The invisible failure costing billions: why nobody understands what you're building

When did you last ask whether your organisation is spending enough on helping people understand what you're building? If you're developing technology for defence and security applications, the honest answer might be "never". And that's precisely why promising innovations languish whilst threats multiply.

The UK's Strategic Defence Review, published in June, commits Britain to becoming "the leading edge of innovation in NATO". Lord Robertson's team identified a "deadly quartet" of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, demanding capabilities delivered at unprecedented speed. The US Department of Defense's Replicator initiative aims to field thousands of autonomous systems within 18-24 months. These aren't aspirational timelines, they're operational necessities.

Yet early survey responses from across the defence sector, MOD, primes, SMEs, reveal an uncomfortable truth: communication failures are materially impacting programme delivery.

Organisations report that breakdowns between technical teams and stakeholders routinely contribute to delays, increased costs, and reduced effectiveness. The challenge isn't building the technology. It's ensuring the right people understand it, trust it, and adopt it quickly enough to matter.

This isn't about glossy brochures or media relations. Academic research on technology adoption demonstrates that social networks, peer communication, and organisational training support determine success more than technical merit alone. The social identity of communicators influences adoption, stakeholders are most convinced by those sharing group identity or comparable operational conditions. In defence contexts where engineers must persuade procurement officials, technical developers must engage military end-users, and everyone must navigate security constraints, this insight is existential.

The notorious ‘valley of death’, where innovations go to die, is in significant part a communication failure. Whilst technical maturation and operational validation present genuine challenges, research from the US Department of Defense explicitly identifies continuous communication with allies and partners as essential to fostering ecosystem vibrancy. When useful research languishes because bureaucratic processes prevent engagement, or when vendors focus on technical specifications rather than communicating operational value, billions of pounds of R&D investment delivers precisely nothing to the front line.

Survey responses reveal the human reality behind these failures. Respondents describe "competing drivers for the MOD audience", "over-promising by competitors", and "invisible soft politics" alongside chronic lack of access to decision-makers' actual requirements. One noted that MOD audiences "think they know what they want as they have been incorrectly briefed by a large prime". Another identified "the inability for the customer to share full details of the use case" combined with unrealistic expectations of what funding can deliver. These aren't technical problems. They're communication failures that burn through budgets and timelines.

So what should organisations actually spend? Defence R&D typically constitutes around 20% of defence budgets under NATO guidelines, whilst corporate communications averages 8-15% of operating budgets in high-compliance B2B sectors. For organisations developing defence and security technologies, strategic communications should constitute 2-3% of annual revenue or budget, approximately 15-20% of R&D spend. This isn't overhead. It's the forcing function that transforms R&D expenditure into operational capability.

But spending money isn't enough. You need to spend it correctly, and in sequence. Forty per cent should fund stakeholder engagement infrastructure, the unglamorous work of mapping decision-makers, creating feedback mechanisms, and maintaining dialogue across military users, procurement officials, and technical developers. Another 35% should resource technical translation: communication professionals who can explain why a five-millisecond latency reduction matters to a brigade commander, or how an AI algorithm addresses a specific capability gap.

The final 25% should build ecosystem partnerships. The SDR emphasises breaking barriers between Services, military and private sector, but barriers don't break themselves. This requires sustained relationship management programmes, industry days, joint capability demonstrations. Survey responses identify building partnerships across traditional industry boundaries as the most important future challenge. That doesn't happen through occasional networking. It requires dedicated resources.

Here's the uncomfortable question: can you name the person in your organisation responsible for ensuring that the people who need to adopt your technology actually understand its operational value? Not marketing. Not bid management. The systematic work of translating technical capability into operational benefit, then ensuring that message reaches decision-makers through trusted channels.

If you can't, that's your problem. And it's costing you, in failed bids, in delayed programmes, in capabilities that never reach the forces who need them.

Government and industry must fundamentally reset how they view communication investment. For government, this means recognising that funding R&D without funding its communication is like buying ammunition without logistics, technically present but operationally useless. Procurement processes should explicitly resource communication activities. Innovation funding should include stakeholder engagement as a deliverable, not an afterthought.

For industry, this means treating communication as engineering discipline, not corporate function. Technical leads should have communication expertise embedded in their teams. Bid processes should allocate communication resources proportionate to technical complexity. Knowledge management systems should capture not just what the technology does, but how to explain it to different audiences.

Most fundamentally, both sides must accept that in an era where speed determines survival, communication isn't what you do after you've built the capability. It's how you ensure the capability gets built correctly, adopted quickly, and deployed effectively.

The threats Lord Robertson identified aren't waiting for us to perfect our stakeholder engagement strategies. They're accelerating. The question isn't whether we can afford to invest 2-3% of defence technology budgets in strategic communication. It's whether we can afford not to, whilst promising innovations die in the valley of death and adversaries deploy capabilities we invented but failed to field.

Ask yourself: what's your organisation's communication budget as a percentage of R&D spend? If you don't know, find out. If it's less than 15%, you're not serious about adoption. And if you're not serious about adoption, you're not serious about national security.

Organisations can contribute to building the evidence base for communication investment through Canny Comms' Defence Communications Survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PC7DPZX, with £15 donated to The Royal British Legion's Poppy Appeal for every completed response.