WHERE LEADERS RETHINK HOW STRATEGY WORKS IN THE REAL WORLD
The traditional approach to strategy is broken.
In a world that won’t sit still, leaders can’t rely on outdated models built for stability and control.
Strategy Meets Reality is a podcast for leaders, strategists, and thinkers who want real insight—not theory. Hosted by organisational psychologist and systems thinker Mike Jones, each episode cuts through the noise with honest conversations from people who’ve lived the complexity, made the tough calls, and rethought what strategy means in practice.
🎧 New episodes every Tuesday
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Meet your Host:
Mike Jones
Mike Jones is a systems thinker, organisational psychologist, and former British Army soldier.
He’s worked as a strategy and execution advisor to senior executives across rail, tech, and government to rethink how strategy actually works in complexity.
He founded LBI Consulting and author of the upcoming book When Strategy Meets Reality.
All Episodes
Meaning Does Not Transfer | Luiz von Paumgartten
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).
From Strategy To Reality Through Better Operations | Ben Chappell
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.
Who Leads When AI Thinks | Adrian Wolfberg
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.
Reality First Strategy | Mike Jones
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.
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