Speed Kills In Business Strategy | Alex Vohr
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 startup building small-scale LNG infrastructure. We use that lens to explore why “strategy meets reality” is not a slogan, but a daily operational problem.
We dig into John Boyd’s OODA Loop as a practical model for decision making in complex adaptive systems, not the oversimplified four-step circle most people quote. Alex explains why orientation drives everything, how assumptions create risk, and why a decision should be treated as a hypothesis that only becomes true when action and feedback confirm it. If you care about organisational agility, learning organisations, and faster strategy execution, the takeaway is clear: improve how you observe, how you make sense, how you decide, how you act, and how you learn.
We also challenge the “false god of efficiency” and the comfort of linear planning. Planning, red teaming, and after-action reviews are not bureaucratic theatre; they are tools for reducing surprise and building a relevant, effective tempo. We talk about incentives, the “zero defects” mentality, and why big organisations drift into entropy when they stop listening to the edges of the system.
If this conversation helps you rethink how your team learns and executes, subscribe, share it with a colleague, and leave a review so more people can find the show.
Find Alex here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-vohr-83b38767/
Get his book: https://amzn.eu/d/01B56POu
Enjoying the show?
Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast.
🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast
📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality
Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/
