Even the most comprehensive strategies fail if the owner of the strategy doesn’t succeed in communicating it to its customers, employees, shareholders and the rest of the marketplace.
Visual communication and a strong narrative are great tools for lifting the strategy from PowerPoint presentations to a life in the real world. The narrative can translate complex data to emotional storytelling, while the visual communication can bring even the most ambitious change strategies to life.
If you manage to tell a story that the receiver connects with emotionally, you can move mountains and mindsets.
According to Bain & Company, change is actually so hard that only 12% of the businesses that initiates large change initiatives fully achieves their goals.
The problem is that the most initiatives tend to stay initiatives. Ideas that slowly fade and manifest as anything but posters with quotes and corporate-value mugs.
The question is why?
A significant cause is the lacking ability to connect the management pushing for change with the employees expected to adjust to change.
That’s how few business initiating change initiatives that fully achieves their goals.
In Bain & Company’s report, Busting Three Common Myths of Change Management, the key factors separating successful changes from failed ones are highlighted. Four out of six emphasized factors are essentially rooted in the ability to communicate.
Engage
Ensure engagement across the entire organization
Support
Acquire the right qualifications (talent) and enable behavioral change
Decide
Enable concise and fast decision making (agility)
Excite
Create an inspiring future
Building the foundation for successful change demands action, leadership and repetition.
That’s why the brand is a good place to start.
Building the foundation for successful change demands action, leadership and repetition. That’s why the brand is a good place to start. Starting with the brand allows you to show concrete and clear action that both customers, partners and employees are faced with consistently across contact points.
Narrative and identity tie together a business’ heritage, strategy and ambitions for the future. If utilized to the fullest, the result is a storytelling that provides the most important stakeholders in and around the business with the ability to understand and experience the brand through the same perspective. Best case, a storytelling that all parties relate to emotionally and are inspired by.
Change is most effective when you agree on the direction the change needs to take.
Using the brand as a compass, you are able to unify powers and abilities across the organization. This is crucial if you want to succeed with cementing change and positioning your business for the next step in your growth journey.
The result of having a strong brand is twofold:
It partly results in businesses that own a distinct position in the market, and partly in an organization that acts with agility and independence with the brand as a compass for decision makers across departments and management levels.
