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. 

The strategy looks clean on paper. Real strategy is sweaty, uncertain, and intensely human. Mike Jones sits down with Matt Finch, a strategist, foresight practitioner, negotiator and mediator, to get underneath the slide decks and into the lived experience of decision-making under pressure. We talk about why so many strategic plans stall at execution, and how the missing piece is often what people are feeling but cannot yet say out loud. 

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 can look brilliant on paper and still fail the moment it meets the organisation that has to deliver it. We sit down with Gavin Rouch, an organisational development practitioner, to get honest about why that happens and what to do instead. We talk about organisations as interconnected systems in all their messy glory, where incentives, history, board pressure, and filtered information create strategic blind spots that senior leaders rarely see from the strategy room.