I had a great conversation with Mike Jones on the Strategy Meets Reality Podcast about strategy, leadership, language, AI, and Relational Dynamics™.
We explored a distinction that often gets missed:
Strategy is not just a plan.
Strategy is a way of staying in relationship with reality.
Strategy is field-level awareness, while tactics are the executive moves.
The danger begins when tactical motion is mistaken for strategic clarity.
A system can have many tactics and still lack strategy. People can be busy, responsive, energetic, and well-equipped, while still playing the wrong game and believing they are making strategic progress.
One phrase we discussed was the Chinese idiom 纸上谈兵 (zhǐ shàng tán bīng), meaning “discussing military strategy on paper.”
It was a pleasure to share that a pattern we still encounter today already has an ancient name. It is a pattern as old as time. The names change, the domains change, the languages change, but the dynamics repeat.
Essentially, 纸上谈兵 is what happens when strategy fails to meet reality.
Or, as I apparently started freestyling in the comments afterwards:
Written in PPT,
they call it strategy.
They want us to believe,
but it ain’t reality. 🎵
From timing and interface to language, communication, business, organisations, consumptive virtue, complex adaptive systems, sports, the World Cup, and AI, we certainly covered a lot. :)
