Innovating Your Way Through Tough Times: The Five Cs

To communicate innovation successfully, great leaders know how to address the needs and concerns of each of their stakeholders with customized approaches, but they also allow a core set of principles to guide what they do. These core principles include connectedness, convergence, clarity, credibility, and capability. 

• Connectedness means listening first, appealing to both hearts and minds, and adjusting content to fit the times. 
• Convergence involves tying innovation to your company’s purpose or major strategy. 
• Clarity requires articulating the problem you are looking to solve, breaking down the technical and complex into the digestible, and making the intangible tangible. 
• Credibility suggests that details matter, facts matter, and admitting to setbacks and failures also matter. 
• Capability touts the use of communications professionals to cast the vision and make it plain. 

Deploying winning practices against these principles can help successful firms to chart a path through whatever ups, downs, twists, and turns the external environment may bring.

For more, see: Tool Kit: Seven Skills for Communicating Innovation Successfully.