In an earlier post, I explored strategy as a form of enabling constraint, with enough boundary to create alignment, and enough width to allow creative and adaptive action. More recently, I’ve been thinking about the five Flight Levels Activities as a form of enabling constraint. Each one (Visualize the Situation, Create Focus, Establish Agile Interactions, Measure Progress, and Operate and Improve) describes a space within which teams have the freedom to perform.
Thus, the Flight Levels Activities work the same way. And like ski slopes, each one can be set too tight or too loose. That connection to ski slopes isn’t accidental. A while back, I wrote about process safeguards and ski slopes, exploring how different processes have different levels of safeguard built in, and how the right level depends on the skill, trust, and maturity of the team involved. A nursery slope has wide, forgiving boundaries with lots of room to make mistakes without consequence. A black run is tight and demanding, with little margin for error, and high precision is required. Off-piste has almost no boundaries at all, and rewards only those capable of navigating without them.
The metaphor works because ski slopes don’t just restrict movement. They also create the conditions for skilful performance within a defined space. The same is true of the Flight Levels Activities. Let’s explore each of them from this perspective.
Visualise the Situation
Making the current situation visible, such as workflows, priorities, metrics, and plans, is the foundation of everything else. As a constraint, it defines what information people have access to when they make decisions. Too tight and visibility is restricted; too loose and there’s so much visible that nothing stands out.
| Too tight | Too loose |
|---|---|
| Teams can only see their own immediate work. The wider context, such as dependencies, priorities, or progress at other levels, is invisible. Decisions feel arbitrary because the reasons behind them aren’t shared. | Everything is visible at once. Every metric, every dependency, every strategic concern competes for attention equally. Signal disappears into noise, and it’s unclear what actually matters. |
Create Focus
WIP limits, time boxes, sequencing, and start policies help concentrate effort on what matters most. As a constraint, this activity defines the scope of what people are expected to be working on at any one time. But focus isn’t just about limiting what’s started. It’s about driving work through to Done, where Done means realising value and meeting user needs, or learning about how to do that better. Too tight and focus becomes control; too loose and everything is in progress simultaneously, with little actually finishing.
| Too tight | Too loose |
|---|---|
| Prioritisation and sequencing decisions are made for teams rather than by them. There’s no room to exercise judgment about how to organise and progress the work. | Everything is in flight at the same time. Starting is easy; finishing is rare. Work accumulates without reaching the point where it delivers value or generates meaningful learning. |
Establish Agile Interactions
Standups, planning sessions, demos, retrospectives, and decisions about asynchronous communication all fall here. As a constraint, this activity defines the cadence and structure of connections across the system. Too tight and interactions become ritual; too loose and coordination breaks down.
| Too tight | Too loose |
|---|---|
| Every interaction is prescribed in detail: mandatory formats, fixed channels, scripted agendas. Coordination becomes something people perform rather than something they use. Attendance replaces engagement. | There’s no shared structure for coordination. Teams don’t know when they’re expected to synchronise, with whom, or about what. Misalignments surface only when they’re already expensive to address. |
Measure Progress
Tracking progress against goals, and being willing to update both the goals and the measures as learning accumulates, is what closes the loop between intention and reality. As a constraint, it defines what counts as evidence that things are working. Too tight and teams optimise for the measure; too loose and there’s no way to tell whether anything is improving.
| Too tight | Too loose |
|---|---|
| Goals are so loosely defined that they can’t be tested. There’s no signal to act on, so it’s hard to know what to change, what to continue, or when to stop. | Goals are so loosely defined that they can’t be tested. There’s no signal to act on, so it’s hard to know what to pivot, what to pause, or when to persevere. |
Operate and Improve
This activity is about actually using what the system produces, and not just generating data, but letting learning flow back into the work. As a constraint, it defines the expectation that people will act on what they learn within the scope of their work. Too tight and the loop is visible but broken; too loose and learning stays local.
| Too tight | Too loose |
|---|---|
| Teams can see what needs to change but can’t act without escalation and approval. Learning accumulates without translating into improvement. The feedback loop is present in theory, but closed in practice. | Every team experiments in its own direction with no coherent connection to what the organisation is trying to learn. Things improve locally, but improvements don’t add up across the system. |
Adjusting the Constraints
As I noted in the enabling constraints post, neither too tight nor too loose is inherently wrong. Instead, the question is always whether the current constraints are appropriate for the current context. The right balance depends on the experience and maturity of the people involved, the volatility of the environment, and which of the Flight Levels you’re working with.
Strategy Deployment, at its heart, is the practice of setting and adjusting these kinds of constraints across the organisation to create alignment without removing the thinking. The five Flight Levels Activities offer a useful map of where the constraints could sit. However, the question worth asking regularly isn’t “are we doing these Flight Levels Activities?” It’s “are the constraints we’ve set here creating the right space?” A team that has a board but never acts on what it shows is technically visualising their work. But if the constraint is too tight or too loose, the activity won’t do the work it’s meant to do.