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.

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”.