that provide that shot of the illusion of control they so crave.
I want to stress that I don’t want to single LeSS or SAFe out. I’m just using them as two extreme examples to juxtapose. I like LeSS, it should be more popular, and I don’t like SAFe, it should be less popular.
It’s essential to realize the following: no matter how great your movie is, if you don’t tell a story that people want to tell others, you won’t have word of mouth, and you’ll be caught dead in the water.
Spend as much time on how the frameworks work as the positioning and messaging of your framework. Try carefully crafting and cultivating the story that will enable others to care about your framework and tell that story to others. And that’s extremely hard. You have to watch out not to shock them or disrupt the status quo too much while telling a story they want to hear.
Fight Club was never about boxing, but because marketers didn’t understand the movie, they made it about boxing in the trailers. The wrong audience was attracted and visited the movie, with the end result of all the punches and jokes landing flat.
You must tell the story you want to tell, but you should be careful to tell it in a way listeners want to hear it. Fight Club told a story that a subset of people wanted to hear, and their marketing was aimed at exactly the kinds of people who didn’t want to hear that story.
This is precisely what’s happening with many of the current Agile frameworks. They’re aimed at the wrong people, with messaging that doesn’t resonate or even makes them feel scared of even giving it a shot.
SAFe is doing that part right. They’re telling the story the C-level wants to hear, they’re not shocking. Their story and messaging all fit with your status quo—and that’s why they’re considered the SAFe choice, even if there are many documented cases out there that it ultimately doesn’t work out.
It’s not about being right. It’s about telling the story in a way that people can believe you’re right. You must cater to their emotions and worldview and not just spit out facts because you believe you’re right.
It’s the difference between holding their hand and taking them along for the ride or scaring them by starting by slapping them on the wrist.
In the words of Seth Godin:
“Stories (not ideas, not features, not benefits) are what spread from person to person… (cont.) The essence of marketing today is to tell a story to people who want to hear it, in a way that resonates with them so they are likely to either respond or connect to you, or tell their friends.” - Seth Godin
The number of analogies you have in your brain is amazing. They help me understand your story in a way I like to hear so that I can tell the story to others. It works even here!
Great analogy! One problem with scaling frameworks is that the people who make the choice aren't the change catalysts, but rather the people who benefit from the status quo. SAFe is popular because most companies want to leverage the power of teams without giving them any actual empowerment. Only when a major failure occurs or the company is at real risk (or rarely, when a true visionary decision maker is placed) would they consider something like LeSS.
Imo it's more than just marketing, if you sell LeSS right, there won't be many buyers. Who wants real change?