Leaping Into 2026: You can’t bore yourself out of a crisis.
Ivan Pols and Alex Mecklenburg, co-founders of Truth & Spectacle, reflect on a year of unsticking leadership teams through their Big Leap methodology. They dismantle the myth that iteration is better than bravery, and talk about why a solid foundation is the only place you can jump from. From high-stress charities to sticky boards, learn the vital difference between agreement, alignment, and compliance—and why your strategy is just a story waiting to be told brilliantly to inspire action.
Chapter Breakdown
0:00 – Goodbye 2025: Walks, food, and the "novelty" of unplugging.
3:15 – Sprints for Success: Defining the Story Sprint and the four-phase Big Leap methodology (Understand, Explore, Relate, Equip).
7:40 – The Compliance Trap: "Alexisms" and distinguishing between agreement, alignment, and compliance.
12:10 – Case Study: The Fragmented Charity: Helping 10 leaders rediscover 10 years of "half-remembered history" to build a core story.
18:50 – The Bravery Gap: Why design thinking and iteration can sometimes kill the courage to take a "Big Leap".
23:15 – Case Study: Wrangling the Board: Navigating sticky boards with power imbalances to find a shared truth.
28:40 – The Strategy-to-Action Gap: Why a strategy that reads beautifully but lacks shifts (Stop/Start/Keep) will fail.
34:00 – Leaping Together: Using the "glue" of connected culture to move into 2026 with optimistic trepidation
Podcast Transcript
08/01/2026
Ivan Pols
Hello, my name is Ivan. I'm sitting with Alex Mecklenburg. We're the co-founders of a consultancy called Treats and Spectacle. And we wanted to talk a little bit about what we observed last year with the clients that we work with and the work that we do. But before that, Alex, how was your break of Christmas?
Alex Mecklenburg
It was lovely. It was very nice. It was a lot of walks. It was fantastic food. It was time with friends and actually not looking at the computer, which was a big novelty for me.
Ivan:
That is a treat.
Alex:
It is a treat. I felt very, I felt like a five-year-old who shouldn't be playing freely, but it was wonderful and it set me up for whatever 2026 is going to bring us.
Ivan:
Excellent. I ate a lot. That's what I did. I specialized in eating. and now apparently have to specialize in exercise like the rest of the world. However, so at the end of last year, it was actually really productive for us. And we got to work with a few different kinds of clients doing different kinds of sprints that we do. The work we're doing is, depending on what the organization is trying to achieve, it's usually built around a story sprint, which is an opportunity for an organization to refigure out what their story is. get alignment on it, craft it, and then use that as a springboard into kind of starting to achieve their objectives. A story that we use in any organization or any team needs to have a purpose. It needs to be objective led. And what happens is organizations of all sorts, whether they're starting or have been around for a very long team and absorbed a lot of other organizations, it starts to get muddy and people get confused. And so the story sprint is a core piece of what we did last year. And another part we do is a thing we call the big leap sprint. And that is kind of... based on the core of our methodology. The point of it is that there are four very simple steps that we kind of apply to everything that get us to outputs. So that might be a story, that might be answering a big question, that could be simply staying in the kind of awkward question space of what on earth might 2026 bring us? And that has four phases. It's understanding a question, exploring it, you know, making it relatable, and then of course, equipping you to do something with it. is not enough to have a strategy. You've also got to turn that into action that teams can execute quickly. And I think it's really key these days. How do you think our clients reacted to that kind of work last year, Alex?
Alex:
I think they reacted very humanly. You said rightly so, our four phases of helping them work towards, say, a story or towards understanding their strategy a bit better are not rocket science. You would say we always make sure that everybody understands everything. We, now I'm already looking slightly critical, we always help people to explore what it means. And I think one thing that we learned is that often we think we help people to explore what a strategy means or a story means, but very often we actually don't do that. Not because we don't want to do that, but because we just don't necessarily have the processes in place to do that across a whole of an organisation. And then the third step, which I think is the most critical one, is the relate piece. And the people who work with us a lot know that I have a couple of sayings who become Alexisms. And one of the saying I used to have was, don't ever mix up agreement and alignment. And actually, over the work of the last quarter, I would bring another word into that, and that is compliance. So when we talk about does the work or the strategy relate to us as a team, Different people expect different things. So there are people who would expect agreement. We agree on everything, and only then is it a good strategy. Then there is, actually, we don't necessarily need to agree on everything. We can align on things, which means there's this range of tolerance that agrees. I might think differently about how to get there, but I understand where we want to do. And then the last step is compliance. I don't really care. I just want to keep my job. I want to keep what I'm doing. I'm just following through. And if you don't watch that, what happens quite quickly when you start to translate your story into action or your strategy into action, which in a way is nothing else than a story, things start to break. I think this is something we really saw in 2025, that people in our workshops understood suddenly, oh, we didn't really need to all agree, for example, or we didn't need to all talk about alignment. And we also had groups who talked about the fact, shook, I think we just followed the rules in a compliant way. So that was an interesting part that we're wrangling with. How do you give as an organisation enough space to help people really relate to a strategy, to a story? How can you listen to different truths of what good looks like? And how can you create those into a bigger story?
Ivan:
I think it's also important to make the space for people to reimagine. Reinvention is a creative act, and it does need a bit of a prod to get that out of teams who have fallen into habits. I mean, I think it's kind of useful to talk We won't mention specifically who these businesses are or these organizations are, but I think it's kind of interesting to talk about what we learned engaging with teams who were trying to do this stuff. So there's a particular charity that we were working with who has absorbed a number of other charities over the last number of years. So they've grown by kind of bringing in people doing similar work, And so they've scaled very quickly, and they've got many people who all joined different charities for different reasons and different purposes and different stories with different founders. And when we were working with that leadership team, so it was the senior leadership team from across the country. It was about 10 people brought together by the CEO and the head of communications. What we spent quite a bit of time doing in the beginning was, first of all, obviously understanding what they were trying to achieve. I remember in the room, it was like watching people rediscover their history. And they each had a small piece of it. I mean, I thought that was a fascinating room to be in when they are, in this particular case, they were doing a story sprint, trying to piece together a half-remembered history, which is only, what, 10 years old? And then realizing that there was no way they're going to get alignment across, 300 people that work across the country and very, very, very rarely meet each other and working in high stress situations that they were going to suddenly like remember, this is why we exist and this is who we're trying to help and this is why we do it.
Alex:
One of the things that I find fascinating, especially with that charity, was also, remember our little process, understand, explore, relate, equip. We realized that the first part, understand, we thought, well, everybody understands what a core story is. Everybody understands why you would need that. But even stop assuming there and going to have a conversation of saying, why would you need a core story? Why would you need, you know, other people might call it a brand. What would that help us? What would that not help us? So give people the space to be honest about that and talk about why are we sitting here? What are we actually trying to do and why would that help us do a better job?
Ivan:
No one likes to sit there feeling ignorant. You know, and so that part of understanding is understanding as a group what on earth you're talking about and getting a similar language. You know, if you just went to slightly different schools or you come from slightly different discipline, It doesn't matter if you've worked in the same place for 20 years together, your starting points are different. So I know that in the world of design, if you work in UX or graphic design, you use the same words, but you mean completely different things and your purpose is different. Now try and wrangle a charity who are dealing with incredibly stressful situations and trying to do good work within a government space. and then getting them to understand the basic story that they can then gather strength from. That was a really, I thought that was really good. And I think the most, one of the most important, back to your point about relate, is making it relatable to their everyday experience. So not only does it need to be a story that kind of makes sense on paper and you can tell new people who join, but you also understand how to use it in order to fuel the work that you're doing today and make decisions. and take action.
Alex:
The other thing that I found fascinating about it was what we noticed, people are starting to become braver in our workshops. I think they are braver of taking a punt. Now, Ivan and I both worked in big advertising agencies. I then went on to work at a experienced design agency. So we have picked up lots of crumbs. And one crumb that followed us around was this idea of design thinking, this idea of lots of small iterations get you ultimately to a great product. And I, for my point always said that is absolutely correct, but not in all situations. And I think what we are starting to see is that we work with groups who have been so wonderfully trained on thinking iteratively and improving iteratively that they have lost a little bit of the courage and the bravery of taking a chance, thinking about a big leap without forgetting to, at the end, define how are we going to get there.
Ivan:
You've got to jump from a solid place in order to reach a destination that was beyond your reach before. And it's not about being overly imaginative. These are really kind of simple steps. You're trying to get alignment from a group of people who all need to move in a similar direction at speed. One of the things that I think CEOs can get into, or I suppose senior leadership leaders who are presenting to people like boards, for instance, who are difficult, don't seem to want to get on board, is they go away and sort it out themselves and then kind of present back. And that is something we are very much against. I have been saying for years, no surprises. That's the thing I learned working in a tech company. So we're not saying that a leap is a surprise. What it is, a collective, we understand where we're going and how we could get there. And we worked with a CEO who, I mean, has a fairly sticky board, like half finance banker types, half specialists. People who impressed me deeply for their humanity and empathy and expertise, but they were at loggerheads as board, and then they had a CEO, or have a CEO, who was trying to push a new strategy through. What was your observation of that? You were a bit closer.
Alex:
Well, I think I love what you just said earlier on, I'm going to steal this, which is you can only leap from a solid foundation. I think, well, we help organizations. is to build that solid foundation surprisingly quickly. And we use creative tools to do that, which means that very quickly you can build trust and listening in the room. And once you have that foundation, you can then be brave and leap. And it isn't about this is my truth or this is your truth. a whole group goes, we don't really know what the truth is. We're going to jump to try to find a truth. And once we've done that, we'll do all the proper work of going, how do we get there? What do we need to do? What do we have to quit the organization for doing that? So I think in that case with that board, what really happened was giving the board space to acknowledge that there is a brilliant foundation, but also acknowledge that there are some real gaps in that foundation. Not trying to patch those gaps over, but to just acknowledge it. That in itself is a foundation. If I know what is solid and where are the gaps, if we all know that, we can jump from that point. We don't have to wait for all the gaps to be patched. We just need to be mindful of that. And I think that is what happened. that people didn't necessarily have to agree on everything, coming back to agreement, alignment, compliance. What they maybe did in the past, because there was also a bit of a power imbalance on the board, what they did in the past was that there was part of the board who believed that they had the truth and there was part of the board who complied. And what we helped them to do in the first part of our workshops is to get into that space of alignment. And in that space of alignment, not agreement, they were able to then start to go, well, what would the world look like if we could deliver what we believe in? What are the fundamental shifts that we might be able to be part of?
Ivan:
The workshop they went through on the first part was for the story, their core story. And It's A world-gathering exercise, as Silas Amos would call it. It's what you do is you collect. Everything that this group of people knows and the organization knows, like about who they are, why they do things, previous strategy documents, even press releases. And through the facilitated process, what we get to is getting rid of things that do not matter. Things that have maybe served a purpose at some stage, but do not serve their purpose today. So we're not inventing anything. That's the, I think, a really key piece of uncovering truth is it's not about kind of inventing a new thing. It's about agreeing on the commonality that we have already. And then also making sure that it's interesting and that it's useful to achieve an objective in the future. So otherwise, what are you jumping towards? What was interesting about that one was for the, I think, for the CEO, was that while the process started in that workshop of starting to get alignment and understanding, that it still took a couple of months before the board clicked into place and went, great, we're done now?
Alex:
In time. And I think, you know, coming back to that natural process, understand, explore, relate, equip, there are, I call them washing machine moments where you go in circles between explore and relate. if I feel that I cannot relate, if I don't really agree on what good looks like, I need to go back into exploring. And a lot of times from the outside, that might look like a group of people who just turned into human duck hounds and they just stand there and they don't want to move. But actually, that's not what they do. They need to explore a bit more. They need to understand a bit more. They need to sometimes also just be heard. I'm, people who work with me know that I'm, this is the hardest thing that I do. I can at times think really quickly. And for me, it's incredibly difficult to sit down and to go, A, to acknowledge that where I land, it might not be where everybody else lands, to be very self-critical, but also to give people space to do that work themselves. Yeah. We often think very efficient. So one person in the group has already landed somewhere, brilliant, let's just take everybody else with you. I just don't think that works at times. They have to get there themselves and they might get there in a different way. That for the leader might feel very obstructive, but it isn't. And as a coach, there's a wonderful saying, which is, you stand in the lion's roar. Just don't move. Nothing will happen. The line is just roaring. You're okay with that. The line will find its voice and then the whole of the group can move on.
Ivan:
You know, we've worked with CEOs who are needing to find a story to get alignment to the organization. We've worked with CEOs who are using a story to kind of motivate a board into making new decisions and kind of creating a plan for the future. One of the sprints we did as well was with a foundation that really invested in their purpose, I think really smart people. But I would say that was maybe the one project where because I would say the CEO and the COO were not sure of their own strategy, that any questions about that strategy were going to, I suppose, lead to nothing happening. And everyone in the room kind of understood that. And I would say, if you are someone who is desperate to kind of make something happen in your team or in your organization, if you're going to do that, you need your senior leadership to be bought into executing against that. And so making sure that the question is designed properly to achieve the right kinds of thinking, the right kinds of creativity, the right kinds of leaping. It will just simply stay in the question space, but to a purpose. If you don't have that agreed strategy or a thought of where you actually want to go, the workshop just falls apart at the end of it. That was a lesson for us.
Alex:
That was a lesson for us. And the way I think that we shortcut some of these conversations now is when you are starting to work on a new strategy, and that is when people ask us to come in at times to help people understand the strategy and to translate that into action, I think what was lacking here was a clarity on the strategic shifts. For me, a strategy is a story. It's really, really important. But at the heart, there needs to be clarity. What do we keep doing? What do we stop doing? What do we start doing? And a lot of strategies hide this. So what we are now getting much better is we come in, people say, can you do a workshop with us to help people relate to the strategy? I think that is a big part that we do for people to then be able to leap to deliver that new strategy. If there is not clarity on the strategic shifts, we can't do that work. And to your point, that is at times really hard. And in that particular case, I think the strategy you read beautifully, but when both of us read it, we weren't clear what is the shift. What is changing and what does that then mean for people's beliefs, behaviours, tools, ways of working? And when we did the work with the team, I think the team felt that. And there was no foundation. They weren't quite sure why do we need to do that exercise. Yeah, I think it was one of the very few moments in my career where everybody in the room felt deeply uncomfortable at times, and nobody quite knew how to deal with that. I'm quite happy that at least our creative exercises seem to be joyful for people. They enjoyed it, and I think the feedback we got from the day was, oh, we love you, do great creative exercises. We just weren't quite sure how that will help us in our day-to-day work.
Ivan:
Alex and I are not going to come up with your strategy. We're not a strategy partner like that. What we are is strategy to action partner is a simple way to put it. it's that, was it the strategic execution gap, which sounds bizarre, but it's really about moving quickly and with purpose towards a goal. Yeah, I mean, if I was, I don't want to be too hard on that particular exercise. I thought it was, I could see where if you don't have your strategy sorted out, asking questions about it is deeply uncomfortable, as you said. And if you can't deal with that discomfort and that kind of liminal space, then you're going to struggle to be able to convince anyone else to work with you in order to bring it to life.
Alex:
I think also there's something really practical, especially in non-for-profits and charities. There's hardly any resource left. So you're asking a group of people to make half a day to do a really joyful workshop. That's what we always get feedback. People walk out and they are enthused. They have new tools to use. They learned about each other. But unless they feel that they have actually delivered against the mission of their organization, a big part of them goes, why are we here? I have all of these burning things on my desk and they all need to happen. So Ivan and I also feel really, really, really accountable for the fact that what we want is that people walk out of our workshops, not just going, this was fantastic, I learned something. We're very clear, these are not training workshops, but we want them to walk out and said, we have done something that is already improving the way that we deliver what we say we deliver.
Ivan:
And I would go back to the first example that we talked about, the charity that has people spread across the country who came to one place with us. And it could have been what would classically be called a BS job, as in we came together, we had a nice day, but fundamentally this did not move my practice along in any way to people walking away and using it straight away, basically, and testing the work that they had done together and getting good results out of it. I mean, it changed, has changed the work that those people do on a daily basis.
Alex:
Immediately.
Ivan:
Immediately. And that's a responsibility on us to both make the day joyful, on the CEO or the leader who brings us in to make it purposeful, And then there's the responsibility on the team themselves to commit to the process and just imagine what they can achieve and then start to work towards that. I thought like we had some brilliant clients last year. They stretched us in really interesting ways. What I'm very happy about is the Big Leap methodology. It's just tried and tested and works. We've been doing it for nine years and counting. It's so simple, but it is so powerful getting people in a day or two from kind of being introduced to a strategy to understanding how to execute it in their teams and inventing different ways of doing it that are aligned with everyone around them. It's an amazing process and you can tell that people feel very empowered by it. that was a nice output of last year.
Alex:
I love that because I think, we started our little consultancy on one premise that we said being creative at the heart means actually you have to do something. Yeah, being creative doesn't mean to tell a great story. Being creative means that I have to execute that story. And I think that is where clients bring us in. It is generally either a strategy, which as I said in my word, is nothing else than a story, or they're looking for their organizational story. Some people call it a brand. And we come in and we help through our big leap process to get people very quickly to a space where they feel we have a shared foundation. to then be able to be really brave and retell that story in a way that everybody is clear how they can then become part of that story. And this is why we talk about the fact that we believe that if you have an organization where, for example, if you're looking for your organizational story, the outcome is everybody becomes a better storyteller. Everybody can tell your story. can build experiences on the back of that. And that is the same for your strategy. If everybody understands your strategy, understands the bravery and the courage that sits at the heart of it, what does it want to shift, everybody can come out of the workshop to start to do things to deliver the strategy. And that's what I love what we do. It's just we take that space out, we shorten that space between having created the story and being able to become part of that story and act in your day-to-day job towards what everybody gets up in the morning to do.
Ivan:
Yeah, it's a perspective shift.
Alex:
Every great organization has loads of different team cultures, and those team cultures are incredibly important. You know, your finance team has a slightly different culture to your design team, but you need to have the glue of being able to leap together. And that is it. And I think we help people to create that glue together to be then able to be brave enough to leap together. And how that looks like might look very different in different teams. But that process of how to leap in times of increasing uncertainty is crucial for organizations. You cannot iterate yourself into new horizons. You have to find a shared space to be able to then leap together and trust that how you do that might look ever so slightly different, but you're leaping all into the same direction. That's why I love what we do. is when people come out of our workshops of going, I now understand what I do in an organization compared to what other people do in the organization. I understand that there is more than one truth in an organization. And I feel braver. I trust my creative abilities to take things and put them together in a completely new way. And it works. I love that.
Ivan:
People are surprised every time.
Alex:
People are surprised. You can't bore yourself out of a crisis.
Ivan:
If you are looking at your team and your strategy and you're trying to figure out how to move something along at speed, give us a call. We love to talk about this stuff. We're looking forward to 2026. Trepidatiously.
Alex:
Very trepidatiously and optimistically. And optimistically. Exactly. There is a wonderful German philosopher, Hannah Arendt, and she always said the way she lives is she prepares for the worst, she expects the best, and she understands that **** can happen. And I love that, and that is how I try to approach 2026.
Ivan:
On that note, let us stay on the balls of our feet and be prepared for anything that may came my way. We wish you a fantastic beginning of the year, and we hope this was interesting. Thank you.
Alex:
Take care.
