Kanban Maturity Model and Flight Levels

In this article, I’d like to explore the relationship between two models – Kanban Maturity Model and Flight Levels. Explaining models goes way beyond the scope of the article, I assume the reader has some level of familiarity with both.

Before mapping anything to anything or, at least, trying to make some connections and parallels, let’s quickly recap what both models are about in a nutshell.

Kanban Maturity Model is pretty much misleading by its name. If you study it at least briefly, you’d see that at its core, it is an organizational maturity model. If you check for three pillars, mentioned in all materials (the book, classes, etc) – Outcomes, Culture, and Practices, you’d see that only 1/3 (practices) is related to Kanban. There are also other important aspects mapped to the levels (so they are part of the model) – risk, scope, focus, and level of trust, which have nothing to do with Kanban. Just as it happens historically, Kanban practices were mapped to the model, so that’s how the name emerged. But you can easily not use Kanban at all in your organization and map its maturity to KMM Level (yes, it is more of a theoretical exercise having not much potential practical use, but very doable). And you could potentially map non-Kanban-related practices to various levels of KMM.

So, once again, KMM is an organizational maturity model, have some attributes not related to Kanban and some related. It assumes sequential organizational development. Yes, in real life you may notice some properties of various levels to be present in an organization, still, the idea is that it builds up from top to bottom – so it is not likely that you would have more properties of, let’s say, ML4 be present and less of properties of ML3… So levels are built/developed one by one, from ML0 – to ML6. Some of my readers may be familiar with the Agile Fluency model by Diana Larsen and James Shore – it is different, but the idea of sequential development (you can not jump to “Optimize Value” bypassing “Deliver Value”).

Now, let’s get to Flight Levels. According to the authors, The Flight Levels Model is a thinking tool to understand WHERE in an organization you need to do WHAT in order to achieve the desired results and/or improvements. it is built on a very simple metaphor. In aviation, a flight level describes how high an aircraft flies. Depending on the altitude, the level of detail with which you can perceive a landscape changes. If you fly very high, you can see for miles into the distance, however, you can no longer recognize every detail on the ground. If, on the other hand, you fly low, you can almost see into your bedroom window, but you can no longer see the extent of a city, for example.

The Flight Levels model distinguishes three levels of planning and design horizons: the strategic level (Flight Level 3), the coordination level (Flight Level 2), and the team level (Flight Level 1). These levels are not hierarchical (maybe the most widespread misconception about Flight Levels) and each level has its advantages and limitations. So, these levels are some kind of thinking lenses, that we apply when we try to understand and then change how our organization works. As you could already see from here, these levels may or may not be connected to organizational maturity by definition. So, let’s explore that.

Actually, a few things match pretty well.

Flight Level 1 (the one close to the ground) or operational level belongs to the teams that do the daily work. ML1 (the second level of KMM, as the first one is ML0) is called “Team-Focused”. Both are very similar – focus or scope on the team level – how teams do their work and deliver value. From here it looks like we can confidently map ML1 to FL1 and wise versa.

On a Flight Level 2 or Coordination level, we zoom out from a team view to see the whole value stream that delivers a product or service to the customer. Typically multiple teams are going to be involved in this process and optimization here depends more on interactions between these teams. This is exactly what ML2, called “Customer Driven”, from KMM is about. So we have one more clear match between FL2 and ML2.

The easy part stops right here. I do not see any direct relation/mapping in between FL3 and any level of KMM. Let me explain why…

FL3 is about the strategy.

ML3 is called Fit for Purpose. In a nutshell – that is about meeting customer expectations on a regular basis.

ML4 is called Risk-Hedged. In a nutshell – that is about handling risks, oftentimes by having a portfolio of products/services.

ML5 is called Market Leader and is about becoming Fit for Purpose from the stakeholder’s perspective, it is about perfection in more or less everything an organization does, and therefore becoming one the best in the field, considering results.

ML6 is called Build for Survival. In super simple words, it is about the sustainable ability to be on ML5, so for the organization to be able to reinvent itself to stay a market leader.

I see no direct match. What is a strategy (FL3)..? That is the bigger why behind what we are doing as an organization. That is the direction we are going. That is North Star driving our decision-making.

A company may be a uni-product?with a strategy behind that product or without it (which is essentially the same as having a declared strategy having no real impact – the FL3 Design course is pretty much about it). A company may be a huge corporation, with a huge portfolio of diversified products (or even organizations) with or without a strategy behind all that. A portfolio by itself does not equal strategy.

I would agree that the higher you go in KMM levels, is more likely you have a strategy. I think it is impossible to get to ML5 without an explicit strategy. At the same time, I think it is quite possible (in theory) to get to ML3 and even ML4 without an explicit strategy.

Imagine growing a successful startup that launched a product or service that became mega-successful and bringing them to the stratosphere. A typical challenge is how to launch at least 2nd product of the same level of success. I’ve seen that challenge quite a lot. All kind of internal idea-incubators, splitting teams to start new stuff, and so on is about that. Well, you may call that a strategy, if so – it is present on their way from ML3 to ML4. Interestingly enough, if you’d check the KMM book for the company’s strategy, mentions starting only at ML5 (and ML6).

So, from my perspective, FL3 would help to get to ML3 and, even more, to ML4, but is not required. And is required from ML5. However, it is possible and would make sense to have a strategy on ML2 and even ML1.

So, we could hardly map FL3 to some particular level. The higher the maturity level you go, the more you need your strategy to be in place. And you could start from the very beginning already with a strategy.

Hope it was helpful. I’m also going to gather all known references to this topic right here with different perspectives. For now, I’m aware only of this one:

??The article “Flight Levels und das Kanban Maturity Model”?by Sacha Storz from improuv (the article is in German).

As you may see after reading the article, that perspective is different from the one expressed here, but that’s the value of having different perspectives, right..?

Questions, comments, concerns, or just feedback – please, let me know in the comments.