Flight Levels Day

How can organizations turn strategy into action while ensuring alignment, adaptability, and meaningful impact? Why do so many change initiatives fail to deliver results, and what can we do differently?

In this session, we will share how we designed and implemented a Flight Levels-based system to manage strategy execution in our own organization. We’ll explore how we engaged leadership, fostered cross-team collaboration, and created a people-centered approach to strategy execution that enables continuous learning and adaptation.

Through this real-world case study, we’ll highlight the key system features, pivotal moments, and challenges we faced. We will also discuss the tools and techniques that supported our journey, including how we overcame resistance to change and ensured leadership buy-in.

Picture this: You find yourself in the belly of a corporate beast, a massive, sprawling organisation where red tape is a primary colour, and politics is a full-contact sport. Agile? Oh, they’ve tried it all—Scrum, Kanban, Spotify, SAFe, Not-So-Safe, and the latest flavour of the month. Right now, SAFe reigns supreme, and I must admit, this is the biggest SAFe implementation I’ve ever been part of.

Now, before you roll your eyes and brace for another SAFe-bashing session, hear me out. I put my biases aside, took a deep breath, and fully immersed myself in their context. And guess what? I learned a lot! SAFe provides structure, creates space for critical interactions, and even facilitates some incredibly valuable moments. PI Planning? Showcases? Roaming the Risks? These are fantastic events with real potential.

But—and here’s the kicker—we still ended up with the same old problems. The ART vs. Business mentality. The classic ‘us vs. them’ standoff. Finger-pointing, confusion about who needs to do what and when, and an eerie feeling that despite all these grand events, we’re still not having the right conversations with the right people at the right time.

This is where Flight Levels thinking entered the chat.

By applying a Flight Levels lens, I finally started to see the missing pieces—the real connections between strategy and execution. Instead of chasing Agile Maturity for the sake of looking good on a consultant’s PowerPoint slide, we started focusing on actually delivering on strategy. Because at the end of the day, agility is just a vehicle; the real goal is business success.

Work systems are not static entities; they evolve continuously in response to external and internal triggers. While we often talk about a "take-off" moment, in practice, work system evolution is less of a singular launch and more of an ongoing journey.

This talk is based on real-world experience, reflecting what we`ve learned working with an engineering company. We will start by sharing concrete examples from this environment, highlighting challenges, breakthroughs, and lessons learned. These real-world scenarios will serve as a foundation for understanding the conceptual aspects of Work Systems Ecocycles.

By integrating Flight Levels thinking, Dynamic Reteaming, and systemic change principles, participants will leave with practical strategies to foster adaptability and sustain continuous value delivery.

We want to build great products for the users of Autobild and Computerbild. But organizational settings, different companies for Tech and editors made it difficult to streamline our development process.

The flight level approach seemed to us to be a suitable solution to this problem. We started with implementation at all three levels, the operational level, the tactical level and also the strategic level. Coordinating our product development but also the technical fundamentals via the level 2 level helped us to bring people from different areas together and to solve the different needs of the areas better and more transparently - and in particular to do the right things. Today we have a much better understanding of each others work, we pull together and have become much faster in our product development.

Join us as we share the journey of three value streams striving to enhance coordination, streamline interactions, and foster agility within their teams as they deliver on the strategy and ensure stable systems. We’ll explore the organisational context, the challenges we aimed to address, and the experiments we’ve undertaken to improve collaboration and coordination.

This talk offers an authentic look at the complexities of ensuring the right conversations happen with the right people—while reducing the overall meeting load. While we haven’t found all the answers, we’ve made meaningful progress and are excited to share our learnings, failures, and insights along the way. Come ready to reflect on your own practices and leave with actionable ideas to apply in your context.

If you are thinking about leveraging the Flight Levels Approach to help solve specific problems within your organization, you`ve come to the right place!

In this talk I`ll walk through my approach to leveraging Flight Level`s technical and social practices to begin helping to solve end-to-end visibility, work coordination and focus issues.

Session Overview:

• Why Flight Levels resonated with me
• Where to start
• Using Work System Topologies to align on FL2 and FL3 systems, and beyond
• Approach to internal workshops vs public workshops
• Flight Levels Add-ons
• What ‘s next: Operate and Improve

This talk is about our approach to increase collaboration across approximately 300 people at Commerzbank and how to find a way of exceeding performance in the best agile way:

• how we identified the collaboration challenges and agreed on our solution approach
• how we dug deeper into the complexity of our work system topology
• how we designed a coordinative level and its lift off

We are still in the beginning of our journey but will share our learnings and challenges we have faced so far.

As a company, we are pretty good at developing our long-term strategy. We are also good at implementing the operational requirements. As a first step, we wanted help bridging the gap between strategy and operational execution. So we needed a way to put the strategy into action and talk about the right things at the right time.

A strategy always touches all departments and areas of the company, and so do the projects and actions to operationalize the strategy. This means that communication and the value stream must also be coordinated across departments.

In addition, many departments use different methods and tools to implement and track their requirements and tasks. So we wanted a solution that was method agnostic. It was also important for us to approach the problem from a solution perspective. In other words, to spend a lot of time in the problem area and then decide what is the most flexible and best solution for us to focus on, get the transparency we need, and at the same time talk about the important things across departments.

That`s why we`ve started to build an interdisciplinary Flightlevel 2 Board to help us coordinate the important levels of projects and actions. We are currently expanding the board and planning our way to Level 1 and Level 3 with the learnings from the Flight Level 2 board implementation, because we are convinced that this will make us even more effective.