Flight Route Patterns describe how work moves through an organization, revealing coordination and prioritization patterns that improve flow and adaptability.
Based on Klaus Leopold's Flight Levels: Leading Organizations, flight routes describe how work moves through an organization — from a trigger to a desired outcome. By mapping several routes, recurring patterns emerge that reveal how coordination, prioritization, and learning actually happen.
These Flight Route Patterns are the "heartbeats" of an organization: they reveal whether work is primarily driven locally, strategically, or through a mix of levels.
Recognizing these patterns helps leaders and teams to understand their current "flight behavior" and to purposefully design routes that improve flow, collaboration, and adaptability.
Local Coordination involves autonomous decision-making by local teams for product or service initiatives, promoting fast actions but risking strategic drift if overused.
Strategic initiative involves work flowing from strategy to delivery, ensuring alignment while requiring feedback loops to avoid command-and-control risks.
Team-Only Route allows teams to independently manage localized tasks but risks siloed learning and misalignment with broader goals.
Bottom-Up Initiative involves elevating team ideas for validation and resource alignment while balancing local action to maintain efficiency.
Cross-Level Learning involves fluid interaction across multiple levels in complex adaptive systems, emphasizing learning over control and requiring intentional communication and shared purpose.
More about this
Get the book for in-depth information about this topic and the whole Flight Levels universe. 
dpunkt.verlag Flight Levels – Organisationen mit Business-Agilität führen • Buch oder E-Book kaufen • dpunkt.verlag