Decouple, Contextualize, Evolve: A Sorrento Summit Debrief

“Safe is evolving in small batches now—not just big bangs.” - Nikolaos Kaintantzis

Introduction

Niko moderates this debrief of the 2024 SAFe Summit in Sorrento—but it quickly becomes more than a recap. While only he and Ali attended in person, Stephan and Mark bring layered reflection from the sidelines. What begins as a highlight reel turns into a conversation about direction: not just where the framework is going, but how change agents are meant to meet it. What does it mean to decouple without diluting? How do we contextualize without fragmenting? And how do you lead when the framework’s evolving beneath your feet?

Actionable Insights

Here’s what the Unleashed crew surfaced—explicitly and between the lines—about navigating SAFe's latest shifts:

• Modularity is in. The shift toward continuous delivery and context-driven overlays marks a departure from SAFe’s monolithic past.
• Contextualization is canon. Tailoring is now core guidance, not subtext.
• Disciplines over dimensions. The new structure invites varied learning paths—and sharper competency focus.

Highlights

Configuring SAFe for Continuous Delivery

The crew probes both the mechanics and the implications of breaking the framework into modular, industry-specific parts. While the monolith gave SAFe stability, it also limited adaptability—especially in fast-moving or heavily specialized environments. Now, there's a growing shift toward a leaner, more customizable ecosystem, one where guidance can evolve continuously without requiring a complete re-release.

“How do we decouple it? How do we set ourselves up to get into more of a continuous delivery model with SAFe?” —Mark Richards

The New Discipline and Competency Model

The team reflects on the practical limits of the old competency model and the opportunities created by the new discipline format. The previous structure forced symmetry, even when some dimensions overlapped or felt redundant. With disciplines, SAFe can hold complexity without enforcing uniformity. It also creates clearer on-ramps for learners—and clearer invites for contributors.

Niko shares his own internal tension when offered the chance to contribute to one of the new competencies. At first, he planned to focus tightly—but the new structure made that harder than expected.

“I always had in my mind, I want to specialize... then I realized everything is so interesting.” —Nikolaos Kaintantzis

Insights from the State of SAFe Survey

Ali brings in results from the 2024 State of SAFe report, and the conversation turns toward implementation integrity. From misused titles to rebranded hierarchies, the crew reflects on what makes a transformation feel hollow—and what makes it stick. Rather than avoid hard truths, the report appears to be surfacing them, prompting a more honest community conversation.

Looking Ahead: Between Sorrento and Denver

Instead of closing with conclusions, the crew opens the door to what’s next. They speculate on competency expansions, story-first navigation, and new learning tools—along with risks of fragmentation or fatigue. It’s a hopeful segment, but not a naive one. They’re excited—but they also want to keep the purpose intact.

Conclusion

If SAFe is shifting, so are the questions we ask of it—and of ourselves. This episode doesn’t just explore new structures. It shows what happens when a community chooses curiosity over certainty, and depth over dogma. For the Unleashed crew, the goal isn’t to protect the past. It’s to help shape what’s next—one thoughtful step at a time.

References

• State of SAFe Report
• SAFe Explained PDF

Transcript

Mark Richards: 0:01

You're listening to SPCs unleashed a shaping agility project that emerged from the 2023 Prague safe summit. The show is hosted by Swiss SPC, T Stephan Nick and Niko kaintances, Dutch, spct, Ali Hajou and Aussie safe fellow, Mark Richards. We're committed to helping SPCs grow their impact and move beyond the foundations taught during implementing safe each week, we explore a dimension from the frameworks, competencies. We share stories about our journeys, the secrets we've found and the lessons we've learned the hard way. G'day and welcome back to SPCs unleashed. We were in a fun conversation when the timer went off and was all of a sudden, oh, we better actually start talking serious stuff instead of travel plans. But speaking of travel plans, today, we are here to talk about the safe summit Sorrento in, you know, an ideal world we'd look at the scenario that said we all went, and we've all got our own perspectives and insights. But the truth of the matter is that, for various reasons only Niko and Ali went, and so we're going to have a very strange joy ride where two of us who weren't at something attempt to sound wise and insightful about what happened that that thing we didn't go to, and Niko has got the reins to take us on a magical, Misty tour through it. So Niko, on that note, I'm going to hand over to you.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 1:20

Thank you very much. And Mark, just one question, are you sure we're streaming? Because I don't see anything on LinkedIn, just one small question before we start streaming, and I'm the stupid one,

Mark Richards: 1:31

I'm going to do a tech check, but we are streaming, yes, sometimes LinkedIn, it it's very okay. Dodgy, perfect. Sorry,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 1:39

so yeah, as Mark said, Ali and I had a nice vacation, a safe summit in Sorrento with a beautiful coast, beautiful Theresa, beautiful people. So was was really, really cool, and usually we start with surprises and challenges, or we start the show with that. I would like to ask two different questions. I would I would like to start with Ali, so what is your personal takeaway from the summit, except alcohol and no,

Ali Hajou: 2:07

we had a lot of that. Yes, I had a lot of that. No other than that. Sorrento is such a beautiful place. The Safe summit showed me a nuance, a new ones that I personally very much like, why the safe summit has always been, you know, so a little bit of a podium to show what skill to Agile has sort of assembled, and what kind of community has created. And what, you know, the new, the new stuff from from safe that is, that is coming up. And what I saw this time is that the framework itself is will undergo a couple of changes that most of us have been doing right off the bat, as in the framework, you know, everything around it should be, you know, contextualized. And that is part of implementing. That is the the activities that we do. Whenever we we roll out or install safe, we do that. And what skill Agile has mentioned, it was a really nice presentation from Andrew sales, where the framework is on, will undergo some adjustments, you'll have more industry specific details sort of packaged together, so that whomever would like to use the framework and everything that is around it might be able to look at certain examples from their industry way more details, much more than a case study. And on top of that, scaling down the total amount of, let's say, you know, standard, safe, I don't know how to call it, to scale that down into a more smaller, compact, modular version. And I, I, I really like that. Yeah,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 3:52

what I, what I really loved when I, when I was in Sorrento. So my personal takeaway was, again, the portfolio slicing workshop. And I think we'll dive in in a deeper self, deeper. So I was again, I had the chance to moderate it too. Last time in in Washington, DC, I think there were 70 people. Mark was there, facilitating it. Eric was there, so he was there. So it's a huge class this time was also huge, but only not for one extra coach. Then for four extra coaches was really cool for me. And cool was again, talking with many, many people that will come later to the episode. What I really liked was really the exchange. It feel. It felt like a different conference than before, where there are so many, many people. You see them only once, and you say, Yeah, let's keep in touch and see you tomorrow, and you never see them again. And this time, I've seen them every time, and we just were able to continue discussion after the next session of the next session. So my takeaway was really the great discussions we had, and if we go to to the topics, was really the competencies. We'll talk a lot about the new competencies, or discipline. An incompetence model. During one break, I went to the workshop of configuration, safe. Safely was also cool to see what they are, what they are going, where they are having to and also talk to Luke and Mark. Luke Holman and marks to see what they are doing with with marketing, with product model and so on and so on. So very cool topics, but also cool people. Let's go with a similar question, because Mark and Stephan, you you had other obligations than having a nice days in in Sorrento. So in your opinion, what was the hottest news, looking from the outside, looking from your network, what were the hottest news from the safe Summit? Ali,

Mark Richards: 5:37

fast. Stephan,

Stephan Neck: 5:38

okay, I like a good performance and to understand the performance on the stage, I like peeking behind the curtains, like you said, Ali, I really sense this nuance that the framework is now shifting into a direction that I really like. If you look at the disciplines and the competencies, it kind of prepares the stage for some new action, maybe even a change of the program, right? And I like that on the other side. Let me be a bit critical, like sitting on the balcony with Mark and looking at you guys who attended the safe Summit. For me, it's always like this rope walk. How much guidance do you need for a good performance. And as you mentioned, Ali, as you mentioned Niko, how do you really configure the framework or the adaptation for any transformation? And that's the ultimate goal. And I'm sure we will talk about that. That's the challenge I like, and the safe summit always has been like a pit stop on my journey or on our customers journeys. Some attended, some didn't, and for the first time, and that's also a nuance I'm hearing from the customers, some attended, but less people went to the summit, and they stayed home for several reasons. I don't know why, but I want to know more about that. Why don't people just go to a summit anymore? What's the reason? Is it? Is it economical stress? What's behind that? So again, I like a good performance, and let's talk about performances.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 7:19

What happens in Down Under what have you heard?

Mark Richards: 7:22

So, so I know I got fed lots of things because they got promoted to me by the LinkedIn algorithm. So that's the easiest pass that I have. Is what's coming out of the LinkedIn algorithm backed up by what, uh, what are folks sharing in our shaping agility discord? So, you know, I knew I was missing out on ice creams next to the pool and various things like that. But I think for me, it was, it was a kind of weird perspective I had coming into this one, because I'd been doing some work behind the scenes, helping the framework team work on the new discipline and competency model. And so I kind of had this kind of background view of what's the direction of safe reimagined. And and obviously our work there was just part of what was happening, and it went alongside things like the the Configuring safe work. If I went, What's the one bit of takeaway that should be coming out to people? It's the fact that they're starting to decouple safe just to be really geeky about it, we've had a framework that's been a monolith and a bigger monolith with a harder release cycle every year since it came out. And you know, the more courses they had, the more translations to other languages they had, the more it suffered from the classic waterfall release cycle, because it was so monolithic and coupled and so much what I've seen in the early movement, first safe reimagined has been, how do we decouple it? How do we set ourselves up to get into more of a continuous delivery model with safe? And I know at various moments, in some of the background discussions and the workshops with the framework team, you know, I just see them get so excited, particularly Andrew going, oh man, you know, this makes it so much easier for us to hack your thoughts. And I'm curious whether that perception of it's being broken up. It's becoming more configurable. It's becoming more contextual. It's, you know, actually not so longer feeling so monolithic. Is that a sense that you guys felt was coming through in terms of what the audience was seeing in the messaging on the stage, or, if

Ali Hajou: 9:16

I may, absolutely, absolutely the so I've joined as a as a panelist, one of the Agile for hardware, or I should call it safe for hardware, panels, panel discussions. And even though we talked about hardware over there, we also talked about just the, let's say, more general, the general topic of configuring, you know, a way of working, or a governance model, or an operating model, whatever you would like to call it, for a specific, specific field or industry or a specific context. And that means not skipping over the context. And even though. Anyone who has been working with, you know, the safe framework, and has been implementing it, and has been teaching it, we know that we focus on the principles, and we, you know, if required, we tweak the practice. That's what we're trying to do, which also means that we, we do not need everything out of the framework, but still forever, there has been a perception, whether it is in the Agile community or the broader Agile community, I should say, or just from, you know, the irregular bystanders, there has been a perception that that safe is huge, and we and we need to, we need to implement everything, and therefore it is, I mean, the big picture is, I always say it's, it's one of the best things, but also one of the worst things that the framework has, because there is, you know, people interpret it as something huge that needs to be installed all at Once, and contextualization, or, let me rephrase it, the nuance on contextualization, the focus that is happening right now that it needs to be contextualized, you know, make it industry specific. Do not neglect the contextual constraints. And then, you know, try to find ways of working that match in the context that that that was, that was felt so the majority of the questions that were happening, I mean, I'm talking about safer hardware right now, but there has been also top discussions about the use of an iterative and an incremental way of working in which we incorporate colleagues from procurement or marketing, you know, that requires, you know, contextualization, and the fact that those discussions and those those talks, and you know that interest is happening is there, I think, is, you know, it just gives me a good feeling that We're that we're getting back to what this with the Agile way of working is all about, which is, you know, we're trying to look at results and trying to figure out the way of working along the way something and use something that is not super heavy or difficult or painful to the people that that work with it. I notice. I noticed, that, and I think that's a good

Stephan Neck: 12:22

thing. May I pick that up? Ali, my perception or impression was less density of social media for me as an outsider during the summit. And as you said, now this contextualization and the framework provides some of that stuff. Was that really represented in the customer experience talk. So was it just we all know as well. I'm a bit picky. Some meet the stages you perform, you talk about your success, but what about the failures? How do we now incrementally evolve into the future, and what are the real challenges that we have to face that also will influence how the framework will evolve over the time, because that's, for me, a huge part of the framework team. What's the direction and not to become over, overly constrained on certain topics, right? You're also opening the doors for a lot of new competencies that has two sides, had the positive side also might have a little bit of a challenge for the framework not to become overloaded with that. How well was that represented in the talks? If

Ali Hajou: 13:31

I if I may, there's what was presented during the summit. Was a report that has been created by, I think, was Steve Maynard, who, who spent most time on it, was who led this, this initiative, which is called the state of safe report, which is a freely downloadable report, and a culmination of huge amount of surveys and data that has been collected can be downloaded on The website of scale agile. I think you need to enter your name and email address so so it allows you to download the actual PDF. But in there, there are a couple of key findings, and just from the top of my head, one of the key findings was the the that contextualization of the framework can go into multiple directions. What, what we saw for what, what is being seen in the market is that there are different flavors of how safe has been used, therefore also wrong versions or painful versions of how safe has been used. For instance, that you know the safe organization, the safe framework can be used to rebrand existing structures that we have a department, and we take away the word department called an agile release train. It. And as a department, we're going to have a PI planning as a department, there is some department head. We call that, not the department manager, but, you know, product management, or we're going to call it the RTE, the release chain engineer. Or what was also somewhere in the in the key findings, was that certain roles are just, I don't know, not take it seriously. I'll just use my own my own words, such as the release train engineer role that is such a driver for change and trying to, you know, combine different competences and, you know, engineering disciplines all together into a stable team of teams that we call an agile release trade. There's so much value in, you know, the role that connects, you know, people that with different backgrounds. However, sometimes it's still seen as, you know, a little bit of a facilitation role. It's something that you do next to your serious work. And whenever, whenever we skip over that, you know, whenever we skip over that thought, what you get is, you know, sort of a fake implementation of safe or in a very ineffective one, one that, you know, people are not dumb whenever, whenever they see that their department is rebranded as an agile release train. And we now have pi plannings, and we have an RTE that doesn't really organize much, other than some meetings. You know, people would see, would see that the safe implementation is, you know, is not bringing what it promised. And so there have been a couple of these. I mean, there have been these types of insights, and that came back, you know, in the feedback gathering rounds and nicely summarated, summarized in the state of agile, states of state of safe reports. I always just, am always talking about the annual State of agile report. But this is a sort of a similar something. But I yeah, I recognize that. I

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 17:00

think you just just showed us. We'll need, we will need a new episode about just the safe report, absolutely. And also this was cool on stage, hearing more about problem solving, about how can we help the clients? That's something I think it's normal for, for people who do a lot of consulting and coaching, and I've seen also a shift going away from we are doing. I go to an old episode because I remember Mark made a joke. That's a joke. That's why I was I was laughing seeing, seeing an organization as an organism and not as a operating system. You just have to update. And I felt a lot of more let's make it more individual. What is your problem? How can we solve the problem? Solve the problem? And not say we have your solution? You just have to install it and then wait, and then it's it's finished. And we also came in mind while listening to you, one of my clients, times ago had such department trains, and he called these trains fake edge, other East trains, with the acronym Ford, which was a really cool acronym that

Mark Richards: 18:04

is one of your favorite clients to talk about, Niko,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 18:08

absolutely, absolutely. But let's think on the competencies. Stephan asked about how, how can we be careful not to to explode those because I realized on fellow stay when they asked us, do you want to contribute on one of the new competencies? And I always had in my mind, I want to specialize. I just don't want to do everything. Let's go for coaching. Because I love coaching. I love systemic coaching. Let's go for that. And then I start reading all disciplines, and I realized, oh gosh, everything is so interesting. And I personally ended up with writing something together with maurit about agility and strategy, because was a topic I was in years ago, and it's always like a hobby. And then I realized, oh, it's it's now very much more prominent than before, and let's work again with maurit and do something together there. And I had in my mind. I just want to focus myself on this area, because I think I can provide a lot of there, and I think it's really something we have to be careful, as Stephan said, before it opens too many bridges, maybe, and too many doors. What's your opinion on this? Competencies and disciplines, not dimensions? Sorry, I'm too old. Framework Mark,

Mark Richards: 19:22

I'm going to jump in because I've had a lot to do with the journey from from old to new. And I probably just add a little bit of context. If you think back right, last year, 21 episodes for us on the old competency model. And you know, seven competencies. It was three dimensions per competency, and we did an episode per and pretty regularly, would finish an episode about a specific dimension, we'd hang up, go off air, and then we'd talk to each other off air, and sometimes talk a bit more honestly, and we go, you know, this dimension feels like it's got a lot of overlap with that dimension. This feels redundant. This. Dimensions huge, that dimension small. And, you know, we'd spent a lot of time looking at the whole legacy model through a perspective of what can you get from it, and what's missing and what don't we like? And I think we'd kind of towards the end of our arc on that. I know I had a candidate new model in my head, and it was a very different one to the one that was out there. And it was really interesting comparing the frustrations we'd had, the problems we'd observed, some of the things that have been recognized internally. And you know, one of those was this trap of the formula of seven by three, we

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 20:32

need the third one. We need the third one. What to invent? No.

Mark Richards: 20:36

And you know, that moment of getting to a point of a bit of unleash, no pun intended. Was actually pretty big, and there was a lot of excitement in the framework team to go it opens new pallets for us to talk about new things, but also to talk about things that are contextual, because there's always been this kind of back thread in safe anything we write about, everybody will do. So we've got to be careful to not write too much about stuff that only some people should do, and getting to that place in the new competency and dimension model to go actually, we can write about stuff that not everybody's necessarily going to do on everybody's going to do all of but we can present a way that makes it places you might extend or deepen, as opposed to you must do, because it's on the core big picture. That was great, and it was really interesting. You talk about potential for so many competencies. We went through this process where we went, actually, we want every competency to feel kind of the same size. And again, that was kind of fixing some things from the past. But then as soon as you started to do that, wow, you had a long list of competencies. And you know, I remember we ran through and boy, the education of the feedback cycles that the framework team goes through, with clients, with key customer representatives, with fellows, with everything else before something actually appears on the stage. Is crazy, the level of discipline they've got around that. But it was amazing the first time we looked, because we had, kind of, originally, I think, our first draft, we had four disciplines, and each discipline had 10 or so competencies. And everybody looked and went 40 competencies. It's ridiculous. Sort of managing through that was fun. But what I loved, if I think about the big things I loved, perhaps the first one is safe has been, in a lot of ways, a closed ecosystem, right? Any guidance that went up on safe had to be handed over the IP rights to safe. And it was very much a we own the ecosystem. And I think the door really started to open here, because if you look at the extended competencies, well, all of a sudden we've got external collaborators with their own IP starting to bring that self originated IP into the safe ecosystem. And if you compare it to, and let's say, 10 topologies where, you know, they wrote a book, they've got their own IP, and there was a safe article that took some of it, and the authors perhaps didn't necessarily agree with how it took it compared to these active collaborations on some of the new extended competencies. I think that's brilliant. What I also love is the disciplines and the storytelling aspect of the disciplines, because if you think about safe, right? If you're like a person on the street learning safe, and I think for us, we've known it for so long and so many versions, we forget this stuff. Person on the street wanting to learn safe. How do you do it? Right? Do you click around in some systematic way over the big picture? You know? How do you get the story? Where you can get the story of safe by going on a class. Or I used to say to people, if you can't go on a class, you can get the story by reading safe distill. But it never felt like you could go to scale, dodgile framework.com, and read the story. And now we've got these disciplines, which is new surface to tell a new story, and and you open the discipline, and what do you get when you open the discipline? Well, actually you get almost like a mini big picture, just for the discipline, and then you get the story for the discipline. So there's a soft surface where they can start to connect concepts for you on the website in a way that, for me, never really existed before. So that's my excitement about the new things. I'm, of course, listening with beta breath to see how people in Sorrento like them. But

Ali Hajou: 23:46

so if I may, there's, there is another way to introduce safe to whomever is interested. You know, anyone that wants to begin or to sort of investigate it, which is also something that was presented during the summit, which is something very similar to the what we know of the scrum guide. The scrum guide, simple PDF that was 16 pages, but Andrew sales presented the another PDF called Safe, explained a little it was a little longer than that, I think, from the top my head, 2828 pages or so, but also freely downloadable, an explanation of what safe is, what the different elements of safe are, how to interpret that in a in a package that is at least overseeable, rather than indeed sending somebody on website and practically say, Oh, by The way, you know, you can start reading, click somewhere, and then start reading, you know, that was that sometimes, sometimes a bit overwhelming. So it's, you know, another, another example of simplification, which I just, I like, I just add, and

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 24:56

I, I like that, yeah, and the volunteer just to take care of the. Translation to German, so it's the safe explained will be translated in many, many languages. I just got very three examples to choose. Which one goes in the right direction. One was really horrible. The other two were okay. And let's see what's happened the next things, the next the next months. But yeah, you're right. Mark, having a story available for the people, a possibility to read was really cool, and I just copy pasted a picture from from the framework. When you go in a discipline, you really see another big picture, telling again the story. In this case, I've chosen lpm lean portfolio management so you have much more better content. So if you are interesting in portfolio, you have now your own big picture about or, you know, your own clickable explanation about how portfolio works. And this for all the disciplines. Yeah, disciplines here, not dimension. Sorry, it's also idea. I have to, have to get used to the new vocabulary. Sorry for that. Stephan, we interrupt you several times. I'm

Mark Richards: 26:01

going to jump in before. I can't resist. And by the way, I've got that picture being straight at the moment, I wanted to just probably give one shout out. There's a discipline I think the framework has not really given a lot of prevalence to over the years, and that's UX or design, and it's one of the things I'm hoping this new product, operating model, will start to see us see more visibly in the framework. But I did just want to give a shout out to a member of the framework team a lot of people probably doesn't know exists, because she's never going to get on a stage, and that's Riza. And Riza is their UX person, and she's not a methodologist, right? She's surrounded by methodologists and surrounded by people who are very much professional writers these days, but she gives this ability to bring the UX skill set to bear, to advance the thinking. And you know what we're looking at with these? This is very much. It's a recent picture, and, you know, it was hilarious for me. I look at the end result here, at this complete little mini big picture. It's clickable. It's the story surface. You know, I saw the first five iterations of that. Let me tell you, it didn't start out like that. And so I think there's a real testament to the value of having a UX person on a team, even when it's a team of crazy, deep thinking methodologists, it's amazing. So anyway,

Stephan Neck: 27:15

yeah, Mark, you just mentioned it. Eat your own dog food, right? It's customer centricity, if you don't know the customer, the user journey, what's the first about a framework? But I like this shift towards the dimensions and the different competencies. A huge congrats to the framework team and all those guys contributed towards it. I really like it. Having said that, this is now the challenge, and you mentioned it, Ali, and you guys mentioned it. How do you enter the framework? How do you contextualize? Let's talk about being a change agent, right? No matter what label you have, if you're an SBC or a T or a fellow, I don't care my my challenge is, how do I bring it now into the context, right? How do I make the work and already the rap the ramp up to the safe Summit. Having access to some material influenced my way of teaching and coaching drastically, right? I hardly start the course with the slides. I start with the simplified big picture, the four stories I'm starting now. And I had a course this week where I said, Okay, what dimension are we talking about? And one guy kicked in and said, do you mean essential, safe or portfolio? Said, No, let's talk about a dimension. And that's like in sports. If you have a dimension, you enter a discipline, there's a lot of competency behind it, like training competency, material competency, whatever it is, is used, if you throw a hammer, if you are in a 100 meter dash, different competencies. But it's a discipline which requires some dimension. I really like the picture at the moment, how it is, how it can be used. Having said that in my intro as well, there's a fine line between now doing the copy paste again, falling back in old habits, or really using the new stage with all the stuff that is being behind the curtain. Happy days ahead. Great

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 29:17

guys. We are half an hour. So this usually when I moderate it's jiggles time, so we the jingle for jiggles time. Mark, next time. So this time I tried something to I hope that Mark doesn't ask his avatar to ask AIS to give the answer. So it was really open question. So imagine the safe summit being a roller coaster. Tell me more, Mark, tell me more. All

Mark Richards: 29:41

right. Well, no, it's not my avatar, because I actually used my agent before the show to figure out my roller coaster ride. So I have the ghost train of missed moments.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 29:57

Tell me more.

Mark Richards: 29:59

Well, you see. I originally thought I would be inside right when safe summit Sorrento was announced. I went awesome Amalfi Coast. What an amazing place for a conference. I might even take my wife, because there'll be fun stuff for us to do while we're there. And, you know, I spoke last year in Berlin. I spoke the year before in Prague, and I'll come up with a good talk, and I'll be there. And, you know, for once, instead of just me going to a conference to geek out, I'll have my wife with me, and it'll be just, and then they didn't like my talk, and my wife decided she'd rather go to Japan and look at historic gardens with her mother than come to Italy with me. And I went, you know what, I'm not talking my wife's not coming. I'm going to stay home. And I convinced myself, you know, it was just, it was their fault because they didn't pick my talk, because it my talk, because it was going to be brilliant. I didn't care that I wasn't going. And then it started right, and the buzz starts to happen. And you see all these people that you really enjoy spending time with, and you have really Sparky conversations with, and somebody says, Oh, it was the best fellows day ever. And it's like, oh, I wasn't there. Hence it is. Maybe that was the reason the ghost train of design. Thank you, Ali,

Unknown: 31:14

I had to add to make that joke. I'm sorry, who wants next? Thank you, Mark. So if I

Ali Hajou: 31:22

just, you know, Niko is his jiggles. If the safe servant in Sorrento was a roller coaster, which one would it be? I would say any roller coaster that goes extremely fast and then all of a sudden stays still for very long, so that you have the ability to have a little bit of pre fun and some after fun, and you chit chat while it's standing still, and then the moment that it starts again, it shoots off, and then again, it goes really fast. And I think that's sort of it represents a little bit how I experienced the safe Summit, even though it was just a couple of days. I mean, it was, you know, we had a Monday. It was the SBCT day Tuesday and Wednesday conference, and that went on so fast. The thing is, I had the moments that were slower were the moments that I was chatting with people that I knew, or, as a matter of fact, I also talked with a couple of people who listen at this podcast.

Unknown: 32:21

They're like, Hey, I know you from the podcast. Fantastic.

Ali Hajou: 32:25

So that was really nice. And for whomever is listening also today, thank you so much for spending the time with us on this on the Saturday, or if it's recorded, whenever you're listening to it, listening to it. But I just, I really like the chats, because it's just you'd get something back of how they experienced the new trainings, or what they've been doing with new art launches or new portfolio management type. This

Stephan Neck: 32:53

time, it was really easy when I read the question. The same evening, I was watching on TV a series about roller coasters, and a professor from the Cambridge University said they asked people what they think, which part of the ride puts in the biggest heart rate peak, and ostensibly, people say during the ride, as you described, Ali, maybe a loop, maybe the moment where you hang up 50 meters over ground and all of a sudden it drops. And they found out, no, that's not the case. It's the case when you start sitting into the cart and when they tie you up, right? That's when your heart rate goes up to the highest peak. That's interesting for me. Always the preparation time, the ramp up time to events like a summit or other events, I must admit, yeah, that's really the most intensive time. And then strapping in, into the event, it's, it's like the retaining bar coming down, right? And I think if you look at that retaining bar, it's a safety system component to master forces. And the safe Summit is like a part of an ongoing ride. But every time you embark on a new ride, this peak being restrained. But you're not restrained to have less freedom. It's being restrained to master forces. And I think that's for me, the the kind of, the reason why I intend such events to get better in master mastering forces, everything else is, is kind of falling into places, so that I have a good roller coaster, right?

Unknown: 34:37

What a story teller. Stephan,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 34:40

I love this part of the show. I love this part so cool. In my case, I stayed also a little bit on the meta level. So those who know me and my family, we are a huge fan of the Europa Park, so we are spending many, many vacations there. And once in a while, they introduce new roller coasters, and each safe Summit is for me, like in year. Type of lower coaster. It belongs to a park. There's a theme it has, has, yeah, it's maybe in a country, or it has some kind of a theme. And still, you, you're, you're part of how it's created. So they're calling you for for papers, the Mickey coffee paper. They're rejecting you. They're taking you. They're explaining you something, etc. And each time itself, oh, I know the whole architecture of the roller coaster. I know when it breaks, when it goes, accelerates, and so on and so on. But each time, it's a excitement, even if it's quite the same. Because I'm not sure if you can invent something new in the roller coasters. It's always you sit there and it goes, Yeah, of course there are some elements. It's, it's hanging there, or it's on trails, or is it, is it going up, or is it, is it pushed with main magnets and so on. But each time you it's, it's something new. And this something new, it's a cool thing. So and then you wait online until it opens. The first time you write. You sit there, your heartbeat goes up, and then you're surprised that some elements are different than you thought. And this time I had also many, many surprises, save Summit, and it's not the first one, it's not the first roller coaster, but it was the first one in Sorrento, and it has its own character. So it was really a cool, cool ride. Stephan talking about rights and going to Sorrento. So I think you asked, you asked safe co pilots about why somebody should attempt to save some do I should somebody sit on the roller coaster? What was the answer? Yeah,

Stephan Neck: 36:32

I did. Because, as the old dog in this community here, I forget quite a lot. So safe call pilot reminded me access to experts, and that's what you already mentioned, right? People talking to other people. Oh, there's Ali. I've seen him on shaping agility, then real world experiences, with the focus on real world, right? Also admitting failure, but only do it once, and then, as Mark said, iteratively get better over the time. Best Practices probably now, with the new dimensions and the core competencies, the next few safe events probably will shift a little bit when it comes to best practices. Now we are embarking on new journeys. We are introducing new competencies. I'm looking forward to that one, networking opportunities. It's a people business, right? I like networking. I like talking to you guys. I like talking to my clients. That's what I really miss. This this time, not going to Sorrento and then in depth training, you mentioned it, Niko like, what about the new training regarding lean portfolio management? Also looking forward to these kind of things that will surface over the time. I'd like

Mark Richards: 37:53

to just jump in on the back of a couple of those points that co pilot gave a good comment about starting one of them would be real world experiences like I used to, I know I used to, once upon a time, I would go to every customer story at a safe Summit. That was how I planned my safe Summit. I was like, go to every customer story because I wanted to hear real stories. Then, of course, what I learned was the story you hear on the stage is the one that the legal team at the customer allows them to tell, yeah, and I actually, I wasn't really interested in learning from the good stuff. I was learning, interested in learning from their pain points, and most people don't get to talk about them. So I made a habit of following up. You know, I'd find the social events, I would find the dinners, or find, you know, the whatever, the opportunity go and see somebody who shared a customer story on stage and go, Hey, now we're off stage and there's no microphones and recordings, can we talk a little more deeply? And I think for me, that's probably the thing that copilot missed in that list, was it's not just the access when you go to a session, it's the conversations you can have when you're out of a session. Let me

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 38:53

say something I think nobody knows in the show how the show was created, or this podcast was created. We started in writing articles, and we realize the time between the articles is the most fun and most interesting part, so we started just broadcasting our discussions. And meanwhile, I think the time between the shows, when we prepare and we are finished, I think are the most interesting. Maybe we need the behind the scene podcast, just talking openly, like you said in stage, but yeah, sometimes I'm too crazy. I'm still in my sleeping mode because we have still vacation here, so maybe I'm not 100% fit in mindset. Let's,

Stephan Neck: 39:31

let's put a listening device on mark that follows him all day through, and that will be a very, very successful and influential streaming looking forward to it, mark,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 39:46

but one thing that triggered me, Mark You said handling experts on stage, having time to talk to them. Ali, you were facilitating the hardware cycle as a discussion cop or as a circle, any transform there or any insight. It's from the hardware.

Ali Hajou: 40:01

Yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, making a brief link back again to the state of safe report, because I've opened it up on my laptop and I I scrolled through it, and I was like, Oh, yes, indeed, a part of the feedback was, it's actually for whomever would like to follow. I think this is page come on. Well, I don't see the page number just yet. I think it's 3838 there is. There was a question about, what about evolving safe? So what should it contain, or what should it emphasize, and rather than just simplification and flexibility, it also talks about it also has summarized it to having safe open enough, or maybe even recognizing the integration of other methodologies, and that includes blending safe with ITSM ITIL, traditional project management approaches have been mentioned over here, why? And that's written down in the next page. It talks about that, especially in the large organizations, and especially in organizations that that use safe in environments outside of just it, or software development faith gates approaches, there is what we call traditional project management, which is still ongoing project management, that those kind of governance structures are still in place, not necessarily because the company or the enterprise wants it, but because maybe the Department of Defense of the local country which the company is situated, demands that, or because of industry standards, because you're creating medical devices, and there are just specific compliancy rules, you know, they demand that. So having the having the ability to and then maybe even the guidance to use safe in these type of contexts is just, you know, what the industry wants, what the industry needs. So I'm you know, and I've been talking about the safe for hardware, let's say the use of safe in hardware environments, and the discussions that we had, and the examples that were shared, and the chats that were that happened right after really emphasized about well, then how do you iterate until these face gates? What type of people that are traditionally involved in these phase gates are still involved, if we have, you know, an RTE and product management, product owners, who are way more sort of busy with the ongoing work, so there is less to report out, or there's a different stakeholder group to report out. So how does that work? And I found, I found that that angle really interesting, simply because I think it generates a precedent for publishing practical guidance. So the those case studies that mark just talked about, you know, the customer stories, I mean, that mark just talked about, I mean, on the safe website as a skilled, agile framework website forever, we had these customer stories back in the days. Was called case studies. And these are pretty high level, high level, sort of experience share back but there's just a need for some more specifics and and I think that that is what the safer hardware training material, but just also the, yeah, the knowledge capture around it is doing it's, you know, it's diving a little bit more into these specifics.

Mark Richards: 43:51

You know, the fascinating thing for me about that, because I was reflecting back, I don't know if you guys remember when we did, we did one time after, think, when we got to the end of our competency, we all got together and we had a chat about, like, what competencies would we kill? I don't know if you guys remember this right. And between us, we figured out we would actually kill because the large solution competency. We all looked at it. We went, Oh, we think this dimension should go in Portfolio Management. This dimension should go in here. And we basically went, kill off the large solution one, and when time came that we started thinking about disciplines, because really, what used to be competencies is now reframed as disciplines. I was on that mission, right? And part of my role as I was working with the framework team was I would suggest crazy stuff, and they would put me back on the ground, and I wanted to, like, retain, you know, we got to kill that. And they're like, but it's really important. We've got all these stories. And I'd look and I'd go, all those stories are not really about large solution. They're about things that come in certain contexts where you have to care about them. And you know, something like the hardware discussion you just had, right? In some ways, what you just did was you talked about something that's nothing to do with hardware, because it's not hardware specific, but it's a situation that people doing safe for hard. Where perhaps find themselves in much more frequently than others. And I think this is very interesting tension point for folks to go. You know, at what point, you know, how do people find the help? Because I think there's an awful lot of people who aren't doing hardware that have the problem you just talked about, Ali, and it's really fascinating to me how safe as they maintain their knowledge base, make available that kind of information, knowing that if you're doing hardware, it's just one reason why it might be relevant to

Unknown: 45:25

and I think that's happening for the good, cool. Now we

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 45:28

have a little surprise, because we don't have so much time left, I would ask you guys to put the things you want to talk to in the inner circle of our Miro board. So for the audience, it's now you can have no idea what I'm asking, what I'm talking about, but it's something you want to talk about next five minutes. Please put in a circle only one thing, and then we go through it. Maybe we should share the inner circle for the audience later. So

Mark Richards: 45:53

just just while people are dragging me running out of time, I'm going to do a screen share, by the way, folks, this is our Miro board that facilitates our posts or our episodes and the inner circles this one I'm just zooming in on where we're all picking the thing we most want to talk about. So hopefully I've bought us enough time. Let's go with Stephan

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 46:11

and the question. The question is, what do we expect between between now and Denver? You all have chosen the yellow one, so no other topic, so we stay with the last question. Great. Stephan, what do we expect? Yeah, I

Stephan Neck: 46:24

think, based on what we just discussed, a more fluid framework for competencies, but you can tie them to the disciplines, so you have kind of a structure in there, and you know where to start your journey, perhaps a cleanup of products, courses, MCs, skills, and that's probably the hard work that that the sai people are doing now till the next summit, so that we have a more consistent framework. I'm looking forward to challenging the contributions and the talks and even the different competencies, because there's some really good work in it. Look at transforming people development. But I will question sure we have people developers, because if you do the mapping of what people development is, you already have it in the process authorities. So that's probably the game we will have for the next few months and years. And the hope for me is to also get a clear answer to the dual operating system, which is still a big pain for our customers. My interpretation of Kotter is there is only one operating system, the one you have, and not the one you probably tried to achieve, and is probably not even feasible. So these are my expectations for the future.

Mark Richards: 47:47

I'll go next. Look, obviously, there's more competencies to come. I'm assuming there's more work on the Configuring safe stuff, but I know with the competencies that I think the goal was to go live. I haven't gone back and checked I think the goal was to go live with kind of two or three competencies from every discipline in the new format. And so there's a lot of competencies in the core competency space to fill in between now and Denver, there's also obviously new extended competencies. But I think what fascinates me most, and this comes back to context and problem orientation, is if you think about the big picture and the elements of the framework, they're organized. For a methodologist, I have a framework. It has five disciplines. I click on a discipline. It has 10 competencies and two extended competencies. And you know, this is the way I think about things. Or I try and find myself on the picture and I click on the thing I think is going to help me. But if you look at it another way, and you go, actually, there's a whole bunch of building blocks, right? There's all these base articles, and sometimes a single article is the answer you need, or there's competencies. And often what a competency will do is it will collect a group of articles and say, you know, the first thing you should do if you want to get somewhere, if there's competency, is go and read these six articles and maybe watch that summit presentation. But it's still just a building block orientation, and the thing that I was most excited about, and I always got in trouble with the framework team, because I'll go think about what's enabling, as opposed to the just the pizzazz on itself. For me, the enablement was to go, I could do a scenario and go, if I'm in this situation, right, and I'm struggling with these things, but this stuff's going well, then I think probably I should be focusing on these two competencies from this discipline and this one competency from that discipline. And if I use them together, they'll help me where I am. So starting to look at different ways of, you know, a situational navigation of the competencies, as opposed to a logical decomposition and navigation orientation of them. And then if you go a little bit further and you go, actually, I can start to think about how I might train safe Copilot to get to the point where somebody could get onto the website and go, this is where I am, what should I be looking at? And it can go, if you look at this combination of competencies, and you thread them together like this, this will help you and giving people different ways to find this. Off that's really going to help them with

Ali Hajou: 50:02

IO My hope is that between now and well, maybe the next safe Summit, or at least in the upcoming years, the main topics that are described in the state of safe report, such as their difficulties in value stream funding. So, you know, an issue or problem that a lot of companies face for very, very valid reasons, regulatory requirements, issues, that's a very hard change to make. And so for that sort if, if, if, a lot of questions arise from these types of problems, and it's a very good space in which, in which to search for solutions, maybe even to publish existing solutions. So I really hope that in the upcoming year or so, we're going to see some more ideas, guidance, examples, for, for, that are related to the topics that are mentioned or deemed to be problematic or difficult for most so that's, that's what I'm looking forward

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 51:09

to. Yeah, what we unfortunately missed in this show, which we which we prepared already we had. There is a new workshop out there for advanced SPCs about I call it portfolio slicing, if you are in a company with several kind of portfolios, which portfolio to slice. But I think we have to do this in a differently episode as a whole. And it makes also sense to talk about the state, state of safe report and about the new safe discipline. So we just opened three new episodes, and I think Ali should in the background, try to choose which one is next for next Saturday. So I let you do the work. You have an area to remove the post it and say which one you want to moderate the next time. But closing, just one takeaway of the safe summit of this show, what is

Mark Richards: 51:51

it? Okay.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 51:56

Mark starts. I'm starting.

Mark Richards: 51:58

So I think mine would be safe. Summits are really expensive, but also really rewarding. And the trick is you got to know why you're going and how you're going to get the most from it. And you know all the things you can do while you're there. And it could be as simple as, Are you going to sign up for the spct coaching station every time you go and sit down for lunch? Are you going to look for a table full of people you don't know instead of a table full of people, you do know, what are you going to do to find and have deeper conversations with people outside the room? Or who are you going to consult for guidance on who's a good speaker, right, and why you should always go and watch Ali or Niko so planet, that's one key takeaway. But planet,

Ali Hajou: 52:37

well, we all heard, and me included, we all heard the market to talk about simplification or to simplify. Well, I think the response of Sai speaks for itself. I

Stephan Neck: 52:49

think as a change agent, if I want less roller coaster and more sustainable rights, I'll be there and you, hopefully as well.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 52:56

And my takeaways is a meta takeaway, small batches and continuously involving of safe. That was my takeaway of safe. And what's happened for me was now I really also feel the pace, because years before, yeah, well, slowly, you wait for the Big Bang. And now, every once in a while, you have to read stuff so, and I haven't read even all disciplines that are out since Summit. So small batches. And with that mark, bring us home? Well,

Mark Richards: 53:21

I'm gonna bring us home because I can share that. Ali has chosen that next week he'd last like to host an exploration in the state of safe report. So I think you've just volunteered yourself mate and some fun prep for us in the week to come and stay tuned. Stay with us. Join us next week, and we had at least one live person, Nicole, thank you for joining us and chipping in on LinkedIn. Nicole, or anybody else been watching, we're keeping an eye on your comments. If you've got a question or something you want to add to the discussion, and you just pop it in a comment, we'll bring it in. We're watching. We're ready and we're willing. And if you hadn't known we love getting curveballs. That's why we let Niko give us a jiggle every week. And live curveballs are even more fun. So we'll see you all next week for the state of safe survey.