Each week in SAFe Connect, we share one practical tip from a member of the community to help you apply SAFe in more meaningful ways.
This week, Mark Moskovitz challenges us to look beyond process when work gets stuck and focus instead on something that can have an immediate impact on flow: making decision rights explicit.
💡 Tip of the Week: Make Decision Rights Explicit
A surprising amount of what looks like an Agile problem is really a decision-making problem.
Teams are waiting for approval. Dependencies keep escalating. Leaders are getting pulled into decisions that should be made closer to the work. When I see those patterns, I try to look at decision rights before adding another event or changing the process.
I believe strongly that big consequences deserve big decisions, and small consequences deserve small decisions. I’ll also admit that I don’t always practice this as well as I preach it. I have a tendency to want to stay involved and maintain control.
That’s part of the lesson.
For me, improving flow means creating clarity around a few things:
- When can people act on their own?
- When do they need to align with others?
- When does a decision truly need to escalate?
- What guardrails give people enough clarity to make the decision themselves?
Once those boundaries are clear, I have to actually let people use that agency.
That connects to some of the best advice I’ve received recently: focus less on proving how much work is happening and more on making the outcome visible—and delegate more. As I’ve become responsible for more, I’ve learned that staying close to everything doesn’t scale. It can even make the people around me less effective.
I’m learning that leadership is less about being involved in every answer and more about creating clarity, setting the right guardrails, making the desired outcome clear, and trusting other people to figure out more of the “how.”
Sometimes, improving flow doesn’t require another event. It requires making it clearer who gets to decide.
