Lean

Strategy Deployment and Flight Levels

This is another post in the series that compares Strategy Deployment and other approaches. This one is about Flight Levels.

Visualisarion of the 3 flight levels with Flight Level 3 (tretegic level) at the top, then Flight Level 2 (coordination level) in the middle and Flight Level 1 (oprtaitonal level) at the bottom.

What are Flight Levels?

Klaus Leopold created Flight Levels as a way of enabling business agility by connecting team agility to strategy. It has its roots in the Kanban community.

Klaus has described it as “a thinking model that shows a systems architecture connecting all (agile) teams by means of 5 activities (visualize the situation, create focus, establish agile interactions, measure progress, initialize improvements) on 3 flight levels (strategic, coordination, operational).” This can be seen in the image on the right.

Thus at its heart, there are three levels,

  • Strategy
  • Coordination
  • Operation

with 5 activities which happen at every level, and continuously repeat.

  • Visualise the situation
  • Create focus
  • Establish agile interactions
  • Measure progress
  • Operate and improve

Flight Levels and Strategy

Flight Levels describes its mechanism for strategy as SOFI – Stories, Outcomes and Flight Items. It works as follows:

  1. Make Flight Items visible on Flight Level 3 (strategic level) boards
  2. Visualise long-, mid- and short-term Outcomes
  3. Connect your Outcomes with the Flight Items
  4. Provide context with Stories

Flight Levels and the X-Matrix

The above SOFI elements can be mapped on a TASTE X-Matrix quite easily. Firstly, the Flight Items are the Tactics that are being worked on. Then the long-term outcomes can be framed as Aspirations, the mid-term outcomes as Strategies, and the short-term outcomes as Evidence. Further, the various Correlations show the different connections between the Outcomes and the Flight Items.

Finally, the X-Matrix itself provides a lot of context on a single page. However, I would also suggest that using a technique such as Backbriefing will also help with providing additional context as a way of generating Stories.

Thus Flight Levels is a perfect fit for Strategy Deployment. I have said for a long time that “having agile teams does not make you an agile organisation”. In fact, I had this quote printed on a T-Shirt at Agile 2014. Subsequently, that shirt has been lost over time sadly. However, Flight Levels is effectively solving that same problem. Its different levels and activities, alongside SOFI, provide a way of visualising and managing the work, such that “solutions can emerge from the people closest to the problem”.