What are the best ways to communicate your tech innovation strategy to employees?

Why is having a strategic vision important? Most companies and organizations can benefit from incorporating a strategic vision into their strategy. It creates a sense of meaning. It helps the organization focus on its future. A coherent and relevant strategic vision can give employees a shared set of goals and purposes, motivating them to collaborate in achieving them. It connects the present with the future. It establishes certain operational standards. A strategic vision not only outlines the organization's goals and purposes but also establishes the standards in quality, work ethic and operational precision needed to achieve goals.

Many organisations face challenges: Employees often lack awareness of the company's vision, purpose, mission, and values. This disconnect leads to a lack of direction, inconsistent decision-making, reduced engagement, and challenges in teamwork and innovation. Effective communication of these core elements is crucial to bridge this gap. Leadership should exemplify these values, integrating them into daily operations and involving employees in discussions about the company's direction. Training and development can help employees connect with the organisation's mission, fostering a more engaged and effective workforce.

La estrategia tecnológica de la compañía debe explicar el papel que juega la tecnología dentro de la estrategia corporativa de la empresa. Delimita el papel de la tecnología como recurso exclusivo o diferencial de la organización o como facilitador de capacidades diferenciales de la organización.

To create an innovation vision for your own organization you must understand many aspects such as: Understand and clearly identify the main challenges. Look at the best solutions and all related opportunities Define your direction and should lay out your company’s innovation goals and how they will be achieved.

In my experience setting the strategy and vision is just the beginning. What's sets an innovation strategy on a path to success is a well defined phased approach. The approach needs to allow measurable and achievable phases that ultimately realize the strategy and vision. A great example of this can be seen at work in SpaceX. The overall vision is far sighted which is articulated as "Take humans to Mars". To vision is then broken into achievable phases with the first one focusing on creating a commercial rocket to generate cash flow followed by reusable rockets and so on. Each step is leading towards the ultimate vision addressing the business challenges along with the technical aspects to make the vision come alive.

Es necesario hacer visible el enfoque tecnológico que se ha adaptado a la organización en su conjunto. Explicar cómo la tecnología va a potenciar nuestra diferenciación o eficiencia y de qué manera se van a impactar en los stakeholders. También es conveniente que se sea muy claro con los planes de absorción de la tecnología por la organización, planes de upskilling o reeskilling necesarios para que el impacto sea el esperado.

it's important to ensure that everyone on your organization is working towards achieving same goal. This is where a strong company vision comes in - it ensures that everyone is aligned and moving in the same direction.

Often innovation strategy projects fail to early on identify the key metrics and success criteria. In typical business situations the Technology Hype Cycle becomes a driving force to pilot the latest technologies without ample consideration provided to the business problem that will be addressed . Innovation strategy should start with the business metrics (revenue, margin, customer satisfaction/experience, working capital improvements) that will be influenced by the strategy and the expected benefits along with a measurement approach. The metrics and realized value should be communicated to the employees as the strategy is executed.

Según mi experiencia, es conveniente compartir los logros y el progreso que se vaya obteniendo en la implantación de nuestra estrategia tecnológica. Son muy importantes los proyectos de demostración de que esa tecnología es la adecuada para nuestro negocio y los business cases de el impacto que está teniendo.

Rapid feedback loops are essential for fostering a culture of continuous learning, agility, and improved performance within organizations. These feedback loops enable timely communication of performance insights to relevant departments and individuals, facilitating quick course correction, skill development, and strategic adjustments. Constructive and actionable feedback, coupled with an open and transparent communication culture, is crucial. Leveraging technology and data analytics can enhance the effectiveness of feedback loops, driving continuous improvement and performance. Building a feedback-driven culture that values learning and actively engages in improvement efforts is paramount for sustained success.

In my humble opinion, it starts with a transparent line of sight to the new outcomes of the innovation strategy and how it impacts each team member. Transformations stall when the impact and outcomes are not well understood. In fact, communication is the key to success. Technology is relatively simple and culture change is hard. Too often, organizations are overly focused on the technology change. Bring your team together and explore the communication channels available to you and the unique communication needs of each stakeholder. Then build and document your communication strategy as well as how you measure the communication plan effectiveness. Celebrate the successes and pivot as needed to adapt the plan as you move forward.

Celebrating the achievements along and learning from failures is crucial for a company to create an innovation culture. Innovation typically involves taking on risky projects. A company that values innovation should not penalize employees/stakeholders that gave their best to the project which did not succeed. This allows employees to take on innovative projects and drive success and use failures as a learning experience.

Quite often the biggest mistake that leaders can make is believing everyone can align instantly to a strategy on a page. This makes no sense given the time we as leaders put into strategic development . Translating anything requires a shared language or an understanding of everyone’s own unique language. Leaders have to be able to seek to learn what drives different mindsets forward and connect that with how their strategy is communicated. A developer might not connect with a placemat on a desk but that doesn’t mean they are resisting. They are builders and problem solvers - show them the problems your strategy seeks to solve .

How you involve stakeholders matters when introducing new ideas in a resistant workplace. It must be clear what's in it for them for them to get buy-in and participate. Show and tell them how the change brought by innovation can improve their lives, not worsening it.

Every Wednesday at our company we have a Wednes-Dev meeting where our lead developer and our UX/UI designer share updates and desgins with our core team of 8. We believe involving our team gives everyone the chance to share their perspectives and ideas in a collaborative way and has led to some really great innovation of our platform. We also have a #development slack channel where members of our team can share screen shots or examples of features or web/mobile app design that can improve our platform. Every once in a while a member of our team catches a bug or something that isn't working right and is instantly able to share that with our dev team to investigate. This collaborative effort ensures all areas of the platform are solid.

Different perspectives will contribute to a more efficient and effective team. It’s important to involve all stakeholders and have an efficient feedback loop for improvements.

My preferred approach - Sending out information about the vision, planned process and keynotes. - Kick- Off meeting with a request to prepare Q&A themselves. - Because not only the questions about technical innovation are important and interesting, but also what answers the participants imagine / hope for

One effective way I have come across is to challenge your team… to challenge them not to conform to the norm. This means allowing diverse points of view and constructive arguments. This can easily go out of hand, therefore some form of control also needs to be practiced when you do this.

Convey vision and strategy in a open and frank group meeting, with questions allowed and answered. Then discuss with each employee how their activities support the strategy.

You need to be patient as management. Change and innovation take time to digest. You will need to hire some new people to get a critical mass of a skill if it does not exist, you will need to train existing employees who are willing to convert in thinking but need a bridge, and you will need to deal with those whose resistance is absolute and actively work to take away from the cause.

DO NOT JUDGE - LEARN 3M's invention of Post-it Notes is a classic example of innovation from perceived failure. Rapid learning is not judging learning as a failure. In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, attempted to develop a super-strong adhesive. Instead, he accidentally created a low-tack, reusable, pressure-sensitive adhesive. This was seen as a failure with no obvious application. In 1974, another 3M scientist, Art Fry, sought a way to keep his bookmark in his hymnbook without falling out. Remembering Silver's adhesive, he saw an opportunity. Fry realised this "weak" adhesive could be perfect for temporary bookmarks since it would stick to the paper without damaging it. Post-it Notes Reframing "Failure".

Firstly know what strategy consists. Strategy is not a vision nor goal nor is it a plan. It consist of all three and includes timeline and critical components. It is essential that there is communication flow from top down and bottom up, especially with technology, you want to know whether it works at the bottom level. You don’t want to incorporate technology to only discover that somewhere because of customer requirements or resource limitation the technology does not deliver.

I will always work no bi-directional Top down to define business. Needs. And focus the innovation to answer then. Work bottom up, to get ideas from every node in my organisation. It’s best if I can get all off them to meet and make as much stakeholders as possible for each initiative.