What is the difference between LeSS, DAD and SAFe

I'm going to give my novice and biased opinion...

"LeSS" is about taking small Scrum teams and scaling them up to an entire organization. I'm not sure if any two organizations have ever accomplished this using the same roadmap; it seems like we just found a bunch of organizations with similar goals and lumped them all together under an acronym.

SaFE is about setting up a organizational structure from the top and allowing scrum teams to exist. It flows more top-down, in contrast to the bottom-up view of LeSS.

My bias is showing here. I view SaFE as a rigid system that protects middle managers who aren't adding value. Plenty of people who are smarter and richer than me will say that I'm wrong, and you can probably make a decent amount of money as a SaFE consultant if you cash in on it now before it gives way to the next fad. I simply think there are better organizational structures.

My own opinion: if your organization is going to be Agile, then just be Agile. You might need help, but if your organization is ready to embrace that degree of transformative cultural change, then you won't need to "scale" it. (How do you scale a culture?) There are plenty of operational frameworks that you can use if you have the trust and flexibility required to be Agile.

But if you're not ready for that type of change, then don't waste your money on fad consultants who can help you pretend to be Agile when you're really not. There are still plenty of large and successful organizations that have a more traditional structure.

Thanks Wade.