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.

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 disassociation”, the gap between what leaders want to be true and what the environment will actually allow. 

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.

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 learning, outcomes, and a clear line of sight to the customer.