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.

The German Broadcasting Archive is the custodian of thousands of historical treasures of German radio and television, particularly holding assets from the times of the GDR and the Third Reich. In this case study, we explore how Flight Levels have helped in the context of German public broadcasting towards more productive, self-responsible work in the digitization and accessibility of the archives. We report specifically on the critical points, the challenges (including initial agile disillusionment), and the next steps on the ongoing journey.

Welcome to Flight Levels International Airport! Here you will find everything you need for a successful flight: runways (workflows), controllers (managers), passengers (teams) and airplanes (initiatives). But why do so many agile transformations still remain grounded?

Markus Schmotz and Rudolf use real-life examples to show the conditions that must be in place for flight levels to really take off – and why it fails when teams want to get into the cockpit enthusiastically but with an empty tank and no navigation.

We talk about the hard reality: shit in, shit out! – If the teams have only a low maturity level and you scale that... guess what happens. However, with the Kanban Maturity Model (KMM) there is a diagnostic tool that helps to start right here. If you want to get started with Flight Levels, you should first check whether the tower is working, the crew is trained and the fuel is sufficient.

Look forward to a humorous but hard-hitting analysis of why the best Flight Levels are useless if the basics are not right – and how to still achieve an agile high!

Achieving seamless collaboration across multiple teams is no small feat. At Quantum GmbH, we embarked on a journey to redesign our coordination system and much more — facing crises, setbacks, and ultimately, breakthroughs. This talk shares how we evolved from waterfall structures to a flexible, people-centric approach with Flight Levels.

Our first major challenge came when a planned merger fell through, forcing cost cuts and a 30% workforce reduction. To survive, we embraced agility, introduced Kanban for improving transparency, and focused on digitalization to improve value-driven collaboration.

Then came the COVID crisis, where our agile foundation paid off. We smoothly transitioned to virtual operations with minimal disruption, but growing complexity led to declining engagement.

The energy crisis following the war in Ukraine was our toughest test. As chaos hit, we rapidly shifted to a complex, experiment-driven approach, enabling fast learning, stability, and stronger value delivery. Today, Quantum is more resilient and successful than ever before.

I will present a case study of how I am using the dependency management practice that I learned in Troy Magennis` course to highlight and treat the dependancies of a team where I work as an Agile Enabler.

In all the last Sprint Retrospectives the team always complained about the same problems and I decided to do something to start addressing them.In our last retrospective I used Troy`s canvas to highlight and categorize blockers and dependencies and then we mapped their frequency and impact.The practice is very simple but impactful because we quickly highlight the problems and understand which ones we need to resolve for greatest impact.In this session I will present the team`s main challenges, how we are using Flight Levels to improve our interactions and deliveries but mainly focusing on blockers and dependencies.

Thailand`s business landscape presents unique cultural and operational challenges that test the boundaries of any methodology. In this session, we share how Flight Levels transcended its IT origins to succeed in two distinctly non-IT environments.

Our journey begins in a major hospital lab equipment distribution company where traditional hierarchies and manual processes created coordination nightmares across a complex supply chain. Unlike the product development flows most Agile practitioners are familiar with, this is a case where the company sources equipment from European headquarters while managing hundreds of parallel 3-6 month installation projects—each worth millions of dollars—across customer sites. This created coordination challenges involving 200 people that are arguably more complex than typical product development scenarios, yet represent everyday business realities for many organizations. The results were transformative, dramatically improving time-to-market from months to weeks.

The story then shifts to an educational institution where 40 dental nurse students across the country used Flight Levels to coordinate social media content creation throughout their academic year. What was once treated as a perfunctory course requirement transformed dramatically through Flight Levels implementation. The students produced content with substantially higher quality and engagement metrics. Interestingly, the recent reordering of the official 5 Activities of Flight Levels was reaffirmed by the results in these cases, highlighting the significance of these changes in practice.

Both Thai case studies offer fresh perspectives on adapting Flight Levels to local contexts and non-technical domains, demonstrating that coordination principles transcend industry boundaries—and thankfully, these insights come with no tariffs attached!