Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Strategy sounds clean on paper until it hits real markets, real customers, real competitors and real time pressure. I’m joined by Andreas Panayiotou from Notion Capital to unpack what venture capital actually optimises for, why VC is a long-horizon game, and how that reality shapes startup strategy, leadership, and decision-making from day one.  We get specific about the scaling journey and the un...

Your strategy can look brilliant on paper and still be totally disconnected from reality. We talk with Dr Alice Jing Shan, who is the originator of Relational Dynamics™, the founder of ScholarLand Ltd, and an independent researcher and writer. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Edinburgh. Her work examines how human systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse und...

Your organisation might have a polished strategy deck, a neat org chart, and a backlog full of “agile” work, yet decisions still stall and accountability still blurs. That is the gap we tackle with our guest Martin Pfiffner, author of The Neurology of Business. He identifies the missing third dimension of structure. Beyond anatomy (boxes) and physiology (process), we dig into organisational neurol...

AI is moving fast, but the real risk is moving fast in the wrong direction. We sit down with Dr Mark Bloomfield, founder of Turbulence and a fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, to get past the hype and talk about what AI transformation looks like when strategy meets reality. If you have ever heard “we need an AI strategy” and felt the room skip the hard questions, you will recognise the boa...

Strategy fails in the gap between the plan and the lived reality of work, and that gap is where most leaders burn out. We sit down with Richard Claydon, an organisational theorist focused on leadership in complex and ambiguous environments, to name what’s really happening when teams feel overloaded, stuck and quietly cynical despite “doing everything right”.  We dig into the confusion tax: the hid...

Strategy fails in a painfully predictable place: the moment it leaves the boardroom and lands in everyone else’s calendar. We sit down with Jurriaan Kamer to get brutally practical about why “alignment” so often becomes a loud broadcast, a perfect slide deck, and a quiet wave of cynicism on the ground. Instead, we dig into what actually moves strategy execution forward: orientation to real conditi...

Strategy falls apart in the messy middle between plans and execution, and that is exactly where we spend our time with Alex Vohr, author of Speed Kills: Leveraging John Boyd's OODA Loop to Build Organisations That Win. Alex brings a rare mix of experience as a US Marine Corps logistician, a commander in Iraq, a leader in disaster relief operations, and now the president of OneLNG an energy st...

Strategy often fails for a boring reason: nobody knows who can decide what, and everything slows to a crawl. We sit down with Stefan Norrvall, joining us from Australia, to unpack organisational coherence and why it beats the usual push for “alignment” when dealing with real-world complexity. If your organisation feels busy but stuck, this conversation gives you language for what is happening and...

Most organisations don’t fail at strategy because they lack ambition. They fail because they skip the one thing that has to come first: an honest read of reality. In this solo reflection, Mike Jones pulls together the strongest themes from the recent run of conversations and the client work that’s been sharpening my thinking, from strategic blind spots to the quiet damage caused by “organisational...

The strategy looks clean on paper. Real strategy is sweaty, uncertain, and intensely human. Mike Jones sits down with Matt Finch, a strategist, foresight practitioner, negotiator and mediator, to get underneath the slide decks and into the lived experience of decision-making under pressure. We talk about why so many strategic plans stall at execution, and how the missing piece is often what people...

Strategy can feel like a choice between two bad options: a rigid annual plan that gets ignored by February, or constant agility that mistakes motion for direction. We sit down with Joel Grundy, Head of Strategy at Q5, to get back to what strategy is meant to do: help leaders make a small number of tough choices in an uncertain world, without pretending we can “bridle” the market into certainty. We...

Strategy can look brilliant on paper and still fail the moment it meets the organisation that has to deliver it. We sit down with Gavin Rouch, an organisational development practitioner, to get honest about why that happens and what to do instead. We talk about organisations as interconnected systems in all their messy glory, where incentives, history, board pressure, and filtered information crea...

Strategy only matters if it survives contact with reality. We sit down with operations chief Jayson Coil to unpack how intent, trust, and disciplined initiative turn a tidy plan into effective action when the stakes are high and time is short. From wildfire lines to boardrooms, we dig into what leaders can do today to bridge the gap between strategy and execution without slipping into control for...

Strategy doesn’t fail in spreadsheets; it fails when people can’t see themselves inside it. We sit down with David Slowly—journalist turned radio producer turned B2B strategist—to unpack a practical, repeatable way to turn direction into action through narrative. David traces how radio taught him to spark imagination without visuals and how working with data-driven teams demanded proof that storie...

Strategy often treats the future like a straight road. We treat it like a landscape. With Lasse Jonasson, Chief Foresight Officer at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, we unpack how to swap predictions for preparedness and why language is the first tool of good strategy. When leaders share a vocabulary for assumptions, signals, and scenarios, conversations stop drifting and decisions st...

Strategy doesn’t live in a binder; it lives in motion. We sit down with practitioner-author Erik Schön to reconnect strategy with doing, drawing on Sun Tzu’s correlative pairs, Boyd’s OODA orientation, and Wardley Maps to turn abstract plans into concrete manoeuvres. From the first minutes, we challenge the ritual of annual decks and fixed KPIs, arguing for shorter strategy loops that privilege le...

What if the most powerful strategy lessons aren’t found in boardrooms but in everyday life at the edge of uncertainty? We sit down with Sarah Kernion, founder of Inch Stones and mother of two non-speaking autistic children, to explore how frontline parenting becomes a masterclass in orientation, sense making, and adaptive leadership. The conversation is candid, challenging, and grounded: you can’t...

Strategy only matters if it changes what people do tomorrow. We bring Stephen Bungay, author of The Art of Action, to unpack how mission command turns intent into execution without drowning teams in detail. Instead of orders that prescribe how to act, directives clarify what to achieve and why it matters—freeing people to adapt their methods as conditions shift. We trace the roots from Prussian Au...

Modern work is overflowing with nonsense. Mandatory e-learning that teaches nothing, policies no one reads, collaboration that never happens, and metrics that drive the wrong behaviour. In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by James Healy, applied behavioural scientist and author of BS at Work , to unpack why organisations get pulled into performative nonsense and how beh...

Most organisations overthink strategy and underdo it. In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones sits down with Alex Smith, author of No Bullsh**t Strategy , to explore why strategy has drifted into a thinking exercise instead of a doing discipline. Alex explains why the fundamentals of strategy are simple, why leaders obsess over the wrong things, and why the real work starts when you...

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Julian Chender—organisational design expert, strategy advisor, and founder of 11A Collaborative—to explore how to make strategy work in the messy reality of organisational life. Julian draws on years of experience helping purpose-driven organisations redesign themselves to stay viable. They unpack the challenges of structure, capab...

What if the future of health isn’t just about fixing sickness—but creating value in how we live? In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality , Mike Jones is joined by Andy Wilkins—founder of Future of Health, futures strategist, and author—to rethink what strategy means in health and care systems. They explore why efficiency often works against long-term health outcomes, how integrated care and live...

Strategy isn’t a performance—it’s a practice. In this special solo episode, host Mike Jones reflects on what 30 episodes of Strategy Meets Reality have revealed about the state of modern strategy. He explores why strategy fails first in perception, not execution, and how organisations confuse alignment with coherence, performance with action, and control with orientation. Drawing on lessons from B...

The brain is your most powerful strategic tool—if you know how to use it. In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones talks with Dr. Delia McCabe—neuroscientist and expert in nutritional neuroscience—about how neuroplasticity, nutrition, and stress shape leaders’ ability to think, decide, and adapt. They dive deep into the biology of creativity, the traps of mental fatigue, and why the s...

Success can be blinding. Strategy is often where complacency hides best. In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality , Mike Jones speaks with Saul Betmead de Chasteigner—strategic advisor and transformation leader—about the hidden traps in organisations that seem to be “winning.” They unpack how strategy becomes theatre, why organisations resist feedback when things are going well, and how real tran...