SAFe Agilist Readiness: Scale Agile Across the Whole Organization
Signature Course No. 415 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's SAFe Agilist Readiness: Scale Agile Across the Whole Organization course, in the Leadership & Management category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
A single agile team can be taught in a week — an organization of fifty teams that must ship one product together cannot. Its problem is different: not how one team plans its next two weeks, but how dozens of teams align on the same priorities, surface their dependencies before those dependencies surface themselves, fund the work that matters most, and keep a whole portfolio pointed at the customer while the market moves. The Scaled Agile Framework exists to answer that second problem, and this course teaches it from the leader's seat, the way the Leading SAFe credential examines it.
It starts with the outcome the whole framework serves. Business Agility — the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally enabled business solutions — tested clause by clause against a running organization, Tarnwick Systems, whose teams could build a regulator's change in six weeks while its committees, funding silos, and monthly steering group consumed the other eight months.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Lead the Foundation, Launch the Train — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The First Train, Ready to Board; then, Module 2 — Run the Portfolio, Sustain the System — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Portfolio That Funds Value.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a launch-ready brief for Tarnwick's first Agile Release Train, ending in a PI Planning readiness brief a leadership team could act on; and a portfolio operating plan for Tarnwick's second year on the framework — strategy, funding, flow, and sustainment in one document.
The honesty standard is part of the course. This course promises readiness, never a result: it prepares you to sit the Leading SAFe (SAFe Agilist) credential examination with your judgment in order, and it does not promise a pass, a score, or a credential. No endorsement is implied: Cognosco Learning is not Scaled Agile, Inc., and this is not an official Scaled Agile course. Scaled Agile revises the framework over time, so before any examination you check the current published framework diagram and examination outline against what you studied here — and where critics of the framework raise substantive objections, the course presents them fairly, because a leader who can only recite the framework cannot defend a decision made with it.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
SAFe Agilist Readiness: Scale Agile Across the Whole Organization is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the last significant market or regulatory change your organization faced. How long from first signal to funded decision, and from funded decision to working solution in customers' hands — and where did the time actually go? Which opportunity did you see clearly and still miss, and was the miss a delivery failure, a decision failure, or a funding failure? And where does your operating model force innovation work through a structure built for predictability — which meeting, which approval, which budget rule? Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The First Train, Ready to Board for Module 1 and The Portfolio That Funds Value for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Scale does not break agile — it breaks the assumption that alignment happens by itself. Inside one team, alignment is a conversation. Multiply the team by twelve, point the twelve at one product, and the conversation stops happening by itself: priorities diverge quietly, dependencies are discovered in the week they bite, and each team can honestly report a good iteration while the product as a whole goes nowhere a customer would pay for.
Module 1 builds the foundation and launches the train. Business Agility and the leadership stance without which the rest is ceremony; the framework's ten principles and four core values taught as decision tools, not wall posters; organizing around value — operational and development value streams; the Agile Release Train, a long-lived team of teams of fifty to one hundred twenty-five people; PI Planning, the two-day event that synchronizes the whole train; and the economics and execution rhythm of the Planning Interval — features, capabilities, WSJF, iterations, the System Demo, and Inspect and Adapt.
Module 2 runs the portfolio and sustains the system. The Large Solution level for work no single train can carry; the portfolio level — strategic themes, epics, and funding value streams instead of projects; Lean Portfolio Management's three responsibilities held as one system; the framework's roles as a division of authority by concern; flow at every level; customer centricity as a working circuit; Measure and Grow, assessing the system without gaming it; and the implementation roadmap and sustain-and-improve discipline that keep the adoption alive after its launch year.
And it holds its boundary throughout. This course teaches one framework, at scale, as published — it does no survey work. Team-level flow and team-level Scrum practice live in their own courses on the shelf, and the cross-framework practitioner credential in another; here, team-level practice is assumed ground, and every page is spent on what changes when fifty teams must do it together.
What you will learn
- Explain Business Agility and the framework's foundations — core values, principles, and the Lean-Agile mindset — and apply them to a scaling decision
- Organize work around value: identify value streams and form an Agile Release Train on defensible principles
- Run PI Planning as the framework defines it — its inputs, its two-day shape, its outputs, and the leader's part in each
- Manage flow into and through a Planning Interval: features, capabilities, Weighted Shortest Job First, iterations, the Innovation and Planning iteration, the System Demo, and Inspect and Adapt
- Coordinate very large work: the Solution Train, solution intent, and supplier and compliance patterns at framework level
- Work the portfolio level: strategic themes, epics, the portfolio backlog and kanban, and Lean Portfolio Management's three responsibilities
- Staff and support the framework's defined roles, and lead the change the framework requires — including its implementation roadmap and its sustain-and-improve discipline
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of SAFe Agilist Readiness: Scale Agile Across the Whole Organization, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The First Train, Ready to Board and The Portfolio That Funds Value
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for leaders whose work spans teams
Executives and portfolio leaders — who fund value streams, set strategic themes, and need the framework's portfolio level in their bones rather than in a briefing deck; and program and train leaders — Release Train Engineers, product managers, system architects, and the managers who support them — who run the cadence the whole organization plans by.
Team leaders moving up — Scrum Masters, product owners, and team leads whose next job is leading across teams, and who need the scale picture before they are handed it.
Credential candidates — practitioners preparing for the Leading SAFe (SAFe Agilist) examination who want readiness built on understanding the framework's reasoning, not on memorizing its vocabulary. This course assumes team-level agile fluency, or equivalent experience inside an agile team; it assumes no prior SAFe experience and no prior leadership title — the leadership it teaches is a set of behaviors, and behaviors can be learned from any seat.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with Business Agility
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
SAFe Agilist Readiness: Scale Agile Across the Whole Organization is Signature Course No. 415. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.