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 dynamics and internal politics shape what can be challenged and what must be navigated.

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”. 

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 conditions, clear choices, and activation that gives teams room to interpret and self-align.

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.