The  Game -Changer across
Industries, Roles and Challenges

Discover how Bosch leveraged Flight Levels® to dramatically shorten time-to-market in autonomous driving. By streamlining global collaboration and mastering complex dependencies, Bosch rapidly delivered a groundbreaking platform, securing a clear competitive advantage.

A Case Study by @Bernd Kudicke and @Sven Surrey.

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I remember speaking at a conference about Flight Levels and the concept of bridging the gap between strategy and execution. Among the audience was Mara, a delivery manager from a financial services company. After my talk, she approached me with a curious smile and asked, "How do you know our company? It felt like you were describing exactly what we're going through."

Intrigued by the concept of Flight Level 3, Mara, along with her boss and three colleagues from the strategy development and software development areas, enrolled in our blended coaching sessions. These sessions were a mix of a self-paced online Flight Level 3 Design workshop and focused online coaching sessions with me. I had the pleasure of being their feedback partner throughout this journey.

During the coaching sessions, they collaboratively designed their Flight Level 3 system. They mapped out how the strategy would transition smoothly into execution. The process was iterative, with constant feedback loops with me and other colleagues in their organization, ensuring that every aspect was fine-tuned to fit their specific needs.

When the design was finished, they kicked off its operation. The resulting change was quite soon noticeable. The strategy team began to see their strategy taking shape in real-time as the execution team started aligning their tasks with the strategic outcomes. Communication channels opened, and the two floors felt less like isolated silos and more like collaborative spaces working towards a common vision.

Mara’s company thrived, not by adopting a new strategy, but by ensuring that their existing strategies were executed flawlessly. Flight Level 3 had bridged the gap, transforming isolated silos into a unified force, driving the company toward its goals.

And so, Mara's story illustrated how a simple shift in perspective and approach supported by a Flight Level 3 system could create a cohesive, efficient, and harmonious working environment.

Agility has long been a topic for AXA Switzerland. For more than ten years, the company, with around 4,500 employees, has undergone a transformation, which started in IT and has continued in a comprehensive cultural change. I was responsible for the change in Business and IT until 2020, when it became clear that our HR department had always supported all other areas in the change but had never been the subject of a comprehensive transformation itself. We have changed that, and Flight Levels® has played a decisive role in this initiative.

Read the whole story in this case study to get the details.

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Introduction

Step into the bustling heart of a city renowned for its blend of rich history and pioneering technology, where a vibrant online legal services company is making waves. Nine years young and already flourishing, this company achieved profitability after its first year. Yet, despite its rapid growth and early success, it faced a daunting challenge: maintaining its innovative spirit and swift expansion while ensuring operational stability and fostering teamwork among its growing ranks. This is the story of how we transformed our dynamic enterprise using Flight Levels®, instilling predictability and fostering a robust culture of collaboration.

The Catalyst for Change

It all began with a startling week-long outage. For a company that thrived online, this was a nightmare scenario. It wasn't just about lost revenue; it was a wake-up call to the core of the business. The leadership realised the urgent need for a seismic shift in how work was managed. 

To get started we embarked on what I call an 'initial exploration'. This involved dissecting the company's operations from four perspectives; teams, individuals, leadership, and cultural dynamics. During this five-day exploration, we peeled back the layers of a complex work environment, revealing both challenges and opportunities. The findings revealed a vibrant culture and a committed team, but also highlighted a crippling load of technical debt and a lack of clear priorities that needed immediate attention.

Part of the exploration involved understanding the culture of the organisation using the Competing Values Framework, which provided us with insights into the dominant cultural values within the company. Our analysis revealed a strong inclination towards clan and adhocracy cultures, which emphasise a family-like, informal environment and with innovation at its heart. This was crucial because it meant the organisation was naturally predisposed to adapt and thrive in an agile and lean transformation setting.

The CVF profile showing a Clan & Adhocracy Culture (the blue shape).

With these cultural insights, we tailored our Flight Levels® implementation to leverage these existing strengths, enhancing our ability to innovate and collaborate across various departments and teams. We avoided the pitfalls of imposing rigid structures that would clash with our inherent cultural dynamics, instead fostering an environment where innovation could flourish within the structured guidance of a Flight Levels 2 System.

Visualising the Change

We began the journey by visualising the workflow through the implementation of a Flight Level 2 System. This wasn't just any organisational tool or technique; it served as the canvas where all our work was painted visibly, displaying projects from inception all the way through to completion.

The first draft of the Level 2 board. Very simple initially, but enough to get started.

With this new visualisation, the teams could see, for the first time, both the forest and the trees. This clarity allowed us to understand where efforts were being directed and, more importantly, where they ought to be channelled to maximise impact.

Fostering Collaboration: The Heart of Agile Interactions

The informal networks that had once supported the interactions between teams and departments were no longer effective. This was particularly evident as the company struggled with transparency and communication across departments. Implementing a Flight Level 2 System provided the environment necessary to enhance these interactions, turning potential chaos into orchestrated collaboration.

We leveraged the Level 2 Flight Board to create a centralised visualisation of all projects and tasks. This had a transformative effect on the implementation and the way it reshaped interactions. By bringing teams together in front of our Flight Levels board, we enabled real-time discussions and decision-making. This setup was not just about reporting status but about engaging in meaningful dialogue concerning priorities, challenges, and focus. Teams could now respond dynamically to changes, adjusting their collective response in real time based on collective input and insights.

As the system took shape, a new culture of collaboration began to emerge. Teams that once worked in isolation were now discussing, debating, and deciding together. We introduced effective communication techniques and collaborative gatherings, connecting teams that could amplify each other's efforts and streamline processes that had become overly complex and redundant.

Agile interactions - the right people talking about the right things in front of the right information!

This visual approach didn't just clarify work; it catalysed a fundamental change in how teams interacted. By focusing on completing existing work before taking on new ones, we dramatically reduced the clutter and chaos that had arisen from managing too many simultaneous initiatives.

Creating Focus

In the bustling environment creating focus was not just an operational necessity but a strategic imperative. As we implemented the Flight Levels system, one of the first tasks was to clear the fog of ongoing projects and prioritise initiatives that aligned closely with the business goals. This meant defining what was urgent and what could wait, a crucial step in managing our work effectively.

We employed the Flight Levels 2 System to visualise and prioritise work across different teams. By establishing a clear view of all ongoing projects on our Level 2 board, we could see at a glance what needed immediate attention and what was progressing well. This visual management became essential in our daily operations, enabling us to pull focus toward critical areas without losing sight of the bigger picture.

Creating and focus and applying WIP limits.

However, the real power of creating focus came from our ability to limit work-in-progress. By introducing WIP limits on the project level, we ensured that our teams were not overburdened with too much work, which often leads to burnout and decreased productivity. This focus allowed teams to complete work more efficiently and with higher quality, as they could dedicate their full attention to fewer projects at a time.

Furthermore, we streamlined our project initiation processes. Projects were only moved from the 'Ready to Start' to 'In Progress' stages when there was clear capacity to handle them, ensuring that efforts were optimally allocated. This approach prevented the common pitfalls of multitasking and context switching.

Measuring Progress

As our Flight Levels system took shape, measuring progress became a cornerstone of our approach. It was essential not just to track where we were, but also to understand the impact of our work and adjust our strategies accordingly. We instituted a simple yet robust set of metrics designed to provide real-time feedback on various aspects of our projects.

We started with basic metrics like the ratio of planned versus unplanned work, which gave us immediate insights into the stability of our operations and our ability to stick to our plans without frequent diversions. Monitoring the number of outages was particularly crucial; it was a direct indicator of the health of our IT infrastructure and the effectiveness of our efforts to reduce technical debt.

Capturing simple but essential metrics.

As the use of the metrics matured, we expanded them to more sophisticated measures. One pivotal addition was the assessment of the impact of released work. In the monitoring column of our Flight Level 2 board, we tracked completed projects for a quarter, examining them at least monthly. This allowed us to compare the expected outcomes of a project against the actual results, providing a clear picture of whether our objectives were being met. This feedback loop was invaluable—it not only informed our ongoing project management practices but also helped refine our future project planning and execution strategies.

The Results Speak for Themselves

Fast forward a few months, and the results were nothing short of revolutionary. For the first time in the company's history, it could predict with reasonable accuracy how many projects would be delivered each quarter. The outages that once plagued the company were reduced to almost zero, and the technical debt was being systematically reduced.

We saw an impressive improvement in cross-team collaboration, which was evident from the seamless integration of departmental projects into our Flight Level® systems. This was not just about implementing a new system; it was about transforming the very culture and operational fabric of the company.

All this improvement was fundamentally driven by the evolution of the Flight Level 2 System. Over several months, the system underwent significant changes, continuously shaped by feedback loops that pinpointed areas for improvement. As we experimented with various enhancements, we adopted those that proved effective and set aside those that did not.

The evolution of the FL2 System over several months

As the Flight Level 2 System matured and demonstrated tangible benefits in terms of collaboration and transparency, its appeal began to resonate beyond the initial teams involved. The highly visual and interactive nature of the system soon caught the attention of other departments.

Initially designed to for product and technology, the system's transparency and ease of access made it an attractive tool for other parts of the organisation. Departments such as Marketing, Legal, Sales and Operations began to see how they could integrate into this system and transform their own work.

The pull towards greater visibility was natural and compelling. As other departments observed the successes, marked by increased project throughput and enhanced synergy across teams, they began to request inclusion in the Flight Level 2 System. This was not a forced integration but a voluntary and enthusiastic adoption, driven by the visible benefits and the promise of reduced silos and increased effectiveness.

As this expansion occurred the FL 2 System evolved with it. Areas were created where work from these departments could flow and be visible. The whole organisation could now see the tradeoffs that needed to be made and where the collective effort should to be focused.

The FL2 System incorporating work from the entire organisation, and integration in to the team’s Flight Level 1 systems

As more departments integrated into the Flight Level 2 System, it evolved into a more comprehensive visual management tool that represented the entire organisation’s workflow. This unified system allowed for an unprecedented overview of all major projects and initiatives across the company, highlighting interdependencies and priorities that were previously opaque.

This broader adoption fostered a deeper organisational cohesion and a shared language. It allowed different departments to synchronise their efforts more effectively, align their objectives with company-wide goals, and shift effort fluidly between projects as priorities changed.

An Extra Note on Addressing Technical Debt

A critical challenge faced was the mounting technical debt; an accumulation that not only risked operational stability but also the ability to innovate. Under the new system, we took a proactive approach to this issue. By visualising the workflow and identifying bottlenecks, we were able to allocate specific effort to tackle technical debt directly. We introduced a policy whereby 50% of all projects funnelling through our Flight Level® 2 system were dedicated to resolving these debts. This strategy led to a dramatic reduction in system outages and significantly enhanced the overall robustness of the digital infrastructure.

As technical debt began to reduce, the flow of operations smoothed, leading to quicker turnaround times and fewer disruptions. This not only improved the internal efficiencies but also enhanced customer satisfaction as the reliability of services improved. Moreover, with the reduction of technical debt, teams were free to focus on innovation and development, pushing forward new projects that were previously sidelined.

Conclusion

As we conclude this transformational journey powered by Flight Levels®, it's clear that every company has chapters yet to be written. Whether you're a novice in the Agile world or a seasoned manager, there’s a lesson here. Visualisation, creating focus, people interacting, measuring progress, and then improving are not just elements of a successful business, they are the very pillars that can uphold it. Through this journey, we aim to inspire other organisations to embark on their own transformational paths, utilising the power of Flight Levels® to navigate challenges and elevate their operational effectiveness.

About the Author

Russell is a Flight Levels Coach and Accredited Kanban Trainer, who has worked with many organisations helping them to become better at what they do. He utilises mainly Flight Levels and Kanban in order to achieve significant organisational improvements, while focussing on building self-sufficient capability within the organisation.

If you would like to know about Flight Levels® we have a number of workshops that help you with these various challenges:

• Flight Levels Introduction - A gentle starter to get an overview of flight levels through a self-paced online workshop.

• Flight Level 2 Design - Build a coordination system for multi-team delivery. Ideally, you should already have a specific organisational area and need in mind.

• Flight Level 3 Design - Build a strategy system (Flight Level 3) and connect its products, services or other coordination systems.

• Flight Levels Systems Architecture - see your organisation from a different perspective and experience what it means when Flight Levels is adopted throughout the organisation, or part thereof.
  

Manfred Hellfurther had to take a deep breath. He would never have believed that his scaling project would cause such problems for him. At the beginning, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a large insurance company thought he had finally found the right way to take their agile way of working to a new level. In the future, there should not only be individual Scrum and Kanban teams but the entire IT should be organized in an agile manner. But somehow, the Spotify model (see below), with which he wanted to reorganize his more than 500 experts, caused strange misunderstandings. The basic structure of the so-called squads, which were brought together vertically in business-specific tribes, the role-specific chapters and the topic-oriented guilds, was nowhere near as clear to his people as it was to him. Why should the teams suddenly reorganize? He was repeatedly asked about the reason for renaming the familiar structure of teams and departments, and why all frontend developers had to align with each other regularly, even though they were working on very different tasks. Manfred Hellfurther had never expected so much skepticism. He was, however, still convinced of his scaling plan — after all, he knew that people need time to get used to change. It was also clear to him that not all his employees had the open mindset he saw as the heart of the agile approach. To consistently promote this cultural change, he hired two Spotify experts, invested in various training courses, and extended his team of agile coaches. So, everything was done to ensure the success of his scaling project, and he just had to be patient until the whole organization was as responsive and swift as he imagined. Or maybe not?

Given the scaling initiatives that have been launched in many organizations in recent years, Manfred Hellfurther's doubts appear to us to be entirely justified. From our point of view, his experiences highlight some characteristic obstacles that repeatedly block real business agility:

• Standardized frameworks are the focus, and the current problems and strengths of the organization are secondary. This often triggers resistance among employees, as many have the feeling that their current work situation is as little noticed as the successes that have been achieved so far. Instead, a normative model is imposed on them, the benefits of which often remain unclear.

• Organizational change is pushed by top management, planned by external scaling experts, and rolled out using traditional project management tools. Subject matter experts as well as middle managers are only involved in the change to the extent that they are supposed to properly implement ready-made solutions.

• An enormous amount of effort is required to follow the respective scaling approach. Comprehensive training, team workshops, and management coaching, let alone the certification costs that arise for using a specific framework. Possible side effects of large-scale initiatives on productivity or morale are not considered.

• Measurable improvement only occurs when everything has been implemented according to plan. This means that although a lot of investment has to be made at all levels, the return from the scaling initiative depends on everything working in practice as intended in theory.

Since the appetite for business agility has increased significantly in recent years, several other scaling approaches have been established in addition to the Spotify model. Particularly noteworthy here are the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe - see below) and the Large Scale Scrum framework (LeSS - see below). In practice, however, these approaches entail similar difficulties as those highlighted above. Nicole Barth, Managing Director of a large IT Services provider, for example, began transforming the entire company to SAFe in 2021. However, the better outcomes she expected by establishing business agility have not yet materialized. After two years of countless consultations, leadership workshops, and role training, the delivery times of their products have neither been significantly shortened nor their quality improved. The so-called Agile Release Train, through which complex development work is bundled in SAFe, tends to make a name for itself due to delays; key players such as the release train engineer, the product owners, and the agile coaches are still poorly coordinated; and the last big room planning, in which all 120 IT specialists were supposed to take part, as usual, was pretty chaotic from Nicole Barth's point of view. The whole story is crowned by the last employee survey, which confirmed what Ms. Barth had noticed more and more recently: employee satisfaction and motivation levels have decreased dramatically!

Strict guidelines instead of meaningful participation, expert dictates instead of co-creation, complicated roadmaps instead of a lean approach: Anyone who follows this “recipe” need not be surprised by negative feedback. Leonie Dellago experienced something similar in her role as Head of Digitalization in a large infrastructure company. Because as much as she was convinced that her software development teams needed to coordinate themselves more regularly, manage their technical dependencies more proactively, and solve cross-team problems more quickly, after five months of change dynamics, she had to admit that the Large Scale Scrum framework (LeSS - see box) did not fit the needs of her organization. In the beginning, she consistently implemented all the suggestions put forward by the LeSS consultants and also defied the skepticism of some of her key players. Even though she also had invested heavily in training and repeated her explanations of “Why LeSS ?” like a mantra, the message didn’t seem to be getting through to people. Or why else was the interaction of their Scrum teams still rather bumpy? The Scrum-of-Scrum meetings did not have the expected coordination effect and the role of the Area Product Owner did not encourage significant improvements.

So, do initiatives to scale agile share the same logic of failure that has characterized so many change projects in recent years? Should we say goodbye to the idea of business agility? Although we claim that the three short case studies illustrate some patterns that we have discovered in numerous other organizations, we do not want to bury the idea of enterprise-wide agility. On the contrary, the Flight Levels® approach (see below) shows that there is another way.

• Instead of starting with standardized solutions, Flight Levels first focus on the problem. More precisely, the current challenges that an organization is facing, but also the successes, strengths, and resources on which it can build. Clarifying conversations with a wide range of specialists and managers help to explore the current situation and the specific need for improvement.

• Flight Levels initiatives are also mandated by senior management. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that change is pushed top-down in the traditional way. Rather, management acts as an active sponsor of improvement and models the co-creative engagement that is at the heart of Flight Levels change. External coaches, therefore, do not dictate but rather inspire and facilitate the journey to business agility.

• Such a journey does neither require extensive training regimes nor complicated roadmaps. The lightweight model of Flight Levels is accompanied by an evolutionary approach that focuses on manageable iterations of change, learning by doing, and regular feedback loops.

• This agile approach means that improvements can be made not just at the end of the organizational journey but at every stage. This means that the start-up phase, i.e., the professional preparation, design, and testing of Flight Levels systems, can be kept well on track. For operation, all you need is a design that is good enough, as this is continuously being improved.

• Last but not least, the Flight Levels focus on the pulse of the respective business activities. The operational structures and value creation processes are made visible and improved in a goal-oriented manner. This does neither require new roles like in SAFe or LeSS nor a complex change in the organizational structure à la Spotify.

Above all, what sets Flight Levels apart from all other scaling approaches is their change philosophy. “If the goal is agile, the way to get there should also be agile,” this philosophy could be summed up in a nutshell. The case study of a media company with over 3,000 employees shows what this can look like in practice.

This company's journey of change started with strong feelings: the confusion of many media business people due to rapid digitalization and AI; customer dissatisfaction over error-prone product features and poor service; the digital experts’ complaints about their overburdening workload; the digital managers´ uncertainty as to why their agile teams were performing poorly. When Harald Girol, the company's Chief Technical Officer (CTO), contacted us, there was massive frustration in the air. Nevertheless, it didn't take long for us to agree on initial support steps. We arranged a series of short meetings in which we, together with the CTO and the Head of Product Development, explored some root causes of the current problems and clarified the most important cornerstones of organizational improvement. From the point of view of the two managers, what exactly should be improved? Why did they think such an improvement was important? Who should be involved, and in what form? How should the change approach look like in order to realize the desired improvements?

In parallel to the intensive sparring that took place in the following weeks, we conducted interviews with key players from a wide variety of organizational units. These conversations were intended to provide additional insights about the current situation but also to signal that the input from our interviewees was guiding further action. Ultimately, Flight Levels change does not start with a ready-made solution but with the key business challenges that specialists and managers agree on. We visualized and clustered the most important answers from the interviews in a way showed the media company's strengths as well as its problems and areas for improvement. Together with our sponsors, we translated these answers into what we call the north star of improvement in the tradition of lean management. “Faster added value” was this north star, which addressed the business problems most frequently mentioned in the interviews: long cycle times, poor product quality, and customer dissatisfaction. These problems were primarily attributed to three root causes: firstly, unclear work processes; secondly, the lack of coordination between the individual teams; and thirdly, the diffuse corporate strategy.

All three causes suggested an agile scaling initiative and the idea of designing this initiative using the Flight Levels model. On the one hand, we wanted to co-create a Flight Level 2 system to ensure better coordination between all teams involved in product development — end-to-end, i.e., from the first business ideas to product management, user experience, data and development to the customers who used the delivered product. On the other hand, we saw the need for a Flight Levels 3 system in order to better align the entire product development with the corporate strategy.

Following our motto of an agile journey to business agility, we suggested to our two sponsors that we proceed in manageable iterations with clear outcomes. What was important was that we only defined the expected outcomes more precisely for the next 2-6 weeks. For each of these iterations, agreed on the specific change formats, i.e. the flow of meetings, workshops, bilateral conversations, and intersessions we would use to achieve the expected outcomes. At the end of each iteration, we reflected on what we had actually achieved, how our collaboration had gone,  and what conclusions we could draw from this for our next iteration.

The north star gave the media company's Flight Levels initiative meaning and direction, the iterative approach allowed us to break this initiative down into outcome-oriented stages, the change formats fostered employee engagement, and the feedback loops ensured continuous learning. In the first iteration, we worked primarily with the sponsors to achieve explicit agreements on their improvement initiative. We agreed on the agile approach and clarified how the Flight Levels model could support us. In the second iteration, we expanded our guiding coalition by building a dedicated change team. This cross-functional and hierarchy-bridging group of 8 people from different departments, the Head of Product Development and one of us coaches, was responsible for the overall change flow, facilitated the various change formats we used for, and took care of the ongoing change communication.

This means that we as Flight Levels experts were still there to provide guidance and support. The decisions about iterations, expected outcomes, and specific interactions were made together according to the consent principle. This meant that the organization itself took full responsibility for improving step by step rather than implementing a set of predetermined roles, processes, and artifacts as with other scaling approaches. Together with the sponsors, the change team also decided to focus on broader communication by sharing the initial interview results with all employees, inviting the two sponsors to a panel discussion, and providing information about business agility in informal brown bag and happy hour meetings. In addition, the change team prepared for a large group workshop to introduce Flight Levels to a broad variety of business and IT people. With this 6-hour format, in which a total of 120 product development experts and stakeholders took part, we invited everyone to start with their current situation, identify the most important strengths and problems across all teams, and prioritize the areas for improvement. After this kind of retrospective, we introduced the Flight Levels model and used an experiential activity to explore key aspects such as flow, work in process and cycle times in an engaging and fun way. We connected the debrief of individual experiences with some more insights into Flight Levels practices and use cases. At the end the small groups built at the beginning of the workshop were invited to connect the strengths and challenges they have identified with their insights from the workshop. How did what they have learned fit into the current situation? What exactly could the Flight Levels help with? Which elements could be used for addressing which challenge? Fitness is documented by all groups recording their most important answers on stickies and assigning them to the appropriate challenges. Before the workshop was closed down, both sponsors and change team members thanked everyone for their commitment, provided information about the next steps, and invited them to a final feedback loop on the workshop.

The high investment of the change team in preparing the workshop and engaging with their colleagues was rewarded with a lot of positive feedback. Although some questions remained unanswered and some employees were still skeptical, the vast majority found the improvement initiative to be important and viewed the Flight Levels as a convincing approach. In addition, the workshop was lightweight and fun, so we achieved a spirit of optimism at the end.

This spirit remained just as trend-setting as the agile approach. In the next iteration, systemic improvement seemed to be on everyone's agenda. In addition, many employees were very willing to deal with Flight Levels even more intensively and to co-create an initial system — which in turn happened in a group of "designers,” which included four change team members but also seven experts from various teams and business areas. In contrast to big bang scaling methods such as SAFe or LeSS, not everyone needed time-consuming and cost-intensive training in Flight Levels. Learning by Doing once again led the way and ensured that just five weeks after the introductory workshop, there was a first draft system design to be shared by the designers. In order to communicate this draft as well as possible and at the same time ensure participation beyond the 11-member design group, we invited people to a so-called sounding board. In this change format that lasted three hours and included 36 people, the Flight Levels system design was presented, reviewed in more detail in small groups, and clarified to such an extent that in the end, a clear decision could be made: Yes, this system is good enough to be used in daily operation! Despite further ideas for improvement, none of the 36 participants raised a serious objection that would have prevented this official take-off.

Of course, getting used to the new ways of operating product development with Flight Levels took time and patience. At the end of the first operational iteration, however, the review of the expected outcomes was positive. Process clarity had improved, as had cross-functional and hierarchy-bridging collaboration — both of which were initially identified as serious pain points. After the next iteration, in which the focus was on promoting measurability, the first sprouts of shorter cycle time and more positive feedback from customers could actually be seen. The fact that these sprouts subsequently grew impressively confirmed the success of the scaling initiative. Improvement was certainly possible, and it not only delivered more value to customers but also created more meaningful work, and new motivation. It's no wonder that the media company ventured into the next business agility initiative almost a year later and, after optimizing end-to-end coordination with a Flight Level 2 system, started to improve the corporate strategy with a Flight Level 3 system. We'll be happy to report on that another time.

Side Note: Agile Scaling Frameworks

Simply speaking scaling Agile means to use the principles and practices that have proven helpful for Scrum, Kanban, or Design Thinking teams for larger areas of the company or even the entire organization. In recent years, various approaches have emerged that promise both horizontal scaling in the sense of more and better coordinated agile teams and vertical scaling in the sense of more agile interactions across different hierarchy and management levels. Below is a brief sketch of the most popular scaling approaches:

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) provides a detailed template that combines elements from a wide variety of lean and agile approaches and thus aims to improve large business units. To achieve this, SAFe relies, among other things, on intense training and coaching, a set of special roles such as the Solution Train Engineer, and cross-team planning in order to focus all employees on the most important development goals. In so-called big room meetings major product increments for the next 8-12 weeks are defined, and then implemented in so-called release trains.

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) is a scaling approach that focuses entirely on software development. The main goal is to connect several Scrum teams, often working on the same customer solutions, into larger, well-coordinated units, which are controlled hierarchically by by Area or Overall Product Owners. Similar to SAFe, LeSS is also being introduced top-down in the big bang style, with strict guidelines and a comprehensive training regime to get all employees sworn in in the new way of working.

The Spotify model summarizes the experiences the music streamer had during its rapid growth in the 2000s. In contrast to SAFe or LeSS, however, it is less about improving operational flows and more about optimizing the organizational structure, which is made more scalable through the combination of so-called squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds.

Holacracy also focuses on alternative organizational structures to promote agility. In contrast to the Spotify model, however, it builds on a network of self-organizing circles and specific roles on different levels. Updating many anti-hierarchical concepts from the sociocracy movement of the 1970s it provides a governance system with a detailed set of policies to be implemented.

Side Note: What are Flight Levels?

What are Flight Levels? In short, Flight Levels are an approach for modern organizational development that can be used to visually capture complex organizations and design them for business improvements. The approach is based on the basic assumption that three levels can be distinguished in every organization:

1. an operational level at which products and services are developed and delivered — for example, tailored software solutions for financial services providers (level 1 in the figure below);

2. a coordination level at which operational units coordinate themselves with each other - for example, all software development teams that work for insurance companies (level 2 in the figure below);

3. a strategic level at which groundbreaking decisions are made — for example, the decision to specialize in software solutions for online banking (level 3 in the figure below).

In the tradition of visual work management, we can create an analog or digital board for each Flight Level using simple means such as lines, columns, stickies, and keywords. Each board then shows work or work packages that need to be completed in a specific value creation process (see square stickies in Fig. 1), the typical activities that each work goes through (see columns), and different types of work. At the strategic level, these types usually involve big topics, overall business objectives, and large initiatives that are broken down into smaller units, such as so-called epics, at the coordination level and implemented at the operational level — be it in the form of stories like in Scrum teams, as a continuous flow of tasks in Kanban or in sequential work steps as in traditional waterfall approaches.

However, what is essential for an organization-wide improvement in responsiveness, ability to change, and business innovation, which is at the heart of scaling agile, is not each individual level on its own but rather their specific connection. In contrast to scaling approaches such as the Spotify model or Holacracy (see box) which aim to promote business agility through alternative organizational structures, the Flight Levels consistently focus on the operational organization and continuous improvement of all value-generating activities. The Flight Levels model is inspired by lean management approaches from the automotive industry (particularly from Toyota), systems thinking and a culture of agile interactions, which were applied to complex knowledge work in the 2010s and have since been used by many well-known companies such as Bosch, Siemens, 1&1, the Scout Group, REWE Digital or the Styria Media Group was used for agile scaling.

Scaling Agile with Flight Levels - How to make it happen

When implementing Flight Levels initiatives in recent years, we have learned one thing above all: If organizations want to realize business agility, the path to get there should also be designed in an agile way. Below are some good practices that have proven successful in shaping the change process.

Start with what you do now

Don’t immediately jump to solutions. Even if you find standardized frameworks appealing, it pays off to explore your current situation first. Otherwise you take the risk that your preferred solutions do not resonate with your current strengths and challenges — let alone with your employees´ point of view.

Engage people

Do not rely on expert´s analysis only. Involve both your subject matter experts and your leaders in identifying your organizational whereabouts. Trust them to come up with the biggest assets and pain points they see in their daily business and consolidate the different points of view.

Create focus for improvement

Since scaling agile is far too complex to be able to determine upfront all actions needed for organizational improvement, we just want to clarify what we want to achieve. A minimum viable North Star is all we need to focus our efforts and give a sense of direction.

Apply an agile approach

Do not roll out the classic transformation plan with comprehensive training and coaching. Instead, define manageable iterations lasting between two and eight weeks, each of which focuses on expected outcomes and ends with a self-critical feedback loop: How well did we achieve the set outcomes? How well did we work together on this? What conclusions do we draw from this for our next iteration?

Share leadership

Resist the temptation to roll-out business agility in a top-down, big bang and expert driven manner. Rather, distribute responsibility and decision-making authority wisely, building on a guiding coalition of engaged sponsors from management, a dedicated change team taking care of facilitating the whole improvement process, and a network of change agents who serve as multipliers and ambassadors.

Expect a long-distance run with detours

Business agility is a challenge for everyone. It demands regular inspection and adaption as well as continuous learning. Even an agile approach with short iterations often does not fit current needs from the market and/or from the workforce.

Authors: @Siegfried Kaltenecker & Sabine Eybl

In this Case Study, we showcase how Siemens successfully navigated the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic by leveraging the Flight Levels approach. The story shows how we align our strategy with operational processes to ensure business agility and continuity in uncertain times. It highlights key strategies, challenges, and the transformative impact of Flight Levels on Siemens' work culture and performance. This case study is a valuable resource for anyone interested in practical applications of Flight Levels in a large, global organization.

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