Alignment Lessons From Forgeahead’s Strategic Messaging Shift

People form 75% of their opinion on the credibility of a website…. purely based on its aesthetics.

User experience design is one of the most essential facets of creating customer-oriented aspects of technology. It’s much more than just the ‘pretty face’ of tech. There’s no doubt that people are highly motivated by the way something looks. All companies know this and build their web presence around these principles. That’s why company websites are always improving in their “look and feel”. While this is a good thing there’s certainly, more to be done.

There are deeper questions these technology companies need to answer. Is there a way to differentiate between each of these companies? What sets one apart from the other? What do they do and how do they do it differently from the others?

Trying to answer such questions brings the focus on the messaging and the visible strategic alignment of the company with the messaging.

Forgeahead just underwent an exercise in defining a strategic message that could crisply say what is at the core of its DNA. The face of that is its new website and the articulation of the concepts can be seen there. We wanted to pull back the curtains on our thinking as this journey progressed. Hopefully, this will help others who set out on a similar path.

Arriving at the heart of the messaging

Let me start with an example. In the context of differentiation, what has a greater impact? Some product companies believe in ideas. When companies ideate, they focus on finding solutions to different problems. This is a creative process. Others would say that the answer to the differentiation question is ‘innovation’. The more innovative a company is – the more it stands out.

Most companies are fascinated by the ideation process and push to be as creative as possible. Why? Because they feel that this is where innovation lies. Every company is looking to be the next big innovator.

But historically speaking, companies known to be innovative were not the first to ideate ground-breaking products in their field. They were the first to build them well and sell them. That’s execution. These companies had to work relentlessly to ensure that their products were built, quality-tested, marketed and then sold. This is how their names became synonymous with the products they created.

So, an idea is worth nothing until it is workable. But what is the difference between ideation and innovation?

It’s the ability to execute.

Execution is a practical activity. It’s at this stage that you create a minimum viable product. Without a good process of execution, ideation itself means very little. Without a good product, there is no space to be innovative. Only when you execute your idea, you create an actual product.

This brings me to our thinking.

Our experience has been all about execution. All our key stakeholders believe with conviction that execution, and not ideation makes a product innovative.  We have proved this in project after project that we have worked on. And it soon emerged that this is what we want to be known for as we truly believe in it.

In this excellent article, professor V. Govindarajan points out that being innovative itself is not even a creative process. It has more to do with actual hard work than anything else. I think a quote by Thomas Edison is very apt in this situation, “Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

This perspective, once articulated, became the crux of our message.  While always a part of our DNA, the strategic shift towards innovation with perfect execution is front and centre to our ethos.

Creating a strategic alignment

With the message in place, it is vital to ensure that everyone in the company understands the articulation and aligns everything they do with that theme. This is an ongoing process but it’s evident that we are in the middle of an exciting paradigm shift. This is proving to be a learning experience on many levels. Here are some  takeaways from this strategic messaging shift:

• It’s essential to reach out to all levels of employees and invest time and energy to illustrate the reasoning behind this new articulation.
• Every employee must be a part of this evolution. Even the most complex of creatures are made up of billions of cells, but evolution always occurs at a cellular level.
• We’ve learned that it’s important to highlight the motives behind each step.
• We’ve disclosed all the important details to our Forgeahead family and tried to emphasize upon a sense of what this would mean to the work they do.
• Most importantly, we have asked our employees what this new message means to them. We wanted to know how this would change their mindsets towards their work.

I’m glad to say that some interesting insights have already emerged as the impact cascades through levels and teams.

Of course, at one level as we have always focused on execution, this is hardly a massive shift and easily fits into our core culture. But, saying this so clearly and encouraging people to define what this means to them has been very transformative. The process energizes me about the future as we all pull together in the same direction based on a shared understanding of who we are. Of course, we have created a good-looking website that (we hope) will convince people about our credibility but I hope it’s the articulation of what we stand for that makes the greater impact!