Strategy Meets Reality Podcast
Strategy Meets Reality Podcast
Podcast Description
Traditional strategy is broken.The world is complex, unpredictable, and constantly shifting—yet most strategy still relies on outdated assumptions of control, certainty, and linear plans.Strategy Meets Reality is a podcast for leaders who know that theory alone doesn’t cut it.Hosted by Mike Jones, organisational psychologist and systems thinker, this show features honest, unfiltered conversations with leaders, strategists, and practitioners who’ve had to live with the consequences of strategy.We go beyond frameworks to explore what it really takes to make strategy work in the real world—where trade-offs are messy, power dynamics matter, and complexity won’t go away.No jargon. No fluff. Just real insight into how strategy and execution actually happen.🎧 New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe and rethink your strategy.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast delves into various aspects of strategic thinking and execution, emphasizing complexity and adaptability. Episodes feature topics like the influence of power dynamics in strategy, the importance of mental models in decision-making, and how to construct deliberately adaptive organizations. For instance, episodes cover frameworks such as the OODA loop with insights from military strategist Chet Richards and methods for navigating organizational change with Mike Burrows.
Traditional strategy is broken.
The world is complex, unpredictable, and constantly shifting—yet most strategy still relies on outdated assumptions of control, certainty, and linear plans.
Strategy Meets Reality is a podcast for leaders who know that theory alone doesn’t cut it.
Hosted by Mike Jones, organisational psychologist and systems thinker, this show features honest, unfiltered conversations with leaders, strategists, and practitioners who’ve had to live with the consequences of strategy.
We go beyond frameworks to explore what it really takes to make strategy work in the real world—where trade-offs are messy, power dynamics matter, and complexity won’t go away.
No jargon. No fluff. Just real insight into how strategy and execution actually happen.
🎧 New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe and rethink your strategy.
Your strategy can look brilliant on paper and still be totally disconnected from reality. We talk with Dr Alice Jing Shan, who is the originator of Relational Dynamics™, the founder of ScholarLand Ltd, and an independent researcher and writer. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Edinburgh. Her work examines how human systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time. Relational Dynamics™ is her original lens for understanding these system trajectories.
Her work moves across complexity, language, culture, leadership, governance, strategy, risk, and AI as a condition shaping human systems. Across disciplines, scales, and narrative forms, she traces how relational dynamics shape stability, adaptation, meaning, judgment, and collapse over time.
We unpack a practical distinction many organisations blur: strategy is field-level awareness, while tactics are the specific moves, who does what when. When teams obsess over competitor activity or internal productivity without tracking relationships and feedback loops, they can become “busy” while making no strategic advance. We also go deep on the variables most strategy documents ignore: constraints, tempo, and timing, not as calendar dates but as thresholds and developmental time. If the interface is missing, there is no entry, and no amount of effort turns a good idea into real impact.
Language is one of the biggest interfaces in any organisation, and AI is rapidly reshaping it. We explore why “more communication” is not the fix, how power dynamics show up between native and non-native speakers, and how large language models can produce fluent, confident text that still drifts away from intent. We finish on a question that matters to anyone using AI for strategy, analysis, or planning: are we still in relationship with reality, or are we just getting better at responding to representations of reality?
Subscribe for more conversations where strategy meets reality, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with your take on the closing question.
Find Alice's work here:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanjingalice/
Substack: https://alicejingshan.substack.com/
Here is one of her latest works: From AI to AIR: Augmented Intelligence Reasoning · v0.2
A reframe of the AI discourse, shifting the focus from AI as an abstract object to reasoning, relationships, and real-world conditions.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20436861
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🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast
📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality
Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/
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