Any tool or process that doesn’t align to the principles in the status report should be discussed extensively with practitioners in the Agile community before it is called Agile.

I like the way you’ve pitched this. discussed with, not necessarily agreed with. It signals intent: as a result of scaling, Agile may have to move some of its stuff around.

We’re already hitting a major area of this. A major bone of contention for many longstanding Agilistas is accepting the idea of systems thinking: that taking a systems view and gaining the value latent in a systems approach may mean giving up a lot of locally powerful stuff. In principle, Systems Thinking is fairly orthodox within the community – Goldratt is well quoted, and The Goal is well read (either directly or through The Phoenix Project, Rolling Rocks Downhill or other domain-versions). But the implications are still controversial.

How can we claim Deming’s heritage (and we do, and we should) if we do not continually seek to elevate practise and real world experience over should/shouldn’t, even while being based on sound principles.

That’s our raison d’etre: we meet the needs of our target context with practises that are tried and are known to work in that context. And it’s our response to the naysayers: Eppur se mouve.

Deming again: By What Means?

This means though, that we need a clear means for experimentation and learning in our own environments to produce candidates. And a ‘bubbling under’ layer of practise that isn’t quite SAFe Canon, but that experienced practitioners should be able to draw on.