I've been thinking a lot lately about why brilliant strategies fail inside organisations. Not because they're wrong, but because they never make it past the conference room they were born in.
After watching countless strategies get lost in translation between the C-suite and the teams actually doing the work, I realised something: communicating strategy inside an organisation follows exactly the same rules as Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. The same psychological barriers, the same adoption patterns, the same need for different messaging at each stage.
Most of us know Crossing the Chasm as a classic marketing framework. You start with the early adopters, you learn fast, you iterate, and then - if you’re lucky - you manage to cross that perilous gap to the mainstream. Miss the jump, and you never scale.
But here's the thing: this isn't just a marketing challenge. This is exactly what it feels like trying to communicate strategy inside a company.
Early Adopters ≠ Everyone
Just as Moore identified distinct customer segments in technology adoption, I've observed the same distinct segments when it comes to how your organisation consumes strategy:
The Innovators - These are your strategy co-creators. They were probably in the room when you developed it. A high-level vision statement is enough for them because they already know the context and reasoning. They can fill in the blanks. Even so - you’re going to want to segment this audience further - your CFO cares about very different things than your CMO, CRO, etc
The Early Adopters - Your visionary department heads and senior contributors. They're comfortable with ambiguity and can work with broad directional guidance. They want to understand the "why" and the strategic rationale, but they don't need you to spell out every detail. They'll figure out how it applies to their domain.
The Early Majority - This is where most strategy communication breaks down. These are your pragmatic managers and team leads. The vision alone isn't enough. They need to see how this strategy translates into concrete decisions, priorities, and actions. They want frameworks, criteria, and detailed guidance they can actually use.
The Late Majority - They need even more specificity. They want to know exactly what this means for their day-to-day work. They need clear processes, defined roles, and explicit expectations. Abstract strategy makes them nervous.
The Laggards - They'll resist until it's operationalised into systems they can't ignore. And that's fine.
The Chasm: Where Strategy Goes to Die
This is where strategy starts to feel like abstract noise to the majority of your teams. They hear the words, they nod in meetings… but they don’t really know what it means for their day-to-day work. They’re not sure how to act on it. So they don’t.
Here's the critical insight: there's a massive chasm between what your Early Adopters need to hear and what your Early Majority needs to hear about the same strategy.
Your Early Adopters are energised by vision and high-level direction. Tell them "we're going to win by having the best customer experience" and they immediately start thinking about what that means for their teams, their processes, their priorities.
But your Early Majority hears that and thinks: "That sounds nice, but what does that actually mean? How do I prioritise customer experience versus technical debt? What criteria do I use to make trade-offs? How does this change what I'm working on this quarter?" Instead of enabling decision-making, your strategy becomes just another PowerPoint slide.
If you only communicate at the aspirational level, you lose the Early Majority. If you only communicate at the detailed level, you overwhelm and bore the Early Adopters. Most organisations try to find a middle ground and end up satisfying no one.
Strategies Don’t Cascade—They Spread
Here’s the shift: internal strategy communication is not a cascade, it’s a diffusion. And like any diffusion of ideas, it follows patterns. Just like in Crossing the Chasm, you need different messaging for different segments.
Early Adopters are actively thinking about strategy. They're seeking out information. They attend your strategy sessions, they read your updates, they ask questions. You can communicate with them less frequently because they're pulling information toward themselves.
Early Majority are focused on execution. Strategy competes with everything else demanding their attention. They need you to push information to them, repeatedly, in different formats. A big-bang strategy announcement isn't enough. They need regular reinforcement and clarification.
This creates a communication dilemma: your Early Adopters get frustrated by repetition ("we already covered this"), while your Early Majority gets frustrated by gaps ("I have no idea what we're supposed to be doing").
Crossing the Internal Communication Chasm
The solution isn't to find a compromise. It's to stop trying to communicate one strategy in one way to everyone. In order to provide strategic clarity for everyone in your organisation, you need different levels of detail and different communication approaches for different segments.
For Early Adopters: Vision + Context
- High-level strategic direction and rationale
- Market context and competitive positioning
- Success metrics and outcomes you're driving toward
- Quarterly updates on progress and pivots
- Access to deep-dive discussions and planning sessions
- High level answers to "what does this mean for my function and my goals?"
For Early Majority: Frameworks + Applications
- Detailed frameworks for decision-making
- Concrete examples of how the strategy applies to common situations
- Clear prioritization criteria and trade-off guidance through Principles
- Regular communication (monthly, not quarterly)
- Specific answers to "what does this mean for my team?"
For Late Majority: Processes + Expectations
- Step-by-step processes and workflows
- Clear role definitions and responsibilities
- Explicit performance expectations and measures
- Frequent check-ins and course corrections
- Integration with existing systems and tools
The Layered Communication Strategy
Level 1: Vision Layer - The high-level strategic narrative. This builds on your vision and is what goes in your strategy deck for the board, your company all-hands, and your external communications. It's inspiring and directional.
Level 2: Framework Layer - This is where you translate vision into decision-making frameworks. How do we prioritize? What criteria do we use for trade-offs? What does success look like? This is what your department heads and senior managers need.
Level 3: Process Layer - This is where frameworks become workflows. Specific processes, templates, checklists, and procedures. This is what your team leads and individual contributors need to actually implement the strategy.
Level 4: System Layer - This is where processes get embedded into tools, dashboards, and automated systems. This is what ensures even the Laggards follow the strategy.
Just like Jesse James Garret’s layers from Elements of User Experience should guide your product thinking, it should also guide your internal comms. You're not replacing one level with the next. You're layering them, maintaining different communication streams for different audiences with different needs.
The Product Manager's Communication Challenge
As product managers, we face this challenge constantly. We need to communicate our product strategy up to executives (who want vision and outcomes), across to other departments (who want processes for collaboration), and down to our teams (who want specific guidance for daily decisions).
The mistake most of us make is trying to use the same communication for all audiences. We create one strategy document and share it everywhere. But your engineering lead needs different information than your CEO, who needs different information than your customer support manager, etc.
Instead, think about your strategy communication like you think about user experience: different users have different needs, different contexts, and different levels of sophistication. You wouldn't show the same interface to a first-time user and a power user. Don't use the same strategy communication either.
The Repetition Problem
Here's where it gets tricky: your Early Adopters are embedded in the strategy development process. They're sick of talking about it by the time you're ready to roll it out. Meanwhile, your Early Majority is hearing about it for the first time.
This creates pressure to rush through the communication phase. Your Early Adopters are ready to move to execution, so you assume everyone else is too. But rushing past the Early Majority communication needs is exactly how strategies die in the chasm.
You need to resist the urge to move on just because your Early Adopters are ready. The Early Majority needs time, repetition, and multiple formats to really absorb and internalise strategic direction. They need to hear it, discuss it, ask questions about it, and see it applied in different contexts.
Why Strategy is Different
Other corporate communication seems simple in comparison right? We don’t need layers to communicating vision or new policies, so why is strategy different? If you’ve done it right an inspirational vision paints a great picture of the future, and leaves room for interpretation - in contrast a strategy is a set of coherent choices on actions you are going to take in order to achieve that vision. By definition you need to be much more detailed, leave less room for interpretation, and make sure your organisation understands not just the strategy, but why you made those choices, how to decide on the right actions, and what trade-offs you’re willing to make along the way.
The Job’s Not Done Until the Team Can Say It Back Understand
If you want your strategy to cross the chasm, measure its spread the same way a good marketer would:
- Can teams describe the strategy in their own words? It’s not enough to parrot back the headline, you need to know they understand the why, the hows, and the trade-offs in the strategy.
- Do their OKRs, plans, and roadmaps reflect strategic intent?
- Are decisions being made because of the strategy—not in spite of it?
If not, you haven’t crossed the chasm yet.
Patience and Persistence
This approach requires both patience and persistence. It's more work than sending one strategy document to everyone. It's more complex than doing one all-hands presentation.
But I've learned that strategy execution isn't just about having the right strategy. It's about having the right level of detail and the right communication frequency for each group that needs to implement it.
Your Early Majority isn't being difficult when they ask what this means for their day-to-day work. They're telling you what they need to cross from vision to action, and they need your help building that bridge with appropriate detail and regular reinforcement.
The good news? Once you cross the communication chasm with proper detail and frequency, strategy understanding and adoption accelerates dramatically. But first, you have to accept that different people need different amounts of information communicated in different ways.
So if you want your strategy to land? Treat it like a product. And treat your organisation like the market. You’ve got early adopters… now cross the chasm.