Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

From AI Hype To Competitive Advantage And Real Change | Dr Mark Bloomfield

AI is moving fast, but the real risk is moving fast in the wrong direction. We sit down with Dr Mark Bloomfield, founder of Turbulence and a fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, to get past the hype and talk about what AI transformation looks like when strategy meets reality. If you have ever heard “we need an AI strategy” and felt the room skip the hard questions, you will recognise the boardroom tension we unpack: change management, competitive advantage, and the uncomfortable truth that with AI, there is no neat finish line.  We challenge the efficiency-first story that dominates so many generative AI rollouts. Yes, AI can cut cycle times, but we argue the bigger prize is capacity: headspace for better judgment, clearer choices, and the courage to reimagine work. Mark explains why AI is best treated as a capability, not a magic USB-C plug-in, and we explore practical uses like strategy simulation, horizon scanning, synthetic personas, and using voice agents to interrogate ideas rather than blindly accepting “synthesis”.  We also get honest about the darker edges: outsourcing judgment, metacognitive laziness, AI obesity, hidden operational costs, token economics, and the way incentives can trigger fear or even sabotage. From governance and accountability to how humans and agentic AI might coordinate work, we keep coming back to one theme: intentional use, with humans staying responsible for meaning, context, and decisions.  If you want a pragmatic, human-centred take on generative AI, organisational change, and strategic planning, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a colleague who is drowning in AI noise, and leave us a review with your answer: where will you draw the line on what you will not outsource? Find Mark's work here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmarkbloomfield/ Send Mike a Message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2466969/fan_mail/new] Enjoying the show? Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast. 🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast [https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast] 📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality [https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality] Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/]

Sensemaking Under The Confusion Tax | Richard Claydon

Strategy fails in the gap between the plan and the lived reality of work, and that gap is where most leaders burn out. We sit down with Richard Claydon, an organisational theorist focused on leadership in complex and ambiguous environments, to name what’s really happening when teams feel overloaded, stuck and quietly cynical despite “doing everything right”.  We dig into the confusion tax: the hidden cost that appears when run work, serve work and change work become tightly entangled. That’s when the coordinating middle gets squeezed, sensemaking time disappears, and only operational delivery looks visible or legitimate. Richard offers a sharp lens on the lived experience as stretch, tangle and drift, and we challenge the false fixes that turn into theatre, from extra boards and reporting to superficial wellbeing initiatives that never touch the underlying system.  From there, we build a practical model of leadership that goes beyond direction and care. Richard explains three leadership grammars: sovereignty (decisions and clarity), solidarity (trust and commitment) and the missing piece, sensemaking (reading conditions, aligning interpretations and choosing moves the system can bear). We also explore “Maya”, an amalgamation of effective leaders, to show how sensemaking becomes action through interpretation, mobilisation across stakeholders and small bounded experiments that create islands of coherence you can scale.  If you care about leadership development, organisational complexity, systems thinking and strategy execution that actually works, this conversation will give you language and methods you can use immediately. Subscribe for more, share this with a leader who needs breathing room, and leave a review with the biggest source of confusion tax in your organisation. Find Richard's work here:  Substack: https://richardclaydon.substack.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drrichardclaydon/ Send Mike a Message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2466969/fan_mail/new] Enjoying the show? Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast. 🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast [https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast] 📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality [https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality] Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/]

Why Just Broadcasting Strategy Is Sabotaging Execution | Jurriaan Kamer

Strategy fails in a painfully predictable place: the moment it leaves the boardroom and lands in everyone else’s calendar. We sit down with Jurriaan Kamer to get brutally practical about why “alignment” so often becomes a loud broadcast, a perfect slide deck, and a quiet wave of cynicism on the ground. Instead, we dig into what actually moves strategy execution forward: orientation to real conditions, clear choices, and activation that gives teams room to interpret and self-align. We also borrow a performance system from an unexpected teacher: Formula One. F1 teams don’t just race fast; they learn fast. Jurriaan explains how reflection is scheduled, how debriefs create psychological safety without losing accountability, and why the best teams rally around a single priority rather than a crowded list. We connect this to organisational design, cross-functional teams, and making work visible by mapping the value chain and measuring time-to-market. Finally, we tackle the hard leadership habits that keep strategy connected to reality: explicit trade-offs through “even over” statements, strategic intent that is ambitious yet achievable over a 2- to 4-year horizon, and the overlooked power of reversible decisions. Less perfection, more experimentation, and more slack so people can think, collaborate, and adapt as the external environment shifts. If this helps you rethink how your organisation turns strategy into daily work, subscribe, share it with a colleague, and leave a review so more people can find the show. Find Jurriaan's work:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jurriaankamer/ His books Unblock: https://amzn.eu/d/0j8eVFIF Formula X: https://amzn.eu/d/051BMbWY Send Mike a Message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2466969/fan_mail/new] Enjoying the show? Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast. 🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast [https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast] 📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality [https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality] Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/]

Speed Kills In Business Strategy | Alex Vohr

Strategy falls apart in the messy middle between plans and execution, and that is exactly where we spend our time with Alex Vohr, author of Speed Kills: Leveraging John Boyd's OODA Loop to Build Organisations That Win. Alex brings a rare mix of experience as a US Marine Corps logistician, a commander in Iraq, a leader in disaster relief operations, and now the president of OneLNG an energy startup building small-scale LNG infrastructure. We use that lens to explore why “strategy meets reality” is not a slogan, but a daily operational problem. We dig into John Boyd’s OODA Loop as a practical model for decision making in complex adaptive systems, not the oversimplified four-step circle most people quote. Alex explains why orientation drives everything, how assumptions create risk, and why a decision should be treated as a hypothesis that only becomes true when action and feedback confirm it. If you care about organisational agility, learning organisations, and faster strategy execution, the takeaway is clear: improve how you observe, how you make sense, how you decide, how you act, and how you learn. We also challenge the “false god of efficiency” and the comfort of linear planning. Planning, red teaming, and after-action reviews are not bureaucratic theatre; they are tools for reducing surprise and building a relevant, effective tempo. We talk about incentives, the “zero defects” mentality, and why big organisations drift into entropy when they stop listening to the edges of the system. If this conversation helps you rethink how your team learns and executes, subscribe, share it with a colleague, and leave a review so more people can find the show. Find Alex here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-vohr-83b38767/ Get his book: https://amzn.eu/d/01B56POu Send Mike a Message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2466969/fan_mail/new] Enjoying the show? Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast. 🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast [https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast] 📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality [https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality] Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/]

The Confusion Tax | Stefan Norrvall

Strategy often fails for a boring reason: nobody knows who can decide what, and everything slows to a crawl. We sit down with Stefan Norrvall, joining us from Australia, to unpack organisational coherence and why it beats the usual push for “alignment” when dealing with real-world complexity. If your organisation feels busy but stuck, this conversation gives you language for what is happening and a model for what to fix first. We dig into Stefan’s run serve change heuristic and how each layer carries a different type of work, a different time horizon, and a different kind of complexity. Run creates value at the frontline. Serve as a coordinating hub across multiple run units to ensure they do not clash on resources, standards, platforms, or handovers. Change sets intent and enterprise constraints by reading the external environment, defining risk appetite, and making the big calls that shape the system. When serve is missing, leaders get dragged into operational conflict and lose the capacity to do real strategy work. From there, we name the “confusion tax”: the financial and human cost of unclear decision rights, endless escalation, and slow governance. We talk scenario-based tests that reveal where decision latency is baked in, why PMOs and change teams often report without authority, and why copying frameworks cannot compensate for poor operating model design. We also challenge strategy theatre, forced cascades, and agile rituals that do not improve decisions. If you want strategy execution that actually meets reality, listen, subscribe, share the episode, and leave us a review with the biggest confusion tax you see in your organisation. Find Stefan's Work:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefannorrvall/ Substack: https://substack.com/@synexia The Organisational Confusion Tax Scorecard: https://scorecard.synexia.au/confusion-tax Send Mike a Message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2466969/fan_mail/new] Enjoying the show? Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast. 🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast [https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast] 📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality [https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality] Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/]