What Really Drives Strategic Decisions? | Matt Finch

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. 

Matt brings a grounded view from scenario planning and high-stakes work: leaders are not just thinking machines, they are bodies in a room, picking up signals, anxiety, hope and resistance. We dig into gut feel versus spreadsheet logic, the temptation to post-rationalise decisions after the fact, and the growing risk of outsourcing judgement to AI in strategy. AI can generate polished strategy outputs, but it cannot carry accountability, context or commitment. 

From military leadership to organisational culture, we explore practical ways to create clarity without building a rigid “Greek villa” strategy: clear intent, light constraints, and the back brief that forces real translation. We also tackle power and role boundaries, why psychological safety is never a magic switch, and how to read the room using attention tools like bracketing and horizontalising. The conversation lands on a sharp strategic question for any leader: would you like what your strategy makes you become? 

If you care about leadership, strategic planning, foresight, and decision-making under uncertainty, listen through and share it with someone who’s carrying the weight of a hard call. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what’s one “unsaid” truth you think your organisation needs to name?

Connect with Matt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-finch/

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Transcript

Strategy As A Product Trap

Mike Jones 0:00

Most people do think of strategy that way.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Developing a new strategy. Strategic blind spots.

Mike Jones 0:05

When strategy meets reality, strategy and innovation.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

In the strategy world. Drive their strategic goals.

Meet Matt Finch And His Work

Mike Jones 0:10

And welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. I'm delighted to have Matt Finch with me today. I've been trying to get Matt on this uh podcast for a long time and I've finally wrestled him to come onto the uh podcast. So thank you for joining me. Thanks, Mike. Very pleased to be here. Just for our guests, do you mind giving a bit of background and a bit of context of what you've been up to lately?

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Yeah, for sure. I work in strategy and foresight mostly, but also negotiation and mediation. Essentially, I help stressed out people under conditions of uncertainty when they have a consequential decision to make. So I wear a number of hats. I'm an associate fellow at Side Business School, University of Oxford, where I work a lot with the scenarios faculty. I work with the National Security College of Australia, advisor to the UK all-party parliamentary group on future generations, in which capacity I supported the Ukraine 2040 scenarios, which were built with Ukrainian parliamentarians. Really, I get involved in all kinds of interesting things, but it boils down to this idea of stressed out people under pressure. In my 20s, I was a kindergarten teacher. That's actually the best training for that job. After all the other things I've done, the PhD, everything else, nothing has been so helpful to my work as a consultant as when I used to have to deal with 35-year-olds every morning, Monday through Friday.

Mike Jones 1:29

Is that because most executives result to being children at the end of the day?

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Yeah, I have to say I've had some experiences sometimes where it felt like we were going back to the playground. But I think also little kids, they learn with their bodies, with all their emotions, because they haven't yet been trained into that experience of school, even when you're doing kindergarten, they literally bring their entire lives and their physicality to the room. And what I found, actually, in the early days of my executive education career at Oxford, was just occasionally when something stressful happened, even in a classroom situation, there'd be a flicker of emotion or something on the face of one of the students, these people who are very senior executives, and you'd see, see those deep emotions we have, those almost primal emotions are still there even in a corporate setting. And I'm sure you as well, with the career you've had, you you've seen those moments when those deep, almost childish emotions come to the fore under pressure.

Mike Jones 2:20

Oh yeah, definitely on on uh under pressure. Seeing back in that, I I used to remember the challenge of trying to make decisions under that immense pressure with everything going on. And I remember that I remember seeing this guy once. Um, he wasn't my lead, he was uh he was um another platoon, and we're all sat there quite stressed because a lot was going on. And he was just sat there, this is in Hellman, by the way, and he was just sat there with a cigarette in his mouth, you know, taking it all in. And I remember saying to him afterwards, I was like, Andy, what why is he not stressed? And he goes, I am, I'm just taking it all in. And that was just that was just funny enough you said that, but I think that's something that we we we overlook when we think about emotions, and strategy a lot is around emotions. And I sometimes I think we we can look overlooking that just to the product, the output of strategy, rather than actually like thinking about the emotions and stresses of what this really means.

Decisions Are Embodied And Emotional

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yeah, entirely. I think because the outputs of strategy in an organizational setting are often things like slide decks, documents, emails, you know, we take them in with our eyes, they're visual and verbal. You forget actually the decisions are made in the room or in a meeting like this. We bring our bodies and our emotions, and the way we understand the world is as creatures with thoughts, feelings, and physical bodies, and all of those things are in dialogue. So I think when you're going through the process of actually making the decision and owning the decision, you have to factor that into the process. Even if the output looks very polished and slick, the real world within which all that is unfolding is a world of feelings and it's it's a world of bodies.

Mike Jones 4:02

Yeah. And when you think about the output, I think that's what strategy is being balled down to now is an output. Rather than where you look back at the the history of strategy, what it was, it was about a way of being. It's like it's a way of constantly reorientating, understanding, you know, what's happening, what you have, etc. Um, and I think we're we're dismissing that for the product. So if I ask someone, you got a strategy, they'll yes, and they'll show me something physical. Well, that's not what I want. I want to know what what's the decision making, what what actually happened, what what got surfaced um during the process. That's what was really important.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Yeah, I completely agree. And and of course, we need documentation and materials as a kind of architecture because we're often coordinating many people, many divisions, but you shouldn't be deceived into thinking the architecture is the only thing. And and I've definitely been in the experience in large organizations sometimes where where the kind of lowest form of strategy is the direction has been set somewhere at the top. And then I've worked in a team where we've been told from on high these are the four priorities for the coming years, and then we've almost the manager has sort of set a checklist exercise. Look at what we're already doing, see how it already fits into those four priorities to get the bosses off our backs and see what we have to do to fill in the gaps. Tick, tick, tick. All right, jobs done. We've we've covered ourselves for another three-year cycle. And of course, we all know that's not really what decision making is about in the real world.

Gut Feel Before The Rationale

Mike Jones 5:35

No, and it uh make me laugh because that post-rationalization, you see it all the time. Like we do this, even you see it in people's objectives, like they they give the objectives at the end and then they post-rationalise what they've done for the year against these objectives, and it's the same in the same in strategy. Um, and I I just wrote wrote about this recently, and I called it the power of the uh the powers in the interpretation. And I don't think we have we make space for that interpretation that this is this is what I'm thinking, uh and then allowing that space for someone to interpret that in their own context, what it means to them, because we all come at something with our own baggage, our own perspective, our own context, you know, our our own unique look on things, that we don't we don't make time to surface that and really understand well what what what does this mean to me and what do I now understand what I need to do to make this work?

The Limits Of AI Strategy

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Yeah, entirely. I think when you when you talk about that post-rationalization, it's this notion of tidying everything up and making everything reasonable, which might not even necessarily be rational. And actually, if you look back to the start of the process, both in an organizational setting, but also when we choose a home, when we choose a partner, when we make big life decisions, something happens before the rationale. And, you know, the philosopher of science, Jerry Ravitz, co-wrote a really nice paper with Rafael Ramirez, who runs the Scenarios program at Oxford, essentially talking about aesthetics, like the perception of what is beautiful and what is ugly. And they said, you know, the first thing that happens in understanding what's going on is how you feel before you get to the thinking, and that's why we trust our guts. Um, you know, most people, you can you can try and do what the spreadsheet tells you to do, but the reason we have a leader is because the spreadsheet can't lead. And if your gut doesn't agree with the spreadsheet, the fact is, even someone who wants to go by the numbers is going to hesitate if something in them says no at the gut level.

Mike Jones 7:33

Yeah. And this is my concern when we start I'm starting to see that people outsource strategy to AI. And I've had this argument around, yes, it will make it'll make a beautiful thing, but the same same stuff that most outputs and architectures about, it'll give you the lovely vision and the pillars. But it misses the whole gut feel, that the cognitive, effective, behavioural emotion that that happens. And I think that's the thing that gets real commitment, not just not just you know, a false agreement around priorities.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, what we're discovering with AI is even large language models that are really just coming up with the next word in the sentence, they can do surprising things and show you stuff that that makes you think, I didn't, I hadn't even thought of this. But they are not intelligences in the world with bodies, with feelings. It is strings of verbiage, which might be very slick and polished, might be useful, but it isn't a thing in the world that is thinking and feeling and responding. That there's other kinds of AI that are interesting, like um like gate analysis, like the International Olympic Committee scouting for talent by looking at um how kids are moving on the soccer field, looking on video. There's other kinds of AI doing cool stuff, but but I think there is this danger of remembering what is actually in the world. And I wondered for you, you know, the the diverse career experiences you've had, have there been those moments where where it's been very palpable, this sense of a decision is upon me, and you you kind of feel it with your whole body rather than just being this kind of PowerPoint-level issue?

Mike Jones 9:09

Yeah, like quite a lot. You know, when we were out on operations, is it's always because I because I I grew up in it, so first operation I went on tour was 2003 when um we went out to Iraq and we we evaded Iraq. Funnily enough, we just evaded um Iran. How things come around. But and I was a young kid then, I didn't really understand what was going on. I just sort of had to look after myself, and as I grew, obviously I was going back and forth to Iraq, but then I then I started to promote and I'd senior rank, but now it changed to you know, I've it's not just me now, it's everyone around me. And I think that that's where the pressure comes. It's no longer about just me, it's about how do I look after and care for all these people, but also the challenge that how do I get what we need to happen across to all these people so they understand and can interpret and act um in these very volatile environments because they're never the same. Nothing ever, you know. I give the perfect patrol brief. As soon as we step out, things change, things change dramatically, and but then I'd always get that sense afterwards where I have a moment of my own, a condor moment, and I'll and I'll I'll sit there and I'd like just you know feel my body and my legs and be thankful that you know it's still there.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Yeah, yeah, totally. When you when you talk about rising into that position of authority as well, the thing I think about is some of my training is in a kind of psychodynamic approach, which is a is a fancy way of saying what goes on within and between us in a group emotionally when we deal with a task. And there's a great thinker called Vega Zagia Roberts, and she talks about the idea that actually a leader is not at the top of the pyramids looking down, telling people where to go, and they're not even at the bottom of the pyramid holding everything up. They're more like a container for the group, and they hold the group together. But the price of that is as the leader and the container, you feel the pressures and emotions from outside, like the pressures that might be on you from headquarters or from the wider environment, but you also feel the pressure from within the group that the feelings and the anxieties and the personalities of your group will be affecting you. And so you kind of get it from both sides. And I wonder if there were times where you might feel something in yourself, and then you'd realise actually that's not me, that's someone in the group or the group as a whole putting a feeling into me that I'm now feeling something on behalf of the group.

Mike Jones 11:39

Yeah, you would because you're always you're always getting this um tension, like you said, from outside and inside the group, and you know, there's a lot of pressure that that's given because you're given orders that you need to do, um, and trying to translate um that to your team, especially when you're going out again and they're tired, and you know, last thing they want to do is go out again, and you know, especially if it's just being quite a difficult one, and then you're saying, right, we've got to kick it up again, and you're you're trying to battle this emotion between what you know is right and what you want to do because it's you know it it's palpable to do. Like I'd love to just said, nah, just sack it, I'll just go, but I couldn't. So it you know, even though I was like, I know they're tired, they shouldn't go, but I have to do it, it really does put that pressure and that tense, and and sometimes you're trying to trying to figure out what perspective do I need to look at this subject.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Yeah, yeah, entirely. And that idea of taking different perspectives, you use that word translation. I think so much of the work is translating between the different inputs we have, the different languages, the different conflicting priorities we might be trying to resolve, and again, bringing things into language sometimes that we feel at this more instinctive or wordless level. Like we've all had that moment. So you go, why am I feeling that? And then as you pay attention to what that feeling is, it is a signal from your body trying to tell you something you haven't yet named. I think we can get seduced by words and verbiage and what's written down and what's on the slides, and it can seduce us away from the real world where we're making decisions. But then the act of translating in and out is what kind of keeps us honest, if as it were.

Mike Jones 13:19

Yeah, and just as you were talking now, I was reflecting on so it's really important where we developed a strategy with a team, one of the senior leaders in that team sat there and and they looked and they said, How do we know this is going to work? And it was a great, you could feel the uncertainty, um, you know, you know, the the and it was quite a moment and other people weren't picking up on it, but I remember, but the the question I was on about was that for who? And wondering why I was asking for who, who won't it work? And I because I wanted to know who who were they trying to demonstrate that it needed to work to. And that I think that was really opened a lot of of interesting dynamics between the board, between the the the leadership team. So that decision around we've got to demonstrate this is going to work for the board, but also then the relationship between the wider organisation, they've had a difficult time. You can sense the grown cynicism of oh not another thing. So you can really feel that they were trapped in these this really tough world of trying to translate that this is going to work.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Yeah, entirely. And it sounds like your role in that as well, to be the person who noticed, paused, and then asked the right question as well. Because what I hear in that interaction is the question for whom is this gonna work? And also just the adult recognition of once you're in the real world, the future always has an element of uncertainty, no one's gonna mark your homework, life's gonna play out, and in hindsight, you will have either made the right decision or the wrong decision, and you can influence that, but you don't have 100% control, which is very unnerving for all of us. And I think your ability to just hold on in that moment of discomfort is is that gift, and why someone like you coming into this conversation helps the strategy to move forward is partly just noticing that silence and wondering what it means.

Mike Jones 15:19

Yeah. And it because I think that's the thing we missed that I said it before about strategy being a way of being. You often wonder why a lot of strategy with the you know, the statistics around strategy execution is pretty poor. Um, and then people look for the obvious things like, oh, you know, we we didn't communicate enough, or you know, we didn't have enough resources, it wasn't a good plan. But I I don't know if people actually stop and think about well, what emotions were holding people back.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Yeah, yeah, nicely said. There's a great mediator who has a sort of therapeutic healthcare background called Adam Carrick. Um, and and he looks at this question of like, what does the silence mean? What is going unsaid in a corporate or institutional setting? Obviously, often we don't want to bring more emotions in than are needed to. It feels wrong to get too emotional in the workplace. So sometimes people suppress those things, and then it's about developing a toolkit. There are so many different options, you know, you could come from a therapeutic background, a coaching background, something else. Just having some kind of toolkit to be able to talk about the thing that previously couldn't be talked about seems to me key.

Mike Jones 16:28

Yeah, yeah. Definitely when you think about if you want people to develop, you can't force them to develop. They have to create um you create an awareness that there's a need. And I think that's the same in strategy. You can't just go, this is what we're doing, go. There has to be some sort of buy-in, the sort of understanding that that aha moment. And I suppose that's why just the same that futures are the same that I view strategy as.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Which of course means if you're making data-driven decisions, the uncomfortable truth is there's a faith-based element there because you've got faith in your model. And actually, we don't know what the future holds. I mean, maybe, maybe in a particular philosophical tradition or something, you say actually the future's already happened. I don't know. That's that's out of my my field. But but to the extent that we are living and experiencing the moment, inevitably you are intervening in an unfolding, uncertain situation, and it's like the clay is constantly wet, the clay is constantly spinning, and you're trying to touch it and nudge it towards a particular outcome, I suppose.

Mike Jones 18:06

And I think that that experience interaction, that constant interaction, is where you know, I really want strategy to go back to that that we move away from this sort of it's almost come like an unemotive product. And it's like, right, we've we've we've done our strategy now. This is our Greek villa, you know, we've done the you know, everyone knows the slide, we've done our vision statement, we've done the priorities, we've we've done the town hall, we've done, and it's just a series of of a process, not an experience. And where where I want to get back to is its constant way of being that we are, you know, like you said, the clay is always wet. We're not we haven't stopped. Yes, we've given the initial direction, but we're constantly orientating, deciding, you know, to the changing circumstances as as information or opportunities or new affordances evolve and show themselves.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Yeah, I think that's well said. And the good thing is, I think that ultimately, people, as individuals and groups and even wider organizations, ultimately they go with what works. So if you do find organizations with excessively formal and rigid strategies, you probably find people tinkering and improvising and doing things around the edges, or even sometimes the strategy might be there on the website to download, but the real strategy is being worked out on the corner of a restaurant tablecloth, you know, with people in a back room or something like that.

Mike Jones 19:33

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

And so the question is always what do you need formally to organize the work effectively that has the right degree of flexibility, but also doesn't overly form formalize, you know. I mean, we've all heard the joke about, you know, you'd almost some people would rather drown clutching a good plan than let go of the plan and swim. And yet, of course, beyond a certain number of people, beyond, you know, a half dozen people or something like that, you need some elements in place just to steer by. Um, I don't know what you found in terms of giving people a bit of direction without building the whole Greek villa, what do you find most effective?

Mike Jones 20:11

Well, I think you go back to this point that um I think we lazily view an organization as a whole rather than you know people are different contexts in the organization, so they are they are you know separate entities. But the way that um well we've always done it in the sense what I'm used to is that we have clear intent, so you must have the clear intent. This is what we need. We have some constraints, so these are the these are the clear, and they're not too uh um over prescribed, but they're just enough to make sure that the whole thing doesn't go apart, and then some context. So I I always talk about you know I went to um Afghan for eight months with a sheet of paper, all I needed, and it's very volatile, so always changing, but it's all I needed. But what what what has to come with that is the back brief, which is the right now. I've told you this stuff, I want you to go away and go think about what I've asked you to do, and then come back, and I want you to tell me what you're doing, what you're thinking, what what you're wrestling with, what you're unsure about, where where do you think you you're over constrained, and we'll have we'll have a conversation. And we call this funny enough, in the army, we call this command and control. But if you look in the if you look in the civilian world, command and control is um a horrible thing. I just saw Rita McGrath put something up about we need to move away from command and control. And I'm like, to us that's a good thing. Right. But yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Well, as as we know, different sectors use language in different ways, and sometimes the same term means complete different things in in different settings. I yeah, I think the thing I really pick up from what you're saying, and about the back brief as well, is of course it makes everything relational, that there is this back and forth, and again, I I think when there is uncertainty unfolding around us, the question is really that that network of relationships, which is the organization, how can it make decisions it can live with collectively and effectively implement them? And part of it is to look at this relationality, this element of we are different beings connecting with one another. There is give and take at every stage. No one is simply sort of receiving from on high and just absorbing the directive and then also just taking things in from the screen. And again, that brings us back to this question of emotions, embodiment, and even like that physical element of perspective of depending on where you stand. I've done whole of organization consultations and retreats before. And actually, it is often talking to admin staff, security staff, the people who are not high in the hierarchy in terms of decision responsibility, but they see things about the organization that others may not have missed. And finding the right way to bring those perspectives into the strategic conversation can be key, as well as helping everyone feel ownership of, oh, we're on this collective journey.

Mike Jones 23:02

Yeah, yeah. And that that backbeat's really important for that because it gives the, as you were, the centre to understand what the edges see and you know, allow the edges to understand what what the the centre sees and it's it's relational. But one thing that I think really impacts that relational element of organizations is that we self-create ambiguity. So to come with that, you you want an organization where you've got the clear roles. So I know that that team is responsible for that, that's what they do. You know, that person is the person that makes a decision about that, that's what their decision. Where I think that we've almost come into this point in organizations where it's not done in a logical sense. Like we, you know, we've got we've got team A, B, and C, they're just lumped together because it just makes it easier for the reporting, you know, or we've now got over here, we've got, you know, Sandra looks after this team because Dave was wasn't good enough, but instead of dealing with that, we we're just gonna move things over, or they've gotten to a point where this new edge of new age of organizational design, which is like they don't want any design, it's polymorphic, it will just emerge, um, which really destroys the relational point because who do I go to? Who do I have that conversation with, which I think is really important.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Yeah, I think I think when we think about roles, roles have boundaries, which become really important. We never get everything immaculate in the world, so there'll always be tension and ambiguity and some overlaps just because it's humans relating to one another. But a sense of role, a sense of what that role encompasses. And again, it comes to the idea that when you take up a role, inevitably there will be external and internal pressures upon you. You'll feel those. It might be a negative thing, it might feel like stage fright or dread at the burden of it, but also you can get into these weird moments of euphoria. You know, you see people who power goes to their heads, even good people. Herbert Simon, who was a scientist of cognition, he's he's sometimes called the father of AI, working in the middle of the 20th century. He wrote a really good memoir about his scholarly career and having this very impressive scholarly career. And one of the really good self-reflective takeaways he has is he says, it took me a long time to understand that as a person in authority, I could invite people to challenge me and mean it, but some of them just wouldn't because they thought this is gonna do my career in if I go head to head with the boss. And even with goodwill, he didn't understand the aura that his role brought, that people didn't dare to challenge him.

Mike Jones 25:42

Yeah, and that's uh that's an inevitable thing. People people look at power and think, oh, power's bad, but some actually, you know, it's not all power's bad, you know, how you utilize power can determine that, but that's an inevitable thing, and you're not gonna get away with it. And I think a lot of people try and focus and answer this, that's why they get so um obsessed around things like psychological safety, if that's suddenly going to be the silver bullet that that does it. But you there's always gonna be there, you just need to be aware of it and pick up once you know about it, you can find a different way of approaching it, challenge them.

Authority Power And Delegation

SPEAKER_00 26:19

Entirely, absolutely. One of the most useful things anyone's ever said to me, almost in a single sentence, I was at a thing called a group relations conference a while back, which is where you you observe how people behave under pressure in groups. You're really thrown in the deep end for two or three days and subjected to all kinds of pressures, and people, you just all observe one another and how you respond to pressure. And I was in a small group that was having real trouble delegating authority to a leader. We basically had the job of we were going to send someone out of a room and they could make a decision on our behalf, and we had no control over what they did. They were gonna sign us up to a commitment, whether we liked it or not. And we had a lot of anxiety about this, and how many parameters did we need to give them and everything else, and should we even delegate that power to one person? And then uh Patrick Mandakate came in, who's a group relations consultant, he's worked in HM prisons, very used to stressful situations. He was looking in on the process and came in for a word of advice, and he said, you know, you know, authority is just a tool. You can pick it up and you can put it down, and you know, you can hand it off to someone else when it's needed, when it's appropriate to the conditions. And we all suddenly relaxed because we felt like we were electing a dictator, and actually we were handing someone a tool to do a job for a certain period of time. It was such a good reframe.

Mike Jones 27:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's it. And and I think I used to, I remember taking over Batoon once, and um they had quite a uh dictator in beforehand that had to make all the decisions, excuse me. And what it meant was when when I took over, people wouldn't make a decision, they'll come to me. And I just had to reframe it all the time. Like, you're there to do a job, what's your job? And it wasn't in a it wasn't in a challenging way, like, you know, go away, only come to me with answers, not problems, or whatever the quaint thing. It was really just getting back to their identity within the the group.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

Yeah.

Mike Jones 28:14

Like, what what's your identity in this group? Um what have I entrusted you to do for me? And I I'll be used to tell them I'm an idiot, mate. Like, you'll you're the one that knows. You tell me, and we'll have this conversation. And it it really worked, and you could see it in a matter of you know, days and weeks, how the dynamics change occasionally. I have to reframe it back because they would go back into habit. But you just frame it back, and you go, okay, what's your part do you play in this?

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Yeah, yeah, no, and I think it comes back to this idea of as a leader, as a container. Within that container, people can have a lot of autonomy, a lot of responsibility, as long as they know that you've ultimately got them. And and what it makes me reflect on is uh Ryan Ramsey, a former submarine captain who used to teach Perisher, which was the submarine captain's course in the Royal Navy. And he would talk about the role of being a captain of a submarine, because obviously in a submarine, you don't have contact often with HQ. So everything falls upon the captain ultimately when they're on operations. And the things he said were one of them was show people you can do everything competently once, and then let them get on with it. Show them that you can drive the submarine reasonably well, show them you know how the nuclear reactor works, but then it's their job because they're the experts, but now they trust you. And then he also talks about the time when when you do have to be the container, that when he was captaining HMS Turbulent, uh the systems began to fail because they were in the Middle East and it was simply too hot. So actually, even elements of the life support started to fail, things were going terribly wrong, people were getting heat stroke, and he had to make the decision, having radioed back, and he he jokingly says, you know, maybe I didn't impress how bad the situation was because they just trusted me to make my own judgment call. But they ended up diving in a submarine where the systems were failing on the assumption that the colder water at depth would actually solve a lot of the problems and let them fix the systems. But but in his his memoir about this, he's written about it, he says that the truth is I wasn't sure. It was uncertain, you couldn't look in a manual and say, will this definitely work if the systems start failing under the heat? The submarine had been built for the North Atlantic and was being used in the Middle East. And and ultimately, that is when you don't delegate, you take responsibility. You might talk to your trusted team, you might get the feedback and the response and accept the challenge. But leadership is also about that responsibility. And again, it comes back to that feeling. You can only imagine the emotions going through someone when they have to make that call with confidence and authority.

Mike Jones 30:48

Yeah. You know, it really comes to everything being about attention. Too easy to say that it's one or the other, but it's attention, it's a you know, it's a spectrum. One of those for organizations is always around control and autonomy. How much control and how much autonomy do I need to give? But again, it's contextual. And you always find in in points of crisis, you'll expect to see the tension shift to more control. Inevitably, the crisis, you have to make that decision, and you never know. If anyone said that they made the decision because they ultimately knew everything is a liar, we don't know. We have again that you know, gut that emotion that'll tell us, but then again, it's that experience that once we start doing it, we know what we're looking for. Like I know this is the right decision, if I start to see these outcomes, and and if I'm not seeing those outcomes, then I know I need to then uh adapt or make a different decision to what we need to do.

Glass Blowing And Saving Mistakes

SPEAKER_00 31:44

Yeah, absolutely. And I and I think it's where as we prepare to take these decisions and as as we go through life holding different kinds of authority, there's this weird way of like you can pull in other parts of your life and it gives you good training for the work. So, John Kay, who was at SciA Business School, talks a lot about obliquity, which means kind of getting things, getting to things by an indirect route. So, one of the things I found has helped me deal with this idea of fulfilling an intent or a goal, is amongst my weird hobbies, I'm a glass blower. And with glass blowing, you know at the beginning, okay, I'm gonna try and make a glass or a vase or something else. You start this process, as you gather the molten glass, you can't be sure how that particular gather is gonna behave. You start to shape it, you're turning the pipe as well. The tools themselves get hot from touching the glass. So even your point of contact with them, you have to manage so you don't burn yourself. And slowly the thing unfolds in line with what you're intending to do, but you don't have absolute control over how the material behaves. You don't even have absolute control if you know something's gonna turn out to be too hot for you to touch when you didn't expect it to be. And the thing that really stuck with me, I'm really mindful that these things can sound really trite when you pull in these metaphors, but it genuinely made me think differently. I had once, when I was learning, almost finished a glass that was really good. And at the last moment when we were handing it off, dropped it on the concrete and it was still soft enough, it smushed instead of breaking. I, you know, the air started to turn blue with my curses, and the and the teacher, supremely chill, said, It's still soft, we can save that. So we quickly heated up another pipe, got it back up off the concrete floor, and spun it back into shape because the material was still malleable. And and there's a saying in glass blowing, if you want to understand someone's talent as a glass blower, they say it's not what you make, it's what you save. It's the ability to correct the unforeseen or unwanted error more than just achieving what you thought you would from the outset that really shows the measure of a glass blower. And something about that very immersive physical experience for me, again, it's one of those things that can teach you a lot about being in the room with people who have a decision to make.

Mike Jones 33:50

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's um, you know, really, as an analogy, is on point when we talk about strategy. You know, we talk about trajectory, we know where we we want to go ideally, we know what we want to change or what effect we're trying to have on our point in the external environment. But, you know, how we get there is never going to be linear. You know, there may be times where it is going perfectly lovely, but then certain things can happen and throw it all up into the air. I bet there's a few people waking up at the weekend thinking, Jesus Christ, I was yeah, I I had stuff plans, now it's not happening. But it's it's that that ability to observe, to orientate what's going, what's happening, to then think, okay, so what options do I have now?

SPEAKER_00 34:36

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and and being smart and creative about generating new options as well. I mean, as I said, I know you were on the Oxford Scenarios programme, and the the point of that is precisely to develop alternative assessments of where the context might go. And it's not that you're predicting the future, it is it is this we've used this word before, reframe, seeing the same context differently based on how the uncertainties might play out. I don't know if you've you've got particular experiences or thoughts or where you've had this experience of kind of seeing the world from a different perspective, like seeing the context afresh and going, oh, actually, I interpret that differently now. Is there is there something there where you've had that experience?

Mike Jones 35:15

All the time. Yeah, all the time. I I think we used to do it quite instinctively anyway, but it's not until recent years that I really really made sure I'd done it. But we we'd have it all the time where we'd have to see it from different perspectives because we'd see it from our perspective around well, or actually I'll go back to one where I I wish we did see it from different perspectives. I think the whole and I hope they don't make the same mistake in Iran, in the same with Iraq and Afghanistan, especially Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a was a major strategic mistake in the sense of not being able to reframe it and see it from a different perspective. Because we we we went there and thinking that we could bring democracy and you know, and all this lovely, wonderful stuff that of course they would want because it's been so great in the Western world, but we weren't willing to see it from the perspective from them and think what do they want? And I and I it was you remember sitting there with some um tribal elders and and talking to them around what they wanted. That was really from that point, it really stuck to me. But I was thinking, do you think that I'm doing here or we're trying to do here is the odds of what they want? And I and at that point I was thinking, I don't know how I can reconcile the difference.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

Yeah. It it comes back to this idea of translation a bit, doesn't it? This word we've used before. And I think people sometimes think listening is passive, but actually often the interpretation that goes on when you really listen to something, it actually changes your map of the territory and what's going on, and particularly of what is valued. And of course, the the experience you have is is interesting precisely because military operations actually happen within a world of politics, society, culture, economics, all this stuff that is outside the frame of military conflict is actually totally embedded in it. But then as someone on an operation, you're also physically there, and it's also very palpable. So it's almost like you can see all those layers folded into a single conversation that you were having, and and the need to listen to the elder rather than simply dictate. Um, you know, it comes back to this idea of relationality, I guess.

Mike Jones 37:18

Yeah, yeah. And it's the same when you're in organisations, and I do this a lot because I've come in as um strategy advisor, you know, you know what it means. Like you come in strategy, but if you can do anything strategy, that affects the organisation. So I I'll I like to spend my time going around, not just stuck in that boardroom listening to what they're doing. I like to go down and sit, I suppose a bit like the elders, you know. I like to go and sit with the different departments and teams and see it from their perspective about how how are they translating what's happening into their world and what does that mean. And I don't think we can once you start doing that, you start to see the different emotions come in. And you know, and it's lazy, everyone just goes, Oh, it's management versus you know the workers. Well, no, there's more to it, and it's trying to figure out what what is the perspective, what is the demand, what is the expectations, what is the the thing that can't be reconciled that that exists? I think this really brings a lot, and it's not going, well, we're gonna change the strategic direction because a lot of that it isn't you know, a lot of people think it's internally driven, but a lot of it's externally driven. We need to do this because we need to be viable. So, you know, well, how how can we enable the translation to happen? How can we we we surface that emotion in a useful way that we can actually sort of move forward?

SPEAKER_00 38:43

Yeah, nicely said. I think of again this this philosopher of science, Jerome Rabbitz, he uses the word contradiction to mean a problem that can't be resolved within the current frame of reference. And you have to rethink to get rid of the contradiction. You know, something that seems an impossible problem to solve. If you reframe it, you seem it differently. Again, the very trite classic example often from negotiation studies is the two siblings come to the mum asking for an orange, and in the end, the mum just cuts it in half. One of them just wants the fruit and eats the fruit and throws away the peel. The other one just wanted the peel to put it in a cake, and they both could have had everything they wanted from the orange, but the mum was like, we're just gonna cut it in half. That idea of imposing a logic, even turning up with the logic of the problem must be management versus the workers or whatever, versus really listening, as you do, to the different parts of an organization, and also not just to what is said but what is unsaid. What is this making me feel? Looking at body language, looking at the silences, what is being brought up in me that might not actually be my own emotion, but something that they are triggering that actually might belong to the wider organization. I I don't know if you've had those moments of kind of an intuition or a gut feeling.

Mike Jones 39:56

Yeah, and I I have it a lot, you know, when I'm different, you know, going around speaking to different teams and stuff. Um and what I always notice a lot and I always listen to is that I'll get loads of people telling me about how constrained they are, you know, and how they can't do something because of this, you know, this constraint. And you know, right, some of those are overly prescriptive due to the risk tolerance of an organization. But then I but then again that I think, well, what freedoms do you have? And they they they think they go, well, now that this thing is changing, what what freedoms does that give you? Or if you had to look at it and go, well, what haven't they told you you can't do? What is that? And I think it's it's opens up that conversation because I'm not saying to them, you know, you're wrong, you can still do it with these constraints. I'm going, okay, that's that's perfectly rec yeah, perfectly understandable, but what freedoms do you have? I think changes that, it reframes it and has a different sort of emotion of okay, let's let's look at it from a different perspective.

SPEAKER_00 41:02

Yeah, entirely. I think I think freedom of interpretation is that great liberty at every rank in an organization. Of course, as you say, there are there are pressures and constraints and all kinds of things which can't be belittled or put to one side, but the extent to which one can interpret what is going on, what as one has been asked to do, and one's own assessment, there's often some wiggle room there. The other thing I was thinking about was I remember consulting to an organization once, and again, at this level of almost something that felt intuitive, there were two senior figures, and they come in the room early before this workshop, and and they start talking about, first of all, about Oxford versus Cambridge and the boat race. And I was like, okay, you I felt like they were trying to trigger something in me or have a go or something. And they said, Oh, this this person's been to Cambridge, don't know how you feel about that, Matt. And I I sort of, you know, it sort of passed me by really, it didn't bother me. And then they tried again, they talked about Lamborghini and Ferrari, and they were going on and on. And it took me a while, and then you realize these two figures actually had quite a severe rivalry going on, but at this weird level in the company where it sort of went unspoken, and they were jockeying with one another, and they were somehow trying to trigger something in me to make it my problem or my bad feeling. Also let me know this can be framed as a rivalry. And then you have the choice: do I go with that? Do I do something else with it? Do I ignore it? Is there do I name it or do I try and offer an alternative? But but gradually, this kind of intuitive ability to work with not what's not being said directly, I think can be incredibly helpful when it comes to this question of strategy.

Mike Jones 42:37

Yeah, I think so. Especially even when you look back on the old days of the general, back in you know, the 16th century, where we didn't have this technology, we didn't have data, and we didn't have a power bible there to tell me what um aggregated data of how people are doing. And that's the problem, it's an aggregated data of how people are doing in an organization. Because you didn't have that, the great generals and the leaders would walk in the evening to the tents to to understand how the men were feeling, what they were thinking, and all this stuff. And I and I think that that's where we we need to move away from this this this drawer of things telling me what it is, rather than taking that time to actually listen, to understand, and to be in the place where I can feel that emotion and I can hear that emotion, or you know, I can see that emotion rather than just looking for some green lights on a board.

Reading The Room With Bracketing

SPEAKER_00 43:41

Yeah, entirely. I think um I think that question of when a metric is useful and what is the right metric, because obviously a metric is a distillation of reality, so of course we don't go without them, but really understanding what they are, what their limits are, when they're useful and when they're not is a big part of it. And the other thing is. As I said, there's so many approaches to theorizing about what am I feeling. And it doesn't almost matter if you choose one psychological approach or the other. The point is actually that you just try. And again, I come back to Adam Carrick, this mediator, and he talks about these two things, uh, bracketing and horizontalizing. Um, they're not his, they're used more widely, but but he was the one who communicated them to me. The bracketing one is just as you sit there going, I'm gonna notice what I'm noticing, whatever signal my body is giving me or my intuition is giving me, I'm gonna actually really listen out and say, what is that thing? What is it doing to me? What does it mean? Do I want to do something with it or ignore it or change it? So the one side is this bracketing to get really specific about the data that your own emotions and your physicality are giving you. And the other one is horizontalizing, which is kind of the opposite, which is if you're getting fixated on one thing, say, well, actually, what else am I taking in? Try and take in all the sensory inputs. And and we've all had it. I mean, I've been in rooms where you feel like the temperature drops, you know, and you and you're like, oh, this was a chilling silence. What's that about? Who's it come from? Who has chilled the room and why? What are they trying to silence? And again, it's this very visceral feeling.

Mike Jones 45:11

Yeah, yeah. I really like that, those ideas, especially that that horizontal thing, because we we can get ourselves into that point where we just fixate on something and we go, well, you know, I always think about what else am I missing? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:24

Yeah, entirely.

Mike Jones 45:25

Trying to broaden it out to think about, well, if I'm focused on this, what what else am I missing? Yeah. And that what what's the real what's the real game? Because we can always just look at the surface thing that's going along, but what's what's the real game behind it all? And I think that's the thing that you can start to draw on.

Identity And The Future Verdict

SPEAKER_00 45:46

Yeah, yeah. Curiosity is an incredibly useful resource. And although I'm sure in theory you could become over-curious, the reality is maintaining that kind of suspended questioning frame of mind. The the great therapist Irving Yallum, he once said when he had a patient who he got really stuck with, he'd say, Why am I more curious about you than you are about yourself? And I and I think when you're consulting to organizations, when you hit that wall, you can you can sometimes present that question to the client and say, Why am why am I more curious about this thing that you don't want to touch? But but I wanted to come back for a second to this question of role as well and the feeling in the body, because because we talked about the idea of taking up a role and taking up authority. And something that that struck me, I wondered if you talk about looking at your career. You've you've talked before about you know putting on a uniform as a kid because of because of the inspiration of your father and the feeling you had of putting on a uniform and and only being allowed to wear the uniform at home when you couldn't wear it out on the street in in Ireland, and then later on in life, the discomfort you felt putting on a uniform that was like a signal to you saying, Oh god, I need to do something about this. I wondered if you could talk a bit about the the feeling, because the uniform represents a role. There was something your body was telling you on both occasions about about your relationships, that role.

Mike Jones 47:00

That's about your identity. Back then, it my my whole identity was was as a soldier and uh proud to be that soldier. And I think it was that sort of I suppose that disassociation that came in between what my identity was and what I was feeling, that we're coming separated, and that's why I knew, and to me, that's why I knew something was wrong, because I've always wanted, as I said, as a kid, I always wanted to be a soldier, and then I was a soldier, and then when I got to the point, that's that's the point where I really knew that something was wrong, and that I was not in a not in a great place, and then um I I had my my breakdown there, but I think that identity is really important that people have and that feeling that it comes with it, and I think there's that point where I suppose if if you've got the identity and you've got that role, and suddenly something's not right, and you're getting that that emotion about there's a difference here, then that's where you probably look and think, well, something's changed. And if you think about it in an organization thing, it's that something's changed because our identity is not now fitting with the environment we're in, and it's been challenged. On a personal one, it's the same. There's something happening internally or externally that is different, and it's causing this this disassociation. And where I tend to what I did was I avoided it massively, and I didn't want to know about it, and unfortunately, by not challenging it, not being curious about it, it led to me having a breakdown where I think that those things are really important signs to be curious, curious of rather than to avoid. And I think we we often avoid those, even in organizations when things aren't quite right and the something's pulling it apart, it's almost too sensitive for us to challenge. So we avoid the conversation uh and until it's too late.

SPEAKER_00 48:50

Yeah, absolutely. I I think it's actually the true measure of courage, it's a bit like the glass-blowing story, is to go through the crisis, particularly the crisis of identity. It strikes me also at the organizational level, you know, Trudy Lang at the Psy Business School at Oxford talks about identity and strategy and says, you know, sometimes people think, well, the the identities are given. We've inherited the identity, now it's just the question of strategy. What are we going to do? And she points out at an organizational level, who we might need to be in a changing context is also something that's in play when we're making leadership decisions. So actually, one might do organizational strategy, but one might also change and evolve the identity. And that might include relinquishing things as well. You know, the example I always find funny is Circo, the services company that does all kinds of things, up to and including running offshore detention centers in Australia, began as a cinema cleaning company, a branch of an American cinema corporation. In the 30s, they cleaned cinemas. During World War II, they were brought in to do sort of technical stuff relating to sound and lighting that was part of the military attempts to sort of find different ways of conducting war in World War II. After the war, they were basically assigned to maintain stations like monitoring stations and so on, because they'd been cleaning cinemas and stuff before. And you watch the evolution of this organization. If you'd have told them in the 30s that, you know, 50 years from now, you'll still be around, there'll be a management buyout, but you'll be a you'll be a services consulting company to the public sector. And they but we clean cinemas. You know, the the question of who we are is a is a really unusual one and it is oriented towards the future. We we're not finished becoming who we're going to be next. And I think that's that's a massive challenge, but it's also a great opportunity.

Mike Jones 50:37

Yeah. I identity in the organization is absolutely crucial in a sense that um it's something I want to pick up with with Trudy when I get a chance to speak to her. Um, because I've been looking at this a lot around organizational identity and why it's important. Because when when you make a strategy decision, you should always think about the question, would we like what we become? Because as soon as you, and that's the same with me, when I when I was medically discharged and had to leave the army, I've got to look at my options that are available to me and what options I'll take. But understanding that those options are going to change me, they are going to give me new identity, and I've got to then decide, would I like what I become? And I think that's a really important strategic question that we don't think about is the fact that there's got all these options, but how's it going to impact our identity as an organization?

SPEAKER_00 51:28

Yeah, completely. And it comes back to this question of foresight. To my mind, a really mature foresight practice or strategic practice under uncertainty is in dialogue with the future. So instead of thinking in my arrogance in 2026, I definitely know which future I want and who I need to become. The other thing you can say is, well, if the future plays out differently, if it plays out in ways I didn't expect or assume, in hindsight, will I look back well on the decision I'm making today? You know, the thing that I think is so wise and good in 2026, in hindsight, will that still seem so wise and good? And I think this question can take you a long way. Because if you ask people, how do you think this decision will be remembered? They don't just evaluate the decision, they tell you something about their assumptions regarding the future, which is going to do that remembering. And I think it's a useful way of reflecting on these changes.

Mike Jones 52:20

Yeah. And I think that really brings the heart of that stewardship of an organization. You you you being the right steward for that organization to where it needs to go. And I and I do think that um the the idea of identity purpose is is people talk about purpose, but what I'm talking about is real purpose. What what does this organization do? What's his identity? Um, we all have one. Some leaders, like you said, some are inherited, but we've got to respect that, and we've got to look at the past and think, well, what decisions got us to this point? Because they're just as great to know, because that will then constrain what's possible for the future. Um, I agree.

Training Attention With The Body

SPEAKER_00 53:01

Well, just this this element of translation. I mean, the similarity that the past and the future both have is they're not now, and we can only get access to them through stories and data and documents and so on. So as we tell the story of who we were and tell the story of who we're gonna be, it's kind of it's translating between three points in time, past, present, and future. It makes total sense. I think I think just the one thing I want to bring in as we come towards the close is this question of listening to the body and not just thinking about words. And again, weirdly, without being trite, the more you do with your body, the more you recognize what is a weird signal and what is not. So actually, you know, as you and I have talked before about these things, that the different activities like horse riding, dancing, and skiing, for example, it's totally different whether you put your weight on the inside or the outside leg when you turn. Things that feel counterintuitive turn out to be the right thing to do. I always think the skiing, you know, wait a second, I have to lean more downhill to have more control of this sliding down this icy slope. One of the things you can do is sort of really train your body to identify these signals and not just go with the default assumption of what intuitively feels right. And I think it's it's good to be challenging ourselves, even in terms of what do I hear and not hear when I listen to my own body in these situations, these rooms where we have difficult conversations that lead to consequential decisions.

Mike Jones 54:23

Yeah, I think that's really powerful, you know, to really just take that time. I always say step away from the fog, you know, and start to think about in that, you know, what's in what do you think is intuitive and what isn't? It brings you back to the days of learning to shoot in the army, and you'd get up a position. What they used to make us do was to to run forward and suddenly stop. And where you stopped on that was your your lead foot. And so it's all about actually how to use that intuitive sense to actually build up a good platform. So that's really good. Just for just before we we leave, Matt, is there anything you'd like to leave people to think about from this episode to go away and think about more about?

SPEAKER_00 55:01

Yeah, so it is literally about the fact that that at any given moment we think, we feel emotions, and we have a physical presence. All of those things are giving us information and giving something out into the world. And I think the interesting thing, again, I'm I'm really praising Adam Carrock here, but it's well deserved. Um, he talks about the idea that that essentially the thing that improves your ability to use these tools is the fact that you make an effort with them. So it almost doesn't matter what school of thought, if you're coming from coaching, facilitation, psychotherapy, or anything else, the mere act of attending to the idea that thoughts, emotions, and physicality are all in play when we have a strategic conversation, that will develop your capacity to use them in an effective way.

Final Takeaways And Closing

Mike Jones 55:48

Yeah, I like that. And it one thing I always say to leaders as well is that I I could teach you anything you want if you wanted to about strategy, but there has to be a will. There's no will, there's no, there's no, there's there's nothing. No, I think that was great. And I'll link um your details so that people can get in touch you. It's absolutely fantastic. Um, and hopefully when you're you're you're back and you're actually in Oxford, um, I'd love to actually meet up in in person because I'm only down the road in Milton Keynes, so it'd be great.

SPEAKER_00 56:15

Sounds absolutely delightful. Uh it's a real joy talking with you. I was looking forward to this, so so thank you so much, Mike. And uh yeah, been really fun.

Mike Jones 56:23

That was awesome. Made my week, and I look forward to catching up you soon. Thank you very much. Take care for now.