Flight Levels

Flight Levels is a thinking model connecting strategy, coordination, and operations to enable true business agility across all levels of an organization

What Are Flight Levels?

Flight Levels is a business agility thinking model created by Klaus Leopold to bridge the gap between strategy and execution. It provides a structured way to visualize and manage work across three interconnected levels - strategic, coordination, and operational - ensuring that organizational goals are effectively translated into outcomes. Unlike prescriptive frameworks, Flight Levels is method-agnostic and focuses on improving the flow of value across the entire organization.

The model is not about hierarchy or job titles; instead, it categorizes the type of work being done and the level at which decisions are made. This makes it applicable to organizations of any size, industry, or maturity level in Agile, Lean, or DevOps adoption.

Origins and Context

Flight Levels emerged from Leopold’s observations that many Agile transformations fail to deliver true business agility because they focus narrowly on team-level practices. While teams may adopt Scrum, Kanban, or other methods, the lack of alignment between strategic intent and operational execution often leads to local optimizations rather than systemic improvement.

The model draws on principles from Lean, systems thinking, and organizational design, offering a lightweight yet powerful approach to connecting the dots between vision, coordination, and delivery.

The Three Flight Levels

Flight Levels are numbered in a way that emphasizes their conceptual relationship rather than hierarchy:

Flight Level 3 - Strategy: The highest level, where organizational direction is set. Leaders define goals, priorities, and desired outcomes. This level focuses on answering “Why are we doing this?” and “What should we achieve?”
Flight Level 2 - Coordination: The connective tissue between strategy and operations. This level ensures that multiple teams or value streams are aligned, dependencies are managed, and work is sequenced to deliver on strategic objectives. It answers “How do we organize and synchronize our efforts?”
Flight Level 1 - Operations: The execution layer, where teams deliver value through day-to-day work. This includes software development, product design, customer service, or any operational activity. It answers “What are we delivering and how?”

Key Principles of Flight Levels

Across all three levels, several principles guide the application of the model:

Visualize the Flow of Work: Make work visible to improve transparency and decision-making.
Focus on Value Delivery: Align activities with delivering measurable outcomes to customers or stakeholders.
Enable Agile Interactions: Foster collaboration across levels and functions to reduce delays and misalignment.
Manage Work, Not People: Organize around the flow of value rather than rigid reporting lines.

Flight Levels in the Agile, Lean, and DevOps Landscape

In Agile transformation, Flight Levels addresses a common gap: scaling agility beyond teams. While frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, or Nexus provide structural guidance, Flight Levels focuses on the thinking and coordination patterns that make those structures effective.

From a Lean perspective, it supports value stream optimization by ensuring that strategic goals are connected to operational work without unnecessary handoffs. In DevOps, it complements continuous delivery by aligning release pipelines and operational readiness with broader business objectives.

Applying Flight Levels in Practice

Implementing Flight Levels involves several steps:

Identify Current State: Map existing strategy, coordination, and operational practices. Highlight disconnects and bottlenecks.
Visualize Each Level: Create boards or other visualization tools for FL3, FL2, and FL1 to make work and dependencies transparent.
Establish Feedback Loops: Ensure regular communication between levels to adapt plans based on new information.
Align Metrics: Use measures that connect strategic outcomes to operational performance, avoiding siloed KPIs.
Iterate and Improve: Treat the implementation as an evolving system, adjusting as the organization learns.

Common Interaction Patterns

Flight Levels emphasizes that people may contribute to multiple levels depending on their role and context. For example, a product manager might work at FL3 when defining portfolio priorities, at FL2 when coordinating across teams, and at FL1 when refining backlog items with a delivery team.

This fluidity reinforces the idea that Flight Levels is a “company sport,” not just a team sport - everyone plays a role in connecting strategy to execution.

Benefits of the Flight Levels Model

Clear alignment between strategic goals and operational work.
Improved coordination across teams and value streams.
Faster adaptation to changing market conditions.
Reduced waste from misaligned priorities or duplicated efforts.
Enhanced transparency and trust across the organization.

Challenges and Considerations

While Flight Levels is adaptable, organizations may face challenges such as:

Cultural Resistance: Shifting from siloed thinking to end-to-end value focus requires mindset change.
Overcomplication: Adding unnecessary layers or artifacts can dilute the model’s simplicity.
Lack of Leadership Engagement: Without active participation at FL3, alignment efforts may stall.

Overcoming these challenges involves leadership commitment, clear communication, and a focus on incremental improvement.

Flight Levels and Business Agility

Business agility depends on the ability to sense and respond to change quickly. Flight Levels supports this by ensuring that strategic shifts are rapidly reflected in coordinated action and operational delivery. By making work visible and aligning it across all levels, organizations can pivot effectively without losing momentum.

Conclusion

Flight Levels offers a practical, method-agnostic approach to connecting strategy, coordination, and operations. In Agile, Lean, and DevOps contexts, it fills a critical gap by ensuring that team-level agility scales into true business agility. By focusing on value flow, transparency, and alignment, Flight Levels enables organizations to deliver the right outcomes faster and more reliably, making it a powerful tool for any enterprise seeking sustainable agility.