Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Reclaiming Strategy: Mike Jones on Perception, Structure, and the Return to Coherence

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 31

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Strategy isn’t a performance—it’s a practice.

In this special solo episode, host Mike Jones reflects on what 30 episodes of Strategy Meets Reality have revealed about the state of modern strategy. He explores why strategy fails first in perception, not execution, and how organisations confuse alignment with coherence, performance with action, and control with orientation.

Drawing on lessons from Boyd, Sun Tzu, and the 30+ guests who’ve shaped this journey, Mike challenges the branding-led view of strategy and calls for a return to strategy as movement—anchored in perceptual clarity, structural capability, and a shared sense of reality.

🔍 In this episode:

  • Why strategy fails in the boardroom, not the field
  • The perceptual complexity behind strategic failure
  • How structural inertia widens the decision-to-action gap
  • Why coherence beats alignment in turbulent environments
  • The role of freedom of action in resilient execution
  • How we lost the art of manoeuvre—and how to bring it back

Follow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/ 

Learn more: https://substack.com/@strategymeetsreality https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

🎧 Keywords: Strategy, Execution, Leadership, Coherence, Perception, Structure, OODA Loop, Viability, Emergence, Strategic Orientation, Adaptive Organisations, Boyd, Sun Tzu, Viable System Model

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Mike Jones (00:00)
I set the podcast up because I wanted to have a place, where leaders can rethink how we view strategy.

How do we challenge the orthodoxy

I think we need to reclaim strategy back. I think we need to cut the performance and get back to real strategy.

I think strategy fails first in perception, not execution. I don't think the problem is that we can't act, it is that we no longer see clearly enough to know how to.

Welcome back to Strategy meets Reality podcast. I'm your host, Mike Jones. And this week is slightly different. You only have me. The reason for this is last week we got to our 30th episode, which is amazing. I never thought we'd get this far when I set up the podcast. I set the podcast up because I wanted to have a place, a conversation where leaders can rethink how we view strategy.

How do we challenge the orthodoxy

that the world is stable, the world's predictable and linear course relationship? And really how do we unearth the idea around how we create strategy that actually meets contact with reality?

And, you know, I've been overwhelmed since we set the podcast up, the initial, guest that I had on, you know, Mike Burrows the first episode we'd done, Chet Richards and, Patrick Hoverstadt they were the initial three that I, I find that they gave me the opportunity, an unknown podcast to come on as a guest. and ever since then, viewership is, is grown, our LinkedIn.

pages now almost at 500 followers, is quite a lot more than I was expecting. And I've enjoyed every moment of every episode having the opportunity to speak to people. And we've had some absolutely fantastic guests from them. We've had Ava Thomas, Don Vandergrift, Adam Thompson, Stefan Gershater, Ben Ford, Matt Mullen, Julia Hautz talking about Open Strategy.

You know, Steve Hearsum Leanne Sobel, Mark McGrath. That was a great episode on Oolaloop, Paul Forbisher, Michael Negendahl, Ben Zweibelson Norman Chon, Marcus Dimbleby, Louise Le Gatt, Johan Ivari That was a really good one to talk about, you know, execution. Hunter Hastings, Ella Henderson, talking about wayfinding.

Don McLean, Glenn Wilson, Janke Kings-Glebe, Paul Sweeney, Radhika Dutt, Mick Brian Saul Betmead, and the last one, like all of them, is a fantastic episode with Delia McCabe talking about neuroscience and leadership. And I'm blown away that all these people were willing and happy to come onto the podcast.

and work for me because it has been a challenge because I'm with clients a lot during the day and we've been extremely busy at the moment and all the guests have been fantastic to work around. There's been some late night recordings, I've sat in hotel, you may notice my background changes in some of them. But also I'd like to thank all the listeners for

you know, coming back, I've been blown away by the increase in viewership and people sharing the podcast around, people getting in touch, saying how much value they've got from the podcast, which is always great. And with that, you know, if you are a listener and you want something that, you know, a certain topic or you've got a question, please get in touch. can get in touch with me on our LinkedIn page or...

you can message me directly on LinkedIn, I'll always answer. So if there's something that you want us to focus on, please give us a shout and I'll do that. If it's a case you've got a question around strategy, more than happy to get in touch. Strategy is my main focus that we do, as you probably notice, strategy and sort of all design is what we focus in. And that's what my main sort of interest is. So if you've got a question on those, please.

⁓

just reach out and I also do have my newsletter which is on my LinkedIn page or my sub stack, When Strategy Meets Reality. So can find me on there and you have all my views and stuff on there. So plenty of places to understand more about what we're trying to do and also to get in touch if you've got some questions. So yeah, that's great, thank you. And for this point is that for this episode,

for our, well technically it'll be the 31st, but it's not, because it's bonus episode, but I suppose it will be the 31st. I wanted to pause, not to summarize, but to reflect. I think to look on what's happening to strategy, why we keep losing it, and what we need do to take it back. So if you've been following me recently, you probably noticed I've written stuff and I've talked stuff on here on the podcast around...

around what's happened to strategy. I've talked about how marketing is hijacked strategy. But if you look back on the origins of strategy, you may get this. So strategy began all about manoeuvres. So the Greeks called it strategos, the art of turning uncertainty into advantage.

That's really powerful when you think about it. And they also talked about these limited resources as well to an advantage. And Sun Tzu, 300 years before Christ and Boyd both understood that survival depended on orientation, not prediction.

So there's a lot in there around where strategy came from and what it really meant. When they saw it, it was more of an understanding that there are external actors in the environment that have their own conscious will. And they will act and they will continuously act and it's us as leaders or strategists to...

to observe, to orientate, understand what's going on and to act to our advantage. So understanding all those, what do we need to do? How do we shape that environment to our advantage for our maneuver by using our very limited resources to our advantages?

But I think we've lost that along the way and I'm not quite sure where. I'm doing a lot of research at the moment because I'm writing my book at the moment which will be titled When Strategy Meets Reality, An Emergent Approach to Structural Execution which hopefully will be published next year. I'm aiming for my birthday to be fair but we'll see. So I'm doing lot of research into how strategy move from...

from that understanding to what we're predominantly seeing in organisations now. Because I've always been a bit bewildered, especially when I left the military, I was a bit bewildered about what organisations classed as strategy.

Because when strategy seems to have left the battlefield and I'm not saying that we need to go back to war types and areas or anything like that. But I think we have we have lost strategy. Because as it's entered the boardroom, it's been civilized. The language of maneuver became the language of alignment. The strategy stopped shaping outcomes and started facilitating concept.

consensus.

And in that vacuum, you can see how marketing has stepped in. know, it's it's just became about branding, you know, a vantage came, you know, about storytelling. The question stopped about how do we act to how do we appear? And I think that's really big, you know.

big change, the nuance of language, but it's hugely impactful because it's almost if now strategies come with performance, a potence of action and not actual action. It's become about how do we craft a narrative rather than how do we actually act in this uncertain environment? And you've seen it a lot with

how people talk about strategy is this abstract future thing that happens in the future, but it doesn't actually happen now. When reality, yes, we understand we must use futures to explore the possible intent, but it's about bringing that to the present, to what do we need to do now? What actions do we need to start taking now to shape that future?

to shape the advantage of what we're doing. Not just sit there and create lovely statements and somehow turn strategy into, as I've joked on here before, looking like a Greek villa, know, vision statement on the top. These priorities which are confusing.

because the priorities that organisations put out are either faux policies, they really should be policies, not priorities. Also, they're effects. They're not direction, they're effects. They are outcomes of actions. So they really give people the understanding of what you're trying to do. And then...

At the bottom you normally have your behaviors because they seem to change like the wind in lot of organizations and I don't know why.

It sort of became like a branding exercise now instead of really what strategy is about. We now have a strategy theater, performance of coherence, organizations mistake the look control for the reality of it. And I think I term this the cult of nonsense, plans without orientation, alignment, without movement.

What I'm talking about in this cult of nonsense is just this lunacy of...

of what strategies become.

And it's quite surprising. And I'm just trying to think about or research the logical step in how that's made it from the true sense of the battlefield to modern day thinking.

because most of the main models that you see out there like Roger Martin's playing to win things and other ones like that I think they're suited for fast moving goods branding type strategies but I don't think they are really useful for real strategies

And you have a lot of these models based on alignment, but I think they're confusing alignment with control, because that's what they're trying to do. In sense, they're trying to have control. They think that the organizations have to be perfectly aligned all the way through. You see this with the culture people, that they think that it's a static thing all way through the organization.

And I think you see this in this assessment thing for values. I spoke about this with Sol Betmeade in the episode. And all this stuff, it just confuses people and it doesn't really give direction. And I think we create so much internal inertia that we spend all our time trying to...

to appease people, to fill in tick boxes, to write the perfect thing for boards, that we actually lose connection with the external environment, which is the living breathing thing that we are adapting to, and that's the thing that we need to concentrate on to make sure that we achieve fit. And there is a perceptual and a structural element to that that I'll come onto.

I see this sort of every day in organizations I work with. It's the endless PowerPoint decks, frameworks and plans, yet no sense of directions. It's almost as if we have deceived leaders, and I say we, that's not me, but in the whole, that we've deceived leaders in thinking that they are...

Harry Potter that they can wave their magic wand, they can say a few magic words and suddenly that's going to change things. mindset, ambition alone will actually act as strategy. And you see this all the time. You see it more prominent in sports where they get rid of a manager and then suddenly they get a new manager in.

expecting that things will change, but they've not actually changed anything. They've just changed the leader and thinking that that leader is somehow got magical powers to just wish things will happen. And I think that's where, if you think about it, the real shift from where strategy came from, strategy was about maneuver, it's about orientation.

How do I understand and sense what's going on in an external environment? And then what maneuvers must I do to my advantage? So it's all about movement and it was all about action. And now to the present day, strategy seems to be about just wishful thinking and words. And that's about it. And I think this is where you'll see in that real big gap between

strategy and execution because those that making this strategy are just using vague words to appease, to sound good, but there's no translation. So when they chuck that over the wall to the people that are there to execute, they wonder why cynicism just grows. And they have a further disconnect from reality about

what our wishful thinking says to what's actually happening on the ground, where strategy came from was different. That decision to action, that cycle was a lot shorter and was more connected with reality. And as soon as they did act, they were observing and reorientating to what that meant to see if actually, you know,

Did it achieve what they wanted to achieve? If not, then what do they need to do next?

So I think that's where we're at, that I think we need to reclaim strategy back. I think we need to cut the performance and get back to real strategy.

I suppose this brings me to thinking about the next sort of thing I've been reflecting on and...

you know, I think it's really important, I think it's often missed, is the perceptual challenge of strategy. Because I think strategy fails first in perception, not execution. I don't think the problem is that we can't act, it is that we no longer see clearly enough to know how to.

What I mean by this is that we are all unique, we are...

We are all individuals that have unique perceptions of the world and we all perceive information very differently, but we're working in a collective system. So often we are stuck where we think that we are aligned, that we're talking about the same thing, but we're not. We're talking about very different things.

We use words that we think mean the same thing, but they don't. I wonder if often we actually challenge each other to really understand different perspectives. Perceptual complexity is a really important thing because perceptual complexity teaches humility, it reminds us that strategy is not the search for perfect knowledge.

for the practice of acting with incomplete information and always will be incomplete information.

because we have the thing called the darkness principle that the world is so complex there's always going to be an element of darkness. But that darkness increases if we don't listen to different perspectives. Because if we don't listen to different perspectives and listen to understand then we'll only see it from my perspective. Where my perspective is not wrong.

but it's always going to be incomplete. And the same with any else's perspective. Their perspective is not wrong, but it will be incomplete. I think it's gathering these different perspectives together to understand that even as a collective, it will be incomplete, but it will be more complete than it would be on my own.

I suppose that's a challenge about how do we gather these different perspectives.

how do we listen, but also how do we minimise the misinformation transfer, the fact that I communicate one way and believe that people interpret it as I've said it, as I meant it, but that's not true. So we always need to challenge ourselves around, well, you what did you mean by that? know, clarifying, summarising, reflecting.

on what they said to try and to, to minimize that chance for mistransfer of information. So we reduce misunderstandings and misinterpretations of what you said. And what this is to do is to, to increase the shared orientation of the team. And if we can create the increase the shared orientation, that's great. there's three

key principles that we're trying to get in the leadership team, which is that strategic sensitivity so that we are, we are.

We have good sensitivity around the external environment, what's happening, what's the threats, what's the risks, what manoeuvres getting played out by others, what's direction to the external environment, but also the internal element as well, like what are we capable of, how fast can we move, all those good things are really important that we have that strategic sensitivity. Then there's the shared orientation, I was just talking about that, you know, are, I don't want people to...

think like me, but I want us to have a shared orientation around the internal external factors, the context, really the context is what's going on.

They're really key. then the second one, the third one, sorry, resource fluidity. know, can we actually move capability resources, be it people, finance equipment around quick enough? You know, how, what is the delay between, you know, decision and action? I think that's really a big problem. But as John Boyd's Oodaloop and

You know, that episode with Mark McGrath is really good if you to go back and listen to that, learn more about Oola Loop, but teaches that orientation is the way that we interpret reality. And that's everything, you know, lose that and no amount of planning will save you. And the reason for that is, is if our orientation is not congruent with reality, we will be surprised. We will increase our surprises all the time.

because we will act and how it will meet reality will be far different than what we expected. And what we're trying to do with this, with increasing our shared orientation by overcoming the perceptual complexity, is that thing. It's to make sure that our orientation is more congruent to reality rather than being disconnected from reality.

And I often challenge leaders in this that I find a lot of them are disconnected. They are very disconnected with reality. Not only the reality of the external environments, but the reality of what's actually happening in the organization on the ground. Because we do strange ceremonies in organizations that we go out and we go out and visit the widest parts of organization as...

is more of like a show of connection. Like, look at me, I'm the leader and I'm going down to visit my people. isn't that nice? And I've rushed through and rather than saying that I'm going to step down, unannounced.

to understand, to make sure that when I step down the organization, it's to, yes, there's the connection park course, you know, have that, but the key thing as well is to make sure that the model you're using to regulate the system is aligned with reality, aligned with the terrain. I think that's really important. I think that's missed.

People go, we're going to have a walk out Wednesday and we're going to show that we are present as leaders. But they don't realize, because it's not unannounced, that people are almost deceived because there's this power at play that we think that because the leadership's coming down, everything needs to look perfect. And you get this faux reality that

does more harm than good, because it gives the leader the sense of everything's under control and, aren't we great with doing stuff. But in reality, it's chaos. So when they go back up to the boardroom to make decisions, they're making decisions based on a reality and a capability that does not quite exist as they thought. So when they do go and act, they will be surprised. And I think this...

Perceptual blindness comes because organizations create their own noise, their own data dashboards, KPIs, endless reviews, and there seems to be more information and less awareness. I think we get all this information going up, but there's so much, it's amplified onto leaders does it actually help their orientation or is it perceived sense of control that they...

get this perceived sense of comfort and it's the filter that goes through the organization that gives this sense of comfort rather than orientation. And this is what Boyd called the incestuous amplification, the echo chamber that forms when the feedback is filtered and narratives become self-referential, which is not useful.

and that destroys the orientation of the organization and that becomes the perceptual challenge.

And it's that bit about, is your orientation congruent reality? Do you and your leadership team, do you only look for things to confirm your belief about what you already hold to be true? Or do you look for difference, mismatches, differences between what you believe to be true and what's actually happening in reality?

and you're not going to get that from an echo chamber. You need to be curious and challenge the information you've got. You need to be very key about what information you actually need and you need to get yourself down to the edges of your organisation to listen, to understand, to challenge your perspective and to listen. I think this is partly what we're talking about with Julia Hautz when we talk about open.

strategy.

And I think that we've got to challenge what we're listening to and to what's just confirming our worldview or what's challenging our worldview. And we want our worldview to be challenged, otherwise your orientation will collapse.

and

And I think that this perceptual failure is one half the story. The other is the structural element. The way we built the organization, know, even if we are congruent reality, if we haven't constructed the organization to be able to act, then we've got a serious challenge. So the other key point out of this, that was a reflection, I suppose, is the structural challenge of strategy.

I've wrote about this a few times around, organisations shapes strategy, the two-way relationship and a strategy that can survive contact by enabling your teams or protecting your team's ability to act. And I think that organisations don't just execute strategy, they shape it. They shape the way the structure, the authority, the feedback, the decision rights defines how the strategy actually behaves.

I think we could use control with coordination and we layer processes instead of increasing freedom. And I think that you've got to realize that every layer that's added increases latency. I don't think that's what we really can afford nowadays, especially if more uncertain environments.

we can't have that latency, that what I was talking about earlier around that gap between decision and action, we need to shorten that as much as possible. And that's not you just as a leader acting, that's your organization. So how do you make that decision? And then how does your organization enact that decision as quick as possible?

I think that when we have such a large gap forming between decision and action, that is the result of structural inertia, an organization that is designed for stability, trying to operate within turbulence. And we need to remove that structural inertia because otherwise the more you build that structural inertia, it increases the gap between

decision and action and it slows you right down and as we think about the viability principle you as an organisation must be able to act or move as quick as or quicker than your external environment otherwise you'll cease to exist and it's that structural inertia that internal inertia is the thing that's stopping you from doing it.

Um, but I think with, with a lot of this is that I, with strategy, and I suppose it comes to my first point around where with strategies lost is that I think in a lot of the orthodoxy of strategy at the moment, um, it seems to be made regardless of the organization. So it all becomes more just about, um, ambition and aspiration.

and not realizing that the organization...

ability to execute strategy is really defined from the organisational structure. So what's it capable of doing? And I think that bit is wholly missed a lot in the strategy execution world. So it becomes as if, I suppose that's what creates the gap that we keep seeing between.

strategy and execution that people keep talking about.

And I think when we look at these two, There's the, well, two perspectives when looking at the relationship between the organisation and strategy, and they both are true. So you have strategy to the organisation, the strategy shapes the intended behaviour to carry out a manoeuvre. Organisations often need to adapt structures, build new capabilities, enable people, establish measures for progress and outcomes.

And then you've got the organisation to the strategy. The organisation is what conceives the strategy in the first place. It's the structures, processes and relationships set the boundaries of what is possible for the actual strategies that emerge, a direct reflection of the organisation's existing capabilities and couplings. Neither perspective alone is sufficient and the strategy and organisation exist in constant interplay, each shaping and being shaped by the other.

So it's realizing that when we form strategy, we form strategy in the realism of what we're capable of doing. We're not going to suddenly, we're not suddenly going to say, ⁓ yes, our ambition is to achieve this when we've actually got no capability or time to do that because to...

execute that strategy, it means the organization would need to go under immense change, create new capabilities that in realistic terms, it wouldn't have time to enact it. I think that's a real big disconnect that I'm often seeing with strategy, that they're demanding this aspiration. Normally the aspiration is so watered down that it has

they're trying to achieve everything and there's always competing elements in there so people on the ground don't actually know which way to focus because they won't make the difficult choices to where they're going to focus. But they make it regardless of what's actually going on in the organisation and what the organisation has time for or has the ability to do in response to that strategy. So there's a real key there.

And it always thinks that the organization...

The organization doesn't just follow the strategy, it shapes it. The organization defines the strategy you're capable of, of developing or executing, and it's a constraint. It is a constraint to strategy. And I think that constraint is often missed when you think about strategy execution.

that relationship between strategy and the organization is often missed. And you see this, and that's why you get more of that cynicism. So you get the cynicism in the first place, because when you go for that branding exercise of launching the strategy, you look at our great vision statement, you get cynicism, because the organization, people are looking at it what is this crap? And the second one is that

they'll look at it and go, if they actually do understand what you're saying, they'll look at it go, well, we haven't got capability of doing that. You know, we may have got the capability of doing that, but you got rid of it like six months ago. And it definitely seems to be that disconnect. And I think that another part with the structural challenge, I think this obsession with

efficiency in sense that you get a slight problem in your organization, you get Deloitte in or something like that. First thing they'll do is look at how they can cut heads. And it's like you see it in organizations. They have a financial challenge. First thing they'll suggest straight away is cut heads and see where they can make things efficient. And they'll just cut parts of the organization out and go, yeah, yeah, we don't need that. We don't need this.

with no actual understanding around what impact does that have and what use does that thing have? And when you cut heads, all you're doing is making yourself extremely lean, which may be in the short term, a financial benefit, but in the long term, you're removing that agility, that resilience. So, and what that means is when you're trying to enact strategy and you're bringing those adoptions into the organisation saying like, right,

to do this, we need to create this new capability or we need to redirect this capability here, we need to go through this change. With what? Resources. Because you have no resources, because you've cut them. And the only resources you have are the ones that you've committed 110 % to, to another task. And this is the challenge when they're going, well, we want to be more agile and do this.

but they commit 110 % of their resources.

So there's no flex. Your resources are fully committed. They're not just fully committed. They're fully committed and doing extra stuff as well. So if they're fully committed, where's the capacity coming from to enact this new change or build this new capability or to respond to this risk or opportunity that's coming? You haven't got it. You've resourced it all. So you miss those opportunities. So the long-term implication.

is quite drastic and then they have to then go through this whole transformation and probably cut more people because that seems to be what the NBA world is obsessed with, just efficiency. Aim for the top right corner of ⁓ a two by two matrix and cut people. But then I'll stop there because I'm getting quite cynical, but you get where I'm going. And this is the challenge that we need to

to overcome.

I suppose that comes to the other part of the structural challenge, is protecting people's ability to act. Now, if you want to operate in uncertainty, and we say, you know, have any chance of your strategy surviving reality, you need to protect your people's ability to act. What that means is the sense that we give a clear intent, but we can't define every aspect of that because we don't know what's going to change or what's going to happen in reality.

So this is where the emergent approach comes in. For that to work, you've got to give freedom of action for your people to understand sense and then as they go to act, to make sense of their choices, because they understand what the intent is, they understand their constraints, so they've got the freedom of action to adjust their response in line with the intent and the constraints imposed. And this gives them flexibility.

because they know what you want to do. So as things change, they've got choices. You can make sense of those choices and pick the right choice that will enable us to achieve what we want to do. If we remove that freedom of action and we define it too narrowly, then it will fail because they will go to act. It won't work for what we define because it's changed because we're in an uncertain environment. So you'd have missed that opportunity because they'll then have to go up the chain to ask permission.

to make sense of what's changed, to then go back and it's changed again. So you come in this vicious loop, which then just turns into more governance meetings, more actual meetings. And then what happens is your people don't lose the ability to act. They don't act, they just wait. They wait to be told in a meeting. And that's what slows the whole organization down.

because you removed that ability to act. And I think there's two, really two crucial things or three really. One is that in the strategy process, understand the relationship between the strategy and the organization, organization and the strategy. Remove the internal inertia that we create by every time there's a problem we add. So we add more process, more policies, more governance boards, more all this stuff on that just makes.

the organization immovable because we're fighting internal inertia so much and then we lose connection with reality. And the final bit is about how do we protect our people's ability to act? How do we give freedom of action back to where it belongs so that that gives us residual resilience and adaption because they can adapt to what's going on. So I think in...

I think that's where we need to...

rediscover strategies of movement, not management.

And I think that when we look back on all the episodes that we've had, that strategy doesn't fail in the field, it fails in the boardroom.

I think it fails in the boardroom because leaders become disconnected from reality. Strategy becomes more about performance. And we enable this internal inertia and we enable the removal of action from our people or the freedom of action from our people. So when...

I hope you've got this. My key points to look at is, you know, let's reclaim strategy where it was and hopefully next episodes and I'm going to explore that. Understand the perceptual complexity that we're in and what that means. How do we build that shared orientation? And then the structural element. How do we understand that relationship between strategy and instruction and what that means to enable us to execute that strategy or

how do we enable an organization that can create strategy that meets the contact reality.

I think from the Greeks to Sun Tzu to John Boyd all taught us the same truth, strategy is lived, it's not planned.

And it's certainly not a fricking branding exercise. I think it's time that we stop trying to control the future and start learning how to move through it. I think realizing that futures and foresight as we spoke with Ever and Matt Mullen and people like that, that yes, we need to look at the plausible scenarios, the future, but that should inform today's actions. It's not an abstract future thing. should...

informed today's looking at the affordances that we have, the adjacent possibilities that we can move now. And that's what we should do. So that just feeds our actions. it's more about, let's act and adapt as we go through, rather than trying to create these perfect plans that will, they're so perfect, so timed, that they'll just shatter.

the moment we meet reality, which is not good.

And I think, you know, for all 30 guests, I think clear thing is that it's about coherence, not alignment. And you may look at this and think, well, it's just nuances and words. But I think if you go back and listen to those, or you read my articles, the difference between coherence, coherence is how do we maintain enough identity so that we can be adaptable, so we can adapt over time without losing our identity. And I think alignment, when you look at it, alignment is more about control. How do we get everything?

pretty much the same. And I think if you want to look at coherence and a good model of coherence, the viable systems model is by far the best way to look at an organization as a viable thing. And I think that's where leaders in organizations should be challenged about how do we enact in a way that increases our viability. That's the pursuit of viability that's more important. And I think that

we need to get back, we need to get strategy back to what it was. Strategy wasn't about performance, wasn't about buzzwords, wasn't about vision statements, wasn't about mission statements, wasn't all purpose statements and all that. It was about action, was about movement, maneuvers, it was about responding and understanding to the external environment.

about how do we act to increase our advantage and follow the pursuit of viability. But that's one thing I think we need to go forward and act and I'd love this question for you. How do we bring strategy back to life in motion, in practice and reality? And please get in touch with your thoughts on that. But I'll leave you this with.

with big thank you, big thank you to all my guests, all 30 of them so far and the upcoming ones who going forward. Thank you to all my listeners and the followers on our LinkedIn page and the engagement, I love that and please keep engaging, keep sharing, get in touch with me if you've got any questions. And I think that hopefully this conversation has made you.

hopefully rethink strategy and hopefully we can create a movement that enables strategy to survive contact with reality. See you in the next episode. Thank you, bye.