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by Mike Jones
Traditional strategy is broken.The world is complex, unpredictable, and constantly shifting—yet most strategy still relies on outdated assumptions of control, certainty, and linear plans.Strategy Meets Reality is a podcast for leaders who know that theory alone doesn’t cut it.Hosted by Mike Jones, organisational psychologist and systems thinker, this show features honest, unfiltered conversations with leaders, strategists, and practitioners who’ve had to live with the consequences of strategy.We go beyond frameworks to explore what it really takes to make strategy work in the real world—where trade-offs are messy, power dynamics matter, and complexity won’t go away.No jargon. No fluff. Just real insight into how strategy and execution actually happen.🎧 New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe and rethink your strategy.
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Strategy sounds tidy until funding shocks, shifting policy, and the messy reality of local communities hit. We sit down with Craig Hobbs, senior lecturer and systems thinker, to ask a deceptively simple question: what are universities actually for now, and what must change for them to stay viable without losing their public purpose? We explore universities as social anchor institutions within a wider civic ecosystem of employers, local authorities, health services, voluntary groups, and citi...
Strategy fails in ways that feel mysterious: the plan looked solid, the logic was sound, and yet reality does something else. I’m joined by Luiz von Paumgartten, a patent attorney who has spent the last decade developing a model he calls Natural Reality. Using a handful of diagrams and plain language, we dig into “meaning” (everything produced inside your mind) versus “happening” (uninterpreted action in the world). We sharpen the map-territory distinction, the idea that your mind is b...
A strategy you can't deliver isn't ambitious; it's wishful thinking. Mike sits down with Ben Chappell, founder of Cove Ops, to get brutally practical about the gap between strategy and execution and why “operations” is the missing piece in so many SMEs that are scaling, preparing for investment, or gearing up for a sale. We unpack how strategy drift happens when teams go back to business as usual, mistaking constant activity for progress. Ben reframes strategy as intent and a daily decision ...
AI is moving faster than our organisations can make sense of, and that gap is where strategy breaks. We sit down with Adrian Wolfberg, a former national security practitioner and author of Who Leads When AI Thinks, to unpack a tough reality: success with AI is not mainly a technology problem; it is a leadership, context, and knowledge integration problem. We start with boundaries and organisational intelligence, the way functions and hierarchies shape what people see, what they value, and wh...
Most strategy starts in the wrong place. Someone picks the destination, the deck gets built, and nobody stops to examine the ground the organisation is actually standing on. No guest this week. Mike Jones is solo to talk about where the podcast is heading, why he wants more leaders inside organisations rather than commenting from outside them, and what it's been like finishing the book, which is now with the publisher and out on 2nd of March. Then he gets into the thing he keeps having to arg...
If your organisation keeps saying "we need to be more innovative" while doing everything possible to crush experimentation, this conversation is for you. I'm joined by Robyn Bolton, founder and Chief Navigator at MileZero, to get brutally practical about what it takes to turn a growth strategy into results when uncertainty, incentives and internal politics get in the way. We explore the core tension leaders face: most people rise by mastering operating excellence in a high-knowledge en...
A strategy can look flawless on a slide deck and still fail the moment it reaches the real world. I’m joined by Evan Campbell, technology executive, former management consultant, and author of Adapt to Win, to unpack why organisations with “good strategy” so often struggle with strategy execution, strategic alignment, and making day-to-day work match leadership intent. We get practical about what breaks: strategy decay as clarity gets lost down the hierarchy, the inertia of an organisation a...
Strategy sounds clean on a slide deck. Then you try to deliver it inside a system with competing priorities, blurred boundaries, and a public spotlight that never switches off. I’m joined by senior civil servant Alison Guthrie-Wrenn to talk about strategy execution where constraints are real, relationships are long-term, and legitimacy is not automatically granted. We compare what it feels like to drive change from inside an organisation versus advising from the outside, and why power dynami...
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Traditional strategy is broken.The world is complex, unpredictable, and constantly shifting—yet most strategy still relies on outdated assumptions of control, certainty, and linear plans.Strategy Meets Reality is a podcast for leaders who know that theory alone doesn’t cut it.Hosted by Mike Jones, organisational psychologist and systems thinker, this show features honest, unfiltered conversations with leaders, strategists, and practitioners who’ve had to live with the consequences of strategy.We go beyond frameworks to explore what it really takes to make strategy work in the real world—where trade-offs are messy, power dynamics matter, and complexity won’t go away.No jargon. No fluff. Just real insight into how strategy and execution actually happen.🎧 New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe and rethink your strategy.
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