The company had done everything right in the early years. Profitable within twelve months. Headcount tripled in three years. Strong culture. Good product. And then — as tends to happen when informal coordination systems are asked to scale beyond their design capacity — things started breaking.

Technical outages were happening more frequently. The backlog of work was growing faster than the team's ability to address it. New features were being pushed for relentlessly, creating pressure that was straining both the systems and the people operating them. Collaboration between teams had become complicated in ways that were difficult to diagnose because they were partly cultural and partly structural.

The diagnosis

The first activity was a structured exploration of the current situation — interviews with individuals, teams, and leaders to build a picture of where the friction actually lived. The cultural assessment showed a resilient organisation with strong foundations in collaboration and adaptability. This was important: it meant the cultural conditions for change were present, which is not always the case.

The operational picture was harder. Four consistent patterns emerged: limited transparency and collaboration between teams, significant technical debt and a high load of unplanned interruption work, too many projects running simultaneously with unclear priorities, and a coordination layer between teams that was effectively absent. Teams were working hard and productively within their own boundaries. Across those boundaries, the picture was much less coherent.

Flight Level 2 in practice

The chosen intervention was a Flight Level 2 system — a visual coordination board designed to make the flow of work across teams visible, create clear priorities for what should be in progress at any given time, and establish the right coordination conversations at the right frequency.

The principle behind the system is straightforward: you cannot manage what you cannot see. The company's coordination problems were not caused by a lack of effort or capability — they were caused by a lack of visibility. Decisions were being made with incomplete pictures of what was in flight, what was blocked, and where resources were being consumed by unplanned work.

The visual management system changed this. Teams could see the status of work across the organisation, not just within their own boundaries. Priorities could be negotiated explicitly rather than inferred. The distinction between planned and unplanned work became visible — which, in turn, made it possible to have honest conversations about why so much unplanned work was entering the system and what could be done about it.

What co-creation achieved

The most effective aspect of the implementation was not the system design itself — it was that the system was co-created with the people who would use it. This distinction matters more than it might seem. A system handed down from outside is something people comply with. A system they designed themselves is something they own.

As the teams worked through the design process, they surfaced knowledge about their actual workflow that external diagnosis had not captured. They built the system with that knowledge embedded in it. When it needed adjustment — and it did need adjustment, repeatedly — the people making the adjustments understood why the original design was the way it was.

The results

Several months in, the impact was measurable. Technical outages had reduced significantly. The ratio of planned to unplanned work had shifted in a better direction. The Flight Level 2 board had expanded naturally to incorporate work from other parts of the organisation as other teams saw what the coordination layer was making possible.

The lesson the company drew from the experience was broader than the specific intervention: fixing the coordination layer had achieved things that years of team-level improvement had not. The teams had been good before. What had been missing was the system that connected their work in a way that made the whole greater than the sum of its parts.