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The problem with most strategies is that they’re built for a world that doesn’t exist.
When Strategy Meets Reality is for leaders who have followed the established playbook – off-sites, frameworks, cascades – and discovered that the more they plan, the less the organization seems to adapt. Strategy produces documents, not direction.
The truth is that organizations are complex adaptive systems, not machines, which means strategy cannot be designed and then implemented in a linear sequence; it must be oriented, adapted and sustained through structures that enable intelligent action at every level.
Drawing on complexity, systems thinking and decentralization, When Strategy Meets Reality reframes strategy as orientation: the ongoing work of making sense, acting and adapting when the map no longer matches the territory. Rather than control and prediction, it focuses on coherence, adaptation and viable decision-making in uncertainty, supported by information that flows freely and authority that moves to where knowledge lives.
This is a book for CEOs, COOs and strategy leaders who want strategy to produce decisions and direction that survive contact with the world.
Mike Jones is a strategy advisor, organizational psychologist and founder of LBI Consulting. He works with CEOs, boards and senior teams in large, complex, highly regulated organizations across public and private sectors, including Network Rail, the NHS and Amazon. A former British Army soldier, he led on operations and taught leadership at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst before being medically discharged. That experience left him sceptical of tidy plans and focused on how decisions play out in contact with reality.
His work centres on closing the gap between declared strategy and the real patterns of decision-making, trade-offs and behaviour in organizations. A practitioner of systems thinking and complexity-informed strategy, Mike helps leaders move beyond strategy theatre to build organizations that adapt while they act. He hosts the Strategy Meets Reality podcast and writes the Strategy Meets Reality Substack for a growing international audience of senior leaders.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: The Gap Between Story and System
PART ONE: THE DIAGNOSIS — How Strategy Lost Its Way
Chapter 1: What Strategy Once Was
Chapter 2: The Great Enclosure
Chapter 3: The Cult of Nonsense
PART TWO: THE REFRAME — How to Think About Strategy
Chapter 4: What Strategy Is For
Chapter 5: Before We Start
Chapter 6: How to Develop Strategy
Chapter 7: From Thinking to Intent
PART THREE: THE PRACTICE — How to Execute Strategy That Survives Contact with Reality
Chapter 8: Why Execution Fails
Chapter 9: Execution as Freedom of Action
PART FOUR: THE STRUCTURE — How to Build Viable Organizations and Leadership
Chapter 10: Building Viable Organizations
Chapter 11: The Tensions of Leadership
Chapter 12: Protecting Orientation in an Age of AI