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Strategy Meets Reality Podcast
Traditional strategy is broken.
The world is complex, unpredictable, and constantly shifting—yet most strategy still relies on outdated assumptions of control, certainty, and linear plans.
Strategy Meets Reality is a podcast for leaders who know that theory alone doesn’t cut it.
Hosted by Mike Jones, organisational psychologist and systems thinker, this show features honest, unfiltered conversations with leaders, strategists, and practitioners who’ve had to live with the consequences of strategy.
We go beyond frameworks to explore what it really takes to make strategy work in the real world—where trade-offs are messy, power dynamics matter, and complexity won’t go away.
No jargon. No fluff. Just real insight into how strategy and execution actually happen.
🎧 New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe and rethink your strategy.
Strategy Meets Reality Podcast
Latest Episodes
How Growing Firms Stay Viable | Mike Price
One government decision can gut a revenue stream. One “loyal” team member can cap your growth. One annual budget can lull you into thinking you’re in control when you’re not. That’s where strategy stops being a document and starts being a serie...
Strategy Meets Reality In Higher Education And Community Wellbeing
Strategy sounds tidy until funding shocks, shifting policy, and the messy reality of local communities hit. We sit down with Craig Hobbs, senior lecturer and systems thinker, to ask a deceptively simple question: what are universities actually ...
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...
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 m...
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: su...
