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/

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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/

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

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

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality

Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

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

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

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality

Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/