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Innovate or Fail—The Value of Collaboration for Innovation
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Innovate or Fail—The Value of Collaboration for Innovation
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Segment:0 .
Hi, everybody. Welcome We're giving people a chance to come into the webinar and we will start shortly.
Good morning and welcome to today's webinar innovate or fail the value of collaboration for innovation. We're pleased that you can join. I'm Jason point webinar lead of the education committee and publishing director for the international anesthesia Research Society. Before we start, I'd like to Thank SSPS 2023 education program sponsors silverchair, 67, bricks Taylor Francis F1000 and Mauricio.
We are grateful for their support. Now I have a few housekeeping items to share. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A panel to enter questions for the panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate with other participants or organizers. Closed captions have been enabled. You can view captions by selecting the More option on your screen and choosing show captions.
This one hour session will be recorded and made available to registrants in a few days. A quick note on SBS code of conduct and today's meeting. We're committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment, fostering open dialogue, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner.
It's now my pleasure to introduce our moderator for today's session, Shirley decker Lucky. Shirley is director of content at elsevier's preprint server. She has led innovative cross-departmental initiatives that ensure Elsevier understands and meets its customer needs. She's responsible for ensuring that the platform supports content and research needs for the dissemination of early stage research. Throughout her career, Shirley has focused on merging content and technology in innovative ways that serve the research and those who rely upon it.
Before this role, she was a publishing director at Elsevier. Now over to you, Shirley. Oh, can we go back? Great hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Whoever's got the controls, please stop, because something seems to be going crazy with the order. There we go.
Thank you. Um, so. So welcome. Innovation isn't hard, but it also isn't easy. The innovators we have on our panel have been people who've seen how collaboration can make all the difference between successful innovation and failure to effect any change. Our panelists will be sharing with us from their own experiences with building and fostering creativity and collaboration into innovative advancements.
Rich Remington from Elsevier will be talking about a high level thinking on what innovation is, what the different types of innovation are, and how to foster innovation and collaboration. Monica Granados from Creative Commons will be talking about how organizations and structure and infrastructure can foster creativity and collaboration and help to deliver innovative advancements. Ashley postlethwaite from Duke University press will be taking us through a specific example of tactical innovation using the scholarly publishing collective as an example of how a number of organizations came together, overcame obstacles, built consensus and drove innovation.
Before we start, we did want to do an audience poll to get a sense from you. Thank you for dropping in the chat where your location is. We want to get a sense from you of where you feel like your organization is now that will help us kind of couch the way we're having our conversation and discussion. So if people could just fill that out quickly.
so it looks like at this point, a lot of people are saying it's a mixture. A lot of times when you feel like your organization is innovative and other times when it's not, there's some people who think it's hard with a lot of obstacles. We don't have anybody feeling like they're in a group that's really innovative. So that's kind of interesting to.
and did we share the results? Those results have been shown. OK did people see the results that came up? Can't tell from the way the view is. Anyhow, we did. OK, great. And now I'll hand it over to rich, who's senior vice president and managing director at elsevier, running a number of businesses within that unit.
Thank Shirley and welcome, everyone. Thank you for hosting this as well. Um, I'm going to take a little bit of a different approach on this. As Shirley has highlighted, I'm going to talk about innovation as a discussion topic, and there are three areas that really I want to try and get us through in the next few minutes, and that is thinking about the difference between invention and innovation.
I'll come back to that in a minute. Why that that tends to get in the way sometimes of being innovative, thinking about different types of innovation and how they can play to your strengths or opportunities in your organization. And then finally, the importance of alignment and collaboration within your groups, your organizations, or your influence circles.
And so if we start with that first topic, I'm going to start with something that's pretty relevant to those of us in the publishing industry and use it as an example. So many times we innovation gets confused with invention and we only think that innovation is something that happens when you invent something completely new for the environment. And if you look at the typewriter, it actually was first invented in 1867 as a way to support Braille for those who were not able to read.
And that technology then moved on to become things like the first electric typewriter in 1900, the way we did the typeball and learning from, you know, the difficulties of correcting mistakes on typewritten pages all the way through the process of moving into what would eventually become the computer and the laptops. And the typewriter is now gone. For someone, let's call it may even be something you've only ever seen in a museum.
But when you think about that journey along the path, each one of those opportunities was an was an advancement of the capabilities of type written language, but it wasn't necessarily an invention in and of itself. One could argue the computer might have been a step in that direction. But if we keep in this vein of thinking of it more as a word processor than the power of the pure computer.
It really was an innovation and taking learnings from other industries and pulling them into the typewriter. So at the time it may not have felt that you were making that huge of an impact on the world. But each one of these think we could argue today in retrospect, when you look at them, were step changes for how we approach the written word. And so that's the challenge we have as an organization, is thinking about innovation, not always just about something that's completely brand new EndNote one's ever seen before, but how do we improve the processes that we're already doing today to drive better outcomes?
And then once you've got that alignment within your organization and you're thinking about innovation as that area of focus, listen, you're never going to have enough time or enough people. It doesn't matter the size of your team or your organization, the largest organizations down to the, you know, handful of people, organizations that are trying to drive innovation, will always have more ideas and benefits than they can deliver, but it is breaking them down into where do we want to focus?
And I will argue that there are four major types of innovation that you can be driving in your teams. One is strategic, which is that where are we going as an organization? How do we set a vision? How are we making things change that drive the strategy of our organization over the next 3 to 10 years and not just short term. There are some things we need to do innovation wise that are sustaining so, so often we get asked, well, if I make this change, what additional revenue are we going to drive?
The converse question to that too, though, is if I don't make this change, what revenue am I going to lose? And thinking about how to do innovation to sustain your business as well. And sometimes that gets undervalued because that's just seen as a cost of doing business when in actuality being thoughtful and doing it in a timely fashion of driving innovation in a sustaining way is as critical to keeping those businesses alive.
I think the likes of Kodak were back to my previous example with the typewriters. IBM, they're in a very different space than they were because of how they thought about innovation historically. There's also commercial innovation, which is about pricing and sales positioning and marketing and how do I take services and bundle them differently potentially in order to drive value in the market, both for the end users and our customer base, but also for the organizations we support?
And then finally, the one that tends to get focused on most heavily by most organizations initially. Is that monetizable? How do I turn this into something where I can drive incremental revenue through providing value to my customers? And so creating those incremental or disruptive changes, both can deliver value to your organizations. And I would say the important conversation to start having is with the resource that you have, whether large or small, where do you want to take the valuable resources you have and where can you point them to deliver the most value most quickly?
And with that, then as an anchoring point, sorry, one slide too many. It then becomes important to focus on. Getting the teams aligned and collaboration. And so here this is where you start partnering across your organization and start thinking about what is it we're trying to solve. And so if you look at the far left column of this, of this slide, the first thing that we tend to not do well is fall in love with the problem.
So often we start with the solution and then try to figure out what problem it solved. And so I would say that it really driving innovative cultures. And I've spent my career I've only been with Elsevier for 3 and 1/2 years. I've spent the entirety of my career either at or Dun Bradstreet and Equifax in driving product initiatives in data organizations.
And so the important part is to get feedback from your customers, figure out what their problems are, and fall in love with that problem, not how you're going to solve it. Back to that innovation piece, because that'll come in through the ideas from your teams and through your customers themselves and creating a clear process to go through those and setting metrics of what you want success to look like is extremely critical.
And I'd say that's another area from an innovation standpoint, as you're starting down these innovation paths and you're defining the problem. Ask yourself and your team and be able to answer the questions of if I solve this problem, what benefits do our customers get? And then ultimately, what benefits do our organization gets and what will good look like? And that piece is a very critical component because too often we start down the path of delivering something from an innovative standpoint, and you get into that cliché of, well, I've already started, it's not really doing great, but I can justify it to myself.
We should keep going and keep investing because we've already started down the path. But because you didn't have clear metrics of what you wanted to achieve up front, it becomes very difficult then to stop something which becomes the anchor that then prevents you from doing innovation, because you'll see at the bottom a lot of ideas end up discarded. There are lots of things that come along.
You try them, you test them with customers, you vet them, and it just doesn't bear out the way that you had initially thought when you proposed the idea. And so having those clear metrics of success. Is important in the process. So that you can get to those real diamonds as it shows at the end and having those ideas emerge and focusing the valuable resources that you have on getting to those quickly and innovating against not only the solution, but the process of how you're delivering it.
And so the last thing I will say before I turn it back over to Shirley is to say that the collaboration across your teams, getting everyone bought into what is the problem we're solving, what benefit will we have when we deliver it? And then how do we evaluate that? Success is the most critical thing you can do with your organization because that will allow you, when you sit-in those governance meetings or in those executive updates to have a conversation about here's the success we drove, here's what we thought we would deliver, here's where we're overachieving and we'd like to double down on this effort, or here's where it didn't meet our expectations.
Here's the learnings we took from that, and here's how we're now going to pivot and reprioritize our results as a result. And so that's where I'd like to pause now and Shirley and turn it back to you. Great Thanks so much, rich. Now we're going on to Monica, who is the assistant director at Creative Commons.
Thanks so much, Shirley. And Thanks so much for that presentation. And I kind of want to build a little on that. I want to talk about collaboration through openness. Richard, you had this quote. It says that you can never have enough people. And I totally agree with that. You know, a project can always use more folks. But what if open is a way to get more people to collaborate, to input?
I want to speak a little bit about the scientific process. I'm trained as a researcher. I have a PhD in ecology. I know what it's like to do science and to collaborate with other scientists. But I want to start by setting out sort of what's the status quo? And most of you are probably familiar with this.
That generally, you know, we're really not incentivized to openly share our research. If you want to look at some statistics to kind of bolster that assertion, just about 41% of papers by American authors are open, 38% I'm located in Canada, so I'm throwing in some Canadian statistics. There are open access.
And, you know, generally that's just, you know, the way that we do science, that's the status quo. But something changed in 2020. The research community responded differently to COVID 19. We actually saw a shift away from, you know, doing things a little bit more closed or enclosed to doing things a little bit more open.
You just take a quick snapshot of the number of COVID 19 papers that are open, at least in 2021, it was about 77% and there was really a huge uptake in preprints that were related to COVID 19. Things like the way that science ideally works is this idea that we build off of previous. Findings, results, innovations that the way that we continue to understand how the world works is built on learning and reading about what is known and then adding to that.
And it's this sort of like stepwise function of understanding our world. And then so there was this understanding that if we wanted to accelerate that scientific process, our understanding of the problem of COVID 19, that. We could accelerate that innovation. We could accelerate innovation around finding solutions to COVID 19 vaccines and treatments.
And even just understanding what the virus was doing. If things were more open, there was that realization. So the. The message that I'm conveying here is that, you know, like the message. An example that rich had with the typewriter, that that's the way that science sort of builds on that previous innovation. And we could do it a lot faster.
If we can have more people contributing to that problem and being part of the innovation ecosystem. Challenges like COVID 19 need collaboration or we fail. We need to be able to share information quickly so that we can innovate on what a lab in Australia is doing and build on some results that came out of Brazil.
It really realizes the potential of the scientific method when we can get information quickly and build on top of that. So what are some examples of that happening? I'm going to speak to it from my experience at Creative Commons. And just a couple of examples. One way, for example, that Creative Commons facilitates that is to make it easier to collaborate by making it easier to share.
So we've got some licenses that make it easier to share material that you create, whether it's whether it's art or data or a scientific paper. I'm part of a initiative called the open climate campaign, where we're kind of taking this idea that if we're going to innervate quickly around a really big problem like COVID 19 or climate change, that it may be helpful to have more people on that problem, more people collaborating, and that open is a way to get more collaboration.
I've also done some work with an organization called pre-review that identified another big problem in our scholarly communication workflow. We know that peer review is often stifled by the availability of reviewers, and there was then a recognition of how do we innovate around this system to bring in more reviewers.
And really what we did was build around the uptake in preprints and open review again, thinking about what if we opened up review to more people to just doing review now on preprints, could we then get more reviews into the scholarly communication system and then help? Publishers take those reviews and put them into their scholarly communication or publishing workflow.
Really think here that the message that I'm trying to convey is that open is one way in which we can innovate faster. And again, it's really a way to realize the way that we do science, which is really standing on the shoulders of giants, of the people that came before us and just doing it faster. So we can help solve some of these really big challenges that we're facing.
So with that, I'll turn it back over to Shirley. Great Thanks so much, Monica. Very interesting. Next, we have Ashley, who's the business Systems Manager at Duke University press. All right. Thank you, Shirley. So I am going to be talking about the boots on the ground viewpoint of implementing innovation.
It is here. So I'm going to start with providing a brief overview of Duke University press, our new innovative service to scholarly publishing collective and the project that made it all possible. Then I'll kind of get into how do you start? How do you attack something that's this big? How do you manage products of this projects of this size? And finally, we'll get into the weeds on a key element to keeping all new projects moving forward, especially innovative projects where you're learning a lot along the way.
So let's dive in. Duke University Press is a nonprofit academic publisher. Each year we publish about 140 new books. About 60 journals and multiple digital collections has a focus in the humanities and social sciences as well as mathematics. So we decided to launch a new innovative service, the scholarly publishing collective. The collective offers journal hosting sales and fulfillment services to nonprofit University presses and society journal publishers.
After a pilot with one publisher in 2021, the collective was set to launch in January 2022 with four additional partner publishers who manage over 130 journals. So, as you can imagine, 2021 was focused on a launch Project to get everything in place to make sure that the collective would be successful. A key role that I played in the project was to co-lead a working group of data and systems subject matter experts.
So your smes, as well as serve as a member of the overall implementation project team. All right. So now we have this new innovative project. Where do you start? How do you tackle that large effort or as I like to see it, kind of how do you take advantage of this opportunity right in front of you?
Well for any project, innovative or not, there are kind of four key categories that I see. Those are communication organization, decision making and the use of tools. These areas help your project, set the foundation, move the project forward and keep people updated on what's happening to ensure that unified vision. Core project actions like a clear objective, regular updates, working groups, a project plan, decision making and using your tools to manage the work all fall into one or more of these categories.
These areas become more important when doing new and innovative work, as not only do they provide that foundation, but also really kind of the scaffolding that your project can build around. So here are a number of project activities that fall into one or more of these categories. This is not an exhaustive list, but some key items are represented.
You can see that documentation plays a large role in a number of these activities. Also, many of those basic project management efforts are represented a project plan, set communications, a project team. Now I could talk about any of these activities at length as I really geek out on like project and task management. But I want to focus on kind of where communication, decision making, tool utilization and organization all overlap at the center of these categories.
Once you have all four in place, they allow for a key element of being successful, and that is. Pivoting there are a number of the ability to pivot is where all these kind of categories and their activities intersect. And kind of what I want to focus on for our detailed example. So let's get into it. An example, being able to pivot when new information comes to light, when testing shows something isn't going to work or when the requirements change is key to keeping new, innovative projects moving forward.
However, to pivot and have confidence in that change because man, change is scary, you need to have all four categories of communication, organization, tools and decision making in place. So that they can provide that framework. So how did this play out for us? A key milestone for the collective launch Project was determining how various journal subscription options would be set up in our order fulfillment system.
This setup would be different from what we typically use for Duke University Press journal subscriptions as we're providing a set of a select set of services for our collective partners. The data migration team, that group of subject matter expert groups that helped co-lead came up with a set of approach early in the project. However, as what happens with these things during testing of this approach, we discovered an issue or really got some new information that the shipping rates for our subscriptions were going to be included in the calculation for agent commissions.
This was not good. We now had new information which meant we needed to change our product setup plan. We needed to pivot to a plan that would be successful for the implementation. So we had a working group meeting with all of the data systems, subject matter experts at the table. We were ready to address this need head on.
We created just a table in Google Docs. With any and all options folks could come up with no matter if the option was problematic, if it was hard, if it's something we didn't know much about, we put it all down as an option. Then we went through each option identifying pros, cons and questions where there were questions. We identified someone on the team to take ownership of getting answers and bringing that information back to the group.
That could mean they needed to run more tests or maybe talk with their colleagues to discover what we needed to know. Once we had all of our questions answered, we recorded them alongside the question. Now that we had the full picture of all the options, their pros and their cons, we were able to make our final decision. And this was recorded to. With the right people in the room.
It allowed us to identify all the options, discuss their merits, record our thought process and make a decision. One reason I really wanted to highlight this example is to show that you don't need specialized tools or software to do innovative work. This is what you know, this was a low tech, easy to implement and effective approach to problem solving or problem loving.
What we did need to have in place, though, to make the pivoting possible were those four key project categories and their activities. So back looking at those four categories, here's kind of what they look like with just the activities. We use in our pivoting example. So because of the way the project was set up, we had the right people in the meeting.
So that's an organization and decision making allowed for that working group. Those people were empowered by the organization to make decisions. So that decision making piece. We had a clear objective. We were all working to achieve a communication. And we made use of existing technology to a Google Docs to pull together all ideas, document them and record our questions, answers, decisions and reasoning.
This was key to building buy in for our new direction and ensuring stakeholders that are changing course was well thought out, achievable and met the needs of the project. It also documented our process, so when three months later, someone asked why we'd set up products the way we did, we could go back to this pro-con question and answer document and say with confidence why the decision was made and everything that went into making that decision.
All right. Surely I'll pass it back over to you. Great Thank you so much, Ashley. So we have another audience poll. We heard from all of you in the beginning that some of you feel like you're at situations where you have some innovation that works well and some that doesn't. Some of you feel like you're in places where it's really hard to do innovation.
And at the time we took the poll, nobody felt like they were in a place where innovation was really, really great and exciting and happening just the way everyone might hope. So we'd like to hear from you. What sorts of obstacles are the ones that you've encountered when you've been trying to advance innovation in your own space? I'll give people a second to fill that out.
And while we're filling that out, I guess. I guess I'll. As the speakers to turn their videos back on and we'll move into a discussion time. All right, great. So a lot of people say lack of time, money, skills and resources.
Um, some people say, well, one person says too many silos. 25% of people say discomfort with innovation. Um, I'm kind of surprised that nobody felt like there was a lack of organizational support or the culture. So, um, so that's kind of interesting. Thank you for all of that. Uh, and now, um, yeah, I guess I would like to have a conversation with the speakers.
There are many obstacles to innovation and collaboration, such as the ones we've listed. I wonder if you could talk about some in your own experience that you've either seen as obstacles that were unsurmountable and maybe reasons about why or if there were obstacles that you were able to overcome how you were able to do that. We heard some specific examples in the presentations, but maybe some other examples that can give people something to envision when they're thinking about how they might apply what we're talking about here to their own situations.
Anyone want to start? What are some obstacles that have? Great I'll get that. I'll get started. So I'll talk about a very different place than where I am right now, which is Creative Commons. A lot smaller, a lot more agile. I used to work for the federal government in Canada.
That's a really big unmovable machine that has processes in place. And even if you want to make change, it has to happen really slow kind of by design, because it is a risk averse organization. Again, for reasons of that ultimately come down to sort of national security. So how do you innovate in a system like that where there's a lot of potential to take this machine and make changes to do good for canadians?
In my case, I think what I found that was really successful is to think about aligning goals. So how could I speak to a goal of mine and make sure that it aligned with the goals of the organization to talk about how those things were actually in parallel, that the thing that I wanted to innovate or change ultimately also helped the mandate of my particular department or section or subsection.
There I could then find that there was a little bit more movement in what is really not very agile organization. And I take that across, you know, the, you know, in my personal life, in my like in even in the work that I do now, which as I said, is a little bit more agile, but that can be really helpful to always think about what's the big picture of the organization that you're embedded in and how can you align the things that you want to change with the goals of the larger organization in which you are in?
Yeah and Ashley, that makes me curious about when you were pulling the different publishers together into the consortium, you know, was that that's not an easy thing to do to get five different publishers to all work together on something. Can you share a little bit about how, you know, was that the core thing you were able to agree on a goal? Or how did you how did you overcome that challenge?
Sure so part of this was kind of done at the account management level, so not quite our implementation project kind of boots on the ground. But you know, essentially there was a time pressure that was a motivator. Everyone had a date by which they wanted to launch, and this was also really a kind of focus factor for us. So we knew we had to reach agreement quickly and move quickly.
And that happened really early on. So the way we were able to kind of meet that kind of time requirement was by extending Duke University press's kind of proven and trusted business models, practices, teams, technology to all of those partners. So we were really careful from that initial conversation all the way through today to be very transparent and say, here's how we know this will work.
Will this work for you? And so far, those answers have been yes. And things like here's what we know we can do and here's what we know we cannot do. Can you sign? Are you signing on board for that? And again, so far, those answers have been yes. So the collective kind of satisfaction has been high, but we expect this will kind of become more challenging to manage as the current partners settle into the tools and the capabilities they now have and begin to imagine what they might want.
And as we also continue to grow the collective with new partners, new content that may bring greater diversity of publishing tools, goals and missions. But I think a clear piece there comes in with that communication very transparent. This is what we can do. This is what we can't do. How do you guys think about that?
And so far everyone's really been on board with it. And this conversation surely has. What Ashley has said and what Monica has said has been made me think of a few other things that we haven't necessarily talked about. And I think Monica hit on a bit of it with the change in the model, and Ashley talked about the memorialization of decisions. Those are so critical because the one key aspect we all deal with in all of this is people and change management so often goes undervalued in what the impacts are to the people.
So we can come up with the best ideas, the best solutions, having clear change management plans and having people bought into those goals, as Monica said, and Ashley illuminated so that they're all moving in the same direction is very critical because and that memorialization and there's lots of tools you can use, whether it's a Google Doc or Jira or, you know, confluence or whatever you happen to have at your disposal.
As I've said many times, history is long and memories are short. And so having that memorialized, so that even if you're not part of the conversation in the future, people are like, well, they didn't think about, well, actually they did. And they made the decision for the following reasons. So having that change management component aligned with the goals and then a memorialization of the decisions is really critical on innovation projects.
But frankly, most projects that you're delivering against because, you know, it helps you avoid some of those second guessing points down the road. And nothing can slow something down then know rehashing a decision you guys made a couple of months ago or trying to remember why you made a decision and having to spend time going back through it. That's that's always a tough part. Documentation is really key.
Yeah another thing you mentioned, Ashley, when you were talking was trust. And I know that, you know, in my experience with trying to lead cross-departmental groups of people who don't know each other and don't report into the same group and they're trying to accomplish something, it seems like having trust or building trust or not having trust can be a huge issue in whether people feel comfortable doing innovation and risking failure and trying something new and different.
And I wonder, you know, if any of you have any thoughts about that, about the central importance of trust and collaboration and how one might build trust or foster that. Think Duke University Press. There's kind of two things that play into that for us. One is having a company culture where it's OK to make mistakes. You we learn from it, we address it, and we move on. And you know, what you don't want is kind of that analysis paralysis where you're too worried to fail, that you don't try anything.
So thus you're not learning. And I think kind of the other piece to that for dup is that we because of needing to tackle projects like this on whether they're innovative or just trying to get a new vendor selected for a tool, we really started to establish a kind of project methodology, practice and prioritization that kind of happens here quarterly at the press. And so any group can kind of put forth a project.
There's a form that we're all now used to doing. It helps identify that business rationale to align to those goals that Monica and rich both talked about. It provides scope and after, you know, this process was successful, a couple of times people started to trust in it. And so, you know, one of the great things of what I get to do is I get to work with so many of the different great people that work here at the press through projects like this.
And so that kind of helps break down some of those silos. So even if the work is different, kind of that structural foundation is the same. There's going project meetings, there's going to be a project plan, there's a prioritization and buy in from the organization. And so even if what we're doing or what we're tackling is different kind of those that scaffolding is the same and it makes that a little less scary.
So while the work may be scary, kind of the process is known and vetted and trusted through the organization. Yeah, heard sort three themes that jumped out at me was first, like your reputation is good, so people are inclined to trust Duke University Press to begin with. And then you did things to prove trust you. You did things and you, you know, delivered what you thought you would said you deliver and built the trust and then also transparency.
So you gave everyone a chance to validate if they were not sure about something, it was open. And so they could like reinforce trust, which seems like a really nice sort of principle. Anybody else have thoughts on trust? Monica yeah, just building a little bit about on like taking that to sort of a, a scale here. Something we like to implement in the work that I'm doing is to do pilot projects.
So, you know, do things on a, on a bit of a smaller scale where like the risk is a little bit lower. It's just a lot more it's easier for people to buy into, OK, let's try a pilot. And then if that is successful, then you've automatically build that trust like, oh, it worked on that scale. Now I'm, I'm more confident that we could scale this up and, you know, involve more people, involve more resources.
So I found that thinking about maybe decisions that could be that people have trepidation around to start small and think about, is there a way that we could do this in a pilot, like as a pilot on a smaller scale and then scale up from there to build trust? Absolutely Yeah. Um, so rich talked about the need to quickly discard solutions that didn't work, and Ashley shared the example of the pivot that the collective did.
Um, how, how do you determine when is the time to pivot and how do you help colleagues resist an impulse to just hold on to ideas that are really vested in love with? Anybody have a plan. Like, have, like, um, you know, figure out the, the mandate was actually just at an event in Amsterdam this weekend. And we were talking about like what are great quotes?
And somebody was like, oh, you know, if you're a project manager like, you know, figure out the mandate, figure out the mandate, figure out the mandate. Like if what your objectives are, you can always use those objectives to like realign like your vision, but also to like, help resolve conflict and to figure out if you need to like, move on.
Because if you connect it to, you know, or assess whether it's aligned with like the mandate or with your objectives, and if it's not or if it's not moving you towards that, it's a good way for you to make a like yes, no decision about moving on or including a new opportunity that may come as well. Right it's so easy to say yes to things when you're building a project and you're working on a new innovation.
But if it doesn't fit within the scope of the project and the objectives that you have, you know, you have to say no to it because it can jeopardize the other pieces. So just have that be very clear. And I think Ashley talked about that a lot in sort of the management of the work. and I was going to say too that Shirley and think a little bit and I don't want to jump ahead of you on the question that Todd asked, but I think answering a little bit about getting your organization to come along on the journey.
Following Monica's and Ashley's comments, having those clear set of goal alignments and being able to walk away from something, but as importantly and spend this with a lot of time. If you remember from my talk at the beginning of being very clear on what the measures of success are, how it ties to the goals of your group and to the ties of the organization. And it takes time to build those and being everybody being able to do the elevator pitch of what they're doing.
Because at the end of the day, what you want to be able to do is say, as importantly, these are the things we're not working on because we've prioritized these five things with these five metrics to deliver. And here are the things that got deprioritized and that may be your favorite tool in the arsenal, and here's why we've deprioritized it, because then you can have that collaborative conversation that Todd's referencing to say, you know what, I you prioritize these three and mine is down at number eight.
Here's why I think that should come forward. And then you can have an open conversation about should we take number three and replace it with number eight or not amongst the people in the organization? Then everybody's bought into the things you're working on. You have a clear definition and what's coming next, but you also know what you're not working on, which so often in most of our updates, I'm guilty as anyone. We spend so much time saying, here's what we delivered, here's what we delivered, here's what we delivered, here's what we didn't do.
Didn't we do it? Because then people just assume you're not taking on their favorite project and they lose scite of the walk a mile and a person's shoes and understanding. Here's the bandwidth I had. Here's what we delivered. And let's have a conversation. And that ties to just one last thing.
If I add there, and then I'll turn it back is back to the. How do you get buy in and how do you get people to collaborate? Elsevier has spent a lot of time on something called psychological safety. And making sure the participants feel that they can actually speak up in a safe way, even if they come from a different geographic background, a different educational background. Um, because if they don't, it ends up being far off more often than not.
Unfortunately, the highest paid the hippo, the highest paid person's opinion is what we end up following because people don't feel safe in saying, you know what, I would like to challenge that idea. So how do you get more people bringing their whole selves to the table? And again, a cliche, I'm known for these, but checking your title at the door and focusing more on solving the customer problem and less about who has what title sitting in that room.
Yeah thanks, rich. Yeah and I think that the whole psychological safety thing, having been a part of going through that, gives people that space and, you know, maybe all of you on the webinar can think about ways when you're on teams to. Affirm people to check titles at the door to make sure people have space, to have ideas, good ideas, bad ideas without public shaming for the bad ones or whatever you can do to even in just one meeting to make that a safe place for creativity.
Um, so that people don't wish they hadn't spoken up, you know. Um, as we've all seen happen. Um, I love the way what you were saying, which kind tied into the question that Todd raised asking if the panelists can talk more about how you've had to educate different work units in the organization about what your project is and help them.
Other groups have the ability to help and collaborate with them, because I think so much of what we do, it's not just our own group that's doing it. We need input from various groups. So think we'd love to hear ideas from the three of you on how you may have seen that work well in the past. So the need to do that is kind of what bore out our project methodology and prioritization. Realizing that for us to do projects, it does need to be a collaborative piece and there is this educational piece of it of we all need to work together and need to know what you need to know and you need to know what I know for us to be able to make this happen.
And so coming up with a, you know, organization wide, here is how we propose projects and all the questions that need to be answered that we can all walk through together and be on the same page at the beginning. And then quarterly our directors meet to prioritize those projects and those move up and down. And that like kind of process wide prioritization is a really helpful tool. When there becomes those decisions of what are you not going to do?
And it becomes really transparent of this is a high priority project this quarter for the press. So that means that maybe this low or medium one isn't going to get as much traction. And that is just now something that it's kind of accepted because it's been in practice for a number of years here. And so kind of having that organizational wide approach as opposed to one department approaches projects this way.
And another department approaches projects that way, has really kind of helped with that transparency, with that communication and kind of people knowing what to expect by projects that are occurring. I would say just underlying everything that Ashley just said is also just having a tool that everyone is comfortable using that has all of that information and that everybody's bought into using that tool just because there's so many different options out there.
And you can have different parts of your organization using one tool and others using a different tool that it ends up becoming a bit of a barrier because people don't want to, you know, if everything, for example, is on slack, they also don't want to get an email about it or like they just want to focus on Slack. And I've just found that that actually has been quite the barrier of communication to get that information.
Is that like you tools are so great, but you have to make sure that everybody is like is using that method of communication so that you don't get like a bit of burnout but that it's also all centralized and that the information on like what projects are prioritized or what has the CEO said is going to have to go out this week to all be on in the tool that everyone uses.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely sorry, Shirley. I was just to add to what Monica and Ashley have said again, is that. I think the other piece, you know, the tools are absolutely spot on. You know, everything that's been said here is completely spot on. Because the other thing that and listen, I'm saying this as if we do this all the time and this is just the way we work and everything.
And that's not the case at all. This is best practice. But we certainly have a long way to go in making this right as well. Um, organizations tend to also fall into the category of navel gazing. And what I mean by that is we talk about what's in it for us and we don't have a common definition of the customer and put it back into the customer's benefit rather than our own benefit.
And if everybody's aligned around the customer benefit, that educational piece from an organizational standpoint happens easier. It's not easy, but it's easier. And then the other piece is just making sure that when you do those alignments that again, everyone's bought in and you know, this is the benefit for the customer. And if you've done your research, the other piece that's helpful, those audiences you're trying to align with, if you understand what pains they're trying to solve and you can talk about how what you're doing will help them solve their problems eventually, that's another way to help bridge that gap in the organization, because you can say, listen, if I do this, it's going to provide this to our customers, Mr or Ms. Salesperson that will allow you to deliver x value.
Or if we do this, we're going to attract more submissions from the research community because that data, which will then help this group do the next thing that they need to deliver. So tie it back to them. At the end of the day. Again, I've said this before, we're all people and we're motivated about our own goals. So that common set of goals is great customer centricity and then helping them be successful again, making them the hero in their own teams with your deliverables also will help you bridge that gap.
Yeah, and I love that example because I think that's a key part of collaboration. It takes a little work because then you have to put yourself in your colleagues shoes and say, how does this help them? I'm doing a project now and I want my comms colleague to promote it in some of her channels. I know she needs to produce x amount of content pieces a month, and so if I can talk to her and say, actually, I'm helping you by giving you this, could you post this?
But I'm actually helping you. She wins, I win. But I need to be aware of what her goals are and what her KPIs are to be able to have that conversation. Um, and then it can be a win-win. And I think. Todd that might be one of the ways, you know, it's not always applicable, but one of the ways that people can build collaboration with other groups.
Um, one other thing I wanted to kind of pick up on a little bit is the whole decision making thing. I think. Ashley one of the things that really struck me with your project was how you were able to get so many different people to agree on decisions. And Monica can't even imagine how you got the Canadian government to agree on making decisions. And I've seen Richard in action, so I know exactly how he does it.
But, um, what are ideas people have for being able to get a consensus on decision making, perhaps ahead of time, but then also that can just be enforced when it comes to make a decision and you don't end up having people second guess or revisit the decisions or try to step back from things. Yeah, I think having very clear governance and sometimes that is built in to the organization.
If you, you know, you work in a well-established organization where like the reporting structure is very clear and it might even be in like your articles of incorporation, it's a lot harder when you have these sort of smaller spin out projects or if you're part of a nonprofit or if you're small and new. I think it's often neglected. How important, good like good clear governance is. And I've been guilty of that, of like, not thinking about the fact that you have governments before you start any kind of projects because you only realize that until you get to a, you know, a impasse in decision making and then you're like, oh, I wish we had a document that we could refer to about how we get past this impasse.
So having, I think clearer governance again, particularly if you're even if you're in an established organization, but you know, you've got a working group having like a, you know, a terms of reference or a charter that you collectively all agree on and sign that says like, here's how we make decisions here. You know, we're going to do it by consensus and not by majority. Ideally, you know, to be more inclusive, you know, how we communicate to each other, all of those things being in a document.
So that you can refer to it when invariably, even if you work with the best humans on the planet, you will hit some kind of impasse and you will need this type of document to help you through it. See here, here, here on the alignment and the governance structure. Um, and for me, I probably differ a little from Monica on this one, is that I don't necessarily shoot for consensus.
What I shoot for is alignment that we have that vibrant discussion. We have the debate, we have the discussions, and at the end of the day, we push for a decision that everyone aligns behind. And once we align behind the decision, we don't second guess the decision, even if our choice wasn't the one that won out in the conversation.
So it is a little bit more about alignment for me anyway necessarily than consensus, because the fear and consensus sometimes is you have one vocal person who's always the naysayer and then that paralyzes your ability to move forward. So it is about having that vibrant discussion and then everybody getting, do we agree to this decision now? And and everybody aligning behind the decision and moving forward.
So that there's a clear ownership, and there's a deadline behind. Think Monica and rich summed that up beautifully. It really is just being very transparent. This is this is what's happening. This is what we can agree to. This is what we can't do. Here's the reality. Working within what your reality is makes everyone kind of look at whatever the limitations are and not kind of that emotional connection to I like this idea because I invested in it, because I spent six months working towards it.
And now it's turned out that that's not the best option compared to others. And then just documenting what you determine, that's the big thing. I kind of go back to Rich's comment like, you will forget things a month down the road, a year down the road. Why did we do this? I swear, we had this conversation and we came to an agreement.
Where is that documented? Yeah well, Thank you so much to all of you. It's been certainly for me, inspiring to hear the ideas and different perspectives that people have. I hope that's true for the people attending our panel, too. Innovation isn't hard, but it isn't easy. And I think you've given all of us some real clear tools and ideas and visions for how all of us hopefully might go to continue to advance innovative, creative, collaborative thought in the various ways that we interact in our professional lives.
Think we'll hand it over to Jason, who's going to close us up. But but again, Thank you so much, Monica. Ashley rich. I really enjoyed this time and appreciate your contributions to this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you to all the panelists. This was really informative by the session today and I really appreciate all the effort that you put into it and surely the effort you put into bringing the panel together today.
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Segment:0 .
Hi, everybody. Welcome We're giving people a chance to come into the webinar and we will start shortly.
Good morning and welcome to today's webinar innovate or fail the value of collaboration for innovation. We're pleased that you can join. I'm Jason point webinar lead of the education committee and publishing director for the international anesthesia Research Society. Before we start, I'd like to Thank SSPS 2023 education program sponsors silverchair, 67, bricks Taylor Francis F1000 and Mauricio.
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This one hour session will be recorded and made available to registrants in a few days. A quick note on SBS code of conduct and today's meeting. We're committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment, fostering open dialogue, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner.
It's now my pleasure to introduce our moderator for today's session, Shirley decker Lucky. Shirley is director of content at elsevier's preprint server. She has led innovative cross-departmental initiatives that ensure Elsevier understands and meets its customer needs. She's responsible for ensuring that the platform supports content and research needs for the dissemination of early stage research. Throughout her career, Shirley has focused on merging content and technology in innovative ways that serve the research and those who rely upon it.
Before this role, she was a publishing director at Elsevier. Now over to you, Shirley. Oh, can we go back? Great hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Whoever's got the controls, please stop, because something seems to be going crazy with the order. There we go.
Thank you. Um, so. So welcome. Innovation isn't hard, but it also isn't easy. The innovators we have on our panel have been people who've seen how collaboration can make all the difference between successful innovation and failure to effect any change. Our panelists will be sharing with us from their own experiences with building and fostering creativity and collaboration into innovative advancements.
Rich Remington from Elsevier will be talking about a high level thinking on what innovation is, what the different types of innovation are, and how to foster innovation and collaboration. Monica Granados from Creative Commons will be talking about how organizations and structure and infrastructure can foster creativity and collaboration and help to deliver innovative advancements. Ashley postlethwaite from Duke University press will be taking us through a specific example of tactical innovation using the scholarly publishing collective as an example of how a number of organizations came together, overcame obstacles, built consensus and drove innovation.
Before we start, we did want to do an audience poll to get a sense from you. Thank you for dropping in the chat where your location is. We want to get a sense from you of where you feel like your organization is now that will help us kind of couch the way we're having our conversation and discussion. So if people could just fill that out quickly.
so it looks like at this point, a lot of people are saying it's a mixture. A lot of times when you feel like your organization is innovative and other times when it's not, there's some people who think it's hard with a lot of obstacles. We don't have anybody feeling like they're in a group that's really innovative. So that's kind of interesting to.
and did we share the results? Those results have been shown. OK did people see the results that came up? Can't tell from the way the view is. Anyhow, we did. OK, great. And now I'll hand it over to rich, who's senior vice president and managing director at elsevier, running a number of businesses within that unit.
Thank Shirley and welcome, everyone. Thank you for hosting this as well. Um, I'm going to take a little bit of a different approach on this. As Shirley has highlighted, I'm going to talk about innovation as a discussion topic, and there are three areas that really I want to try and get us through in the next few minutes, and that is thinking about the difference between invention and innovation.
I'll come back to that in a minute. Why that that tends to get in the way sometimes of being innovative, thinking about different types of innovation and how they can play to your strengths or opportunities in your organization. And then finally, the importance of alignment and collaboration within your groups, your organizations, or your influence circles.
And so if we start with that first topic, I'm going to start with something that's pretty relevant to those of us in the publishing industry and use it as an example. So many times we innovation gets confused with invention and we only think that innovation is something that happens when you invent something completely new for the environment. And if you look at the typewriter, it actually was first invented in 1867 as a way to support Braille for those who were not able to read.
And that technology then moved on to become things like the first electric typewriter in 1900, the way we did the typeball and learning from, you know, the difficulties of correcting mistakes on typewritten pages all the way through the process of moving into what would eventually become the computer and the laptops. And the typewriter is now gone. For someone, let's call it may even be something you've only ever seen in a museum.
But when you think about that journey along the path, each one of those opportunities was an was an advancement of the capabilities of type written language, but it wasn't necessarily an invention in and of itself. One could argue the computer might have been a step in that direction. But if we keep in this vein of thinking of it more as a word processor than the power of the pure computer.
It really was an innovation and taking learnings from other industries and pulling them into the typewriter. So at the time it may not have felt that you were making that huge of an impact on the world. But each one of these think we could argue today in retrospect, when you look at them, were step changes for how we approach the written word. And so that's the challenge we have as an organization, is thinking about innovation, not always just about something that's completely brand new EndNote one's ever seen before, but how do we improve the processes that we're already doing today to drive better outcomes?
And then once you've got that alignment within your organization and you're thinking about innovation as that area of focus, listen, you're never going to have enough time or enough people. It doesn't matter the size of your team or your organization, the largest organizations down to the, you know, handful of people, organizations that are trying to drive innovation, will always have more ideas and benefits than they can deliver, but it is breaking them down into where do we want to focus?
And I will argue that there are four major types of innovation that you can be driving in your teams. One is strategic, which is that where are we going as an organization? How do we set a vision? How are we making things change that drive the strategy of our organization over the next 3 to 10 years and not just short term. There are some things we need to do innovation wise that are sustaining so, so often we get asked, well, if I make this change, what additional revenue are we going to drive?
The converse question to that too, though, is if I don't make this change, what revenue am I going to lose? And thinking about how to do innovation to sustain your business as well. And sometimes that gets undervalued because that's just seen as a cost of doing business when in actuality being thoughtful and doing it in a timely fashion of driving innovation in a sustaining way is as critical to keeping those businesses alive.
I think the likes of Kodak were back to my previous example with the typewriters. IBM, they're in a very different space than they were because of how they thought about innovation historically. There's also commercial innovation, which is about pricing and sales positioning and marketing and how do I take services and bundle them differently potentially in order to drive value in the market, both for the end users and our customer base, but also for the organizations we support?
And then finally, the one that tends to get focused on most heavily by most organizations initially. Is that monetizable? How do I turn this into something where I can drive incremental revenue through providing value to my customers? And so creating those incremental or disruptive changes, both can deliver value to your organizations. And I would say the important conversation to start having is with the resource that you have, whether large or small, where do you want to take the valuable resources you have and where can you point them to deliver the most value most quickly?
And with that, then as an anchoring point, sorry, one slide too many. It then becomes important to focus on. Getting the teams aligned and collaboration. And so here this is where you start partnering across your organization and start thinking about what is it we're trying to solve. And so if you look at the far left column of this, of this slide, the first thing that we tend to not do well is fall in love with the problem.
So often we start with the solution and then try to figure out what problem it solved. And so I would say that it really driving innovative cultures. And I've spent my career I've only been with Elsevier for 3 and 1/2 years. I've spent the entirety of my career either at or Dun Bradstreet and Equifax in driving product initiatives in data organizations.
And so the important part is to get feedback from your customers, figure out what their problems are, and fall in love with that problem, not how you're going to solve it. Back to that innovation piece, because that'll come in through the ideas from your teams and through your customers themselves and creating a clear process to go through those and setting metrics of what you want success to look like is extremely critical.
And I'd say that's another area from an innovation standpoint, as you're starting down these innovation paths and you're defining the problem. Ask yourself and your team and be able to answer the questions of if I solve this problem, what benefits do our customers get? And then ultimately, what benefits do our organization gets and what will good look like? And that piece is a very critical component because too often we start down the path of delivering something from an innovative standpoint, and you get into that cliché of, well, I've already started, it's not really doing great, but I can justify it to myself.
We should keep going and keep investing because we've already started down the path. But because you didn't have clear metrics of what you wanted to achieve up front, it becomes very difficult then to stop something which becomes the anchor that then prevents you from doing innovation, because you'll see at the bottom a lot of ideas end up discarded. There are lots of things that come along.
You try them, you test them with customers, you vet them, and it just doesn't bear out the way that you had initially thought when you proposed the idea. And so having those clear metrics of success. Is important in the process. So that you can get to those real diamonds as it shows at the end and having those ideas emerge and focusing the valuable resources that you have on getting to those quickly and innovating against not only the solution, but the process of how you're delivering it.
And so the last thing I will say before I turn it back over to Shirley is to say that the collaboration across your teams, getting everyone bought into what is the problem we're solving, what benefit will we have when we deliver it? And then how do we evaluate that? Success is the most critical thing you can do with your organization because that will allow you, when you sit-in those governance meetings or in those executive updates to have a conversation about here's the success we drove, here's what we thought we would deliver, here's where we're overachieving and we'd like to double down on this effort, or here's where it didn't meet our expectations.
Here's the learnings we took from that, and here's how we're now going to pivot and reprioritize our results as a result. And so that's where I'd like to pause now and Shirley and turn it back to you. Great Thanks so much, rich. Now we're going on to Monica, who is the assistant director at Creative Commons.
Thanks so much, Shirley. And Thanks so much for that presentation. And I kind of want to build a little on that. I want to talk about collaboration through openness. Richard, you had this quote. It says that you can never have enough people. And I totally agree with that. You know, a project can always use more folks. But what if open is a way to get more people to collaborate, to input?
I want to speak a little bit about the scientific process. I'm trained as a researcher. I have a PhD in ecology. I know what it's like to do science and to collaborate with other scientists. But I want to start by setting out sort of what's the status quo? And most of you are probably familiar with this.
That generally, you know, we're really not incentivized to openly share our research. If you want to look at some statistics to kind of bolster that assertion, just about 41% of papers by American authors are open, 38% I'm located in Canada, so I'm throwing in some Canadian statistics. There are open access.
And, you know, generally that's just, you know, the way that we do science, that's the status quo. But something changed in 2020. The research community responded differently to COVID 19. We actually saw a shift away from, you know, doing things a little bit more closed or enclosed to doing things a little bit more open.
You just take a quick snapshot of the number of COVID 19 papers that are open, at least in 2021, it was about 77% and there was really a huge uptake in preprints that were related to COVID 19. Things like the way that science ideally works is this idea that we build off of previous. Findings, results, innovations that the way that we continue to understand how the world works is built on learning and reading about what is known and then adding to that.
And it's this sort of like stepwise function of understanding our world. And then so there was this understanding that if we wanted to accelerate that scientific process, our understanding of the problem of COVID 19, that. We could accelerate that innovation. We could accelerate innovation around finding solutions to COVID 19 vaccines and treatments.
And even just understanding what the virus was doing. If things were more open, there was that realization. So the. The message that I'm conveying here is that, you know, like the message. An example that rich had with the typewriter, that that's the way that science sort of builds on that previous innovation. And we could do it a lot faster.
If we can have more people contributing to that problem and being part of the innovation ecosystem. Challenges like COVID 19 need collaboration or we fail. We need to be able to share information quickly so that we can innovate on what a lab in Australia is doing and build on some results that came out of Brazil.
It really realizes the potential of the scientific method when we can get information quickly and build on top of that. So what are some examples of that happening? I'm going to speak to it from my experience at Creative Commons. And just a couple of examples. One way, for example, that Creative Commons facilitates that is to make it easier to collaborate by making it easier to share.
So we've got some licenses that make it easier to share material that you create, whether it's whether it's art or data or a scientific paper. I'm part of a initiative called the open climate campaign, where we're kind of taking this idea that if we're going to innervate quickly around a really big problem like COVID 19 or climate change, that it may be helpful to have more people on that problem, more people collaborating, and that open is a way to get more collaboration.
I've also done some work with an organization called pre-review that identified another big problem in our scholarly communication workflow. We know that peer review is often stifled by the availability of reviewers, and there was then a recognition of how do we innovate around this system to bring in more reviewers.
And really what we did was build around the uptake in preprints and open review again, thinking about what if we opened up review to more people to just doing review now on preprints, could we then get more reviews into the scholarly communication system and then help? Publishers take those reviews and put them into their scholarly communication or publishing workflow.
Really think here that the message that I'm trying to convey is that open is one way in which we can innovate faster. And again, it's really a way to realize the way that we do science, which is really standing on the shoulders of giants, of the people that came before us and just doing it faster. So we can help solve some of these really big challenges that we're facing.
So with that, I'll turn it back over to Shirley. Great Thanks so much, Monica. Very interesting. Next, we have Ashley, who's the business Systems Manager at Duke University press. All right. Thank you, Shirley. So I am going to be talking about the boots on the ground viewpoint of implementing innovation.
It is here. So I'm going to start with providing a brief overview of Duke University press, our new innovative service to scholarly publishing collective and the project that made it all possible. Then I'll kind of get into how do you start? How do you attack something that's this big? How do you manage products of this projects of this size? And finally, we'll get into the weeds on a key element to keeping all new projects moving forward, especially innovative projects where you're learning a lot along the way.
So let's dive in. Duke University Press is a nonprofit academic publisher. Each year we publish about 140 new books. About 60 journals and multiple digital collections has a focus in the humanities and social sciences as well as mathematics. So we decided to launch a new innovative service, the scholarly publishing collective. The collective offers journal hosting sales and fulfillment services to nonprofit University presses and society journal publishers.
After a pilot with one publisher in 2021, the collective was set to launch in January 2022 with four additional partner publishers who manage over 130 journals. So, as you can imagine, 2021 was focused on a launch Project to get everything in place to make sure that the collective would be successful. A key role that I played in the project was to co-lead a working group of data and systems subject matter experts.
So your smes, as well as serve as a member of the overall implementation project team. All right. So now we have this new innovative project. Where do you start? How do you tackle that large effort or as I like to see it, kind of how do you take advantage of this opportunity right in front of you?
Well for any project, innovative or not, there are kind of four key categories that I see. Those are communication organization, decision making and the use of tools. These areas help your project, set the foundation, move the project forward and keep people updated on what's happening to ensure that unified vision. Core project actions like a clear objective, regular updates, working groups, a project plan, decision making and using your tools to manage the work all fall into one or more of these categories.
These areas become more important when doing new and innovative work, as not only do they provide that foundation, but also really kind of the scaffolding that your project can build around. So here are a number of project activities that fall into one or more of these categories. This is not an exhaustive list, but some key items are represented.
You can see that documentation plays a large role in a number of these activities. Also, many of those basic project management efforts are represented a project plan, set communications, a project team. Now I could talk about any of these activities at length as I really geek out on like project and task management. But I want to focus on kind of where communication, decision making, tool utilization and organization all overlap at the center of these categories.
Once you have all four in place, they allow for a key element of being successful, and that is. Pivoting there are a number of the ability to pivot is where all these kind of categories and their activities intersect. And kind of what I want to focus on for our detailed example. So let's get into it. An example, being able to pivot when new information comes to light, when testing shows something isn't going to work or when the requirements change is key to keeping new, innovative projects moving forward.
However, to pivot and have confidence in that change because man, change is scary, you need to have all four categories of communication, organization, tools and decision making in place. So that they can provide that framework. So how did this play out for us? A key milestone for the collective launch Project was determining how various journal subscription options would be set up in our order fulfillment system.
This setup would be different from what we typically use for Duke University Press journal subscriptions as we're providing a set of a select set of services for our collective partners. The data migration team, that group of subject matter expert groups that helped co-lead came up with a set of approach early in the project. However, as what happens with these things during testing of this approach, we discovered an issue or really got some new information that the shipping rates for our subscriptions were going to be included in the calculation for agent commissions.
This was not good. We now had new information which meant we needed to change our product setup plan. We needed to pivot to a plan that would be successful for the implementation. So we had a working group meeting with all of the data systems, subject matter experts at the table. We were ready to address this need head on.
We created just a table in Google Docs. With any and all options folks could come up with no matter if the option was problematic, if it was hard, if it's something we didn't know much about, we put it all down as an option. Then we went through each option identifying pros, cons and questions where there were questions. We identified someone on the team to take ownership of getting answers and bringing that information back to the group.
That could mean they needed to run more tests or maybe talk with their colleagues to discover what we needed to know. Once we had all of our questions answered, we recorded them alongside the question. Now that we had the full picture of all the options, their pros and their cons, we were able to make our final decision. And this was recorded to. With the right people in the room.
It allowed us to identify all the options, discuss their merits, record our thought process and make a decision. One reason I really wanted to highlight this example is to show that you don't need specialized tools or software to do innovative work. This is what you know, this was a low tech, easy to implement and effective approach to problem solving or problem loving.
What we did need to have in place, though, to make the pivoting possible were those four key project categories and their activities. So back looking at those four categories, here's kind of what they look like with just the activities. We use in our pivoting example. So because of the way the project was set up, we had the right people in the meeting.
So that's an organization and decision making allowed for that working group. Those people were empowered by the organization to make decisions. So that decision making piece. We had a clear objective. We were all working to achieve a communication. And we made use of existing technology to a Google Docs to pull together all ideas, document them and record our questions, answers, decisions and reasoning.
This was key to building buy in for our new direction and ensuring stakeholders that are changing course was well thought out, achievable and met the needs of the project. It also documented our process, so when three months later, someone asked why we'd set up products the way we did, we could go back to this pro-con question and answer document and say with confidence why the decision was made and everything that went into making that decision.
All right. Surely I'll pass it back over to you. Great Thank you so much, Ashley. So we have another audience poll. We heard from all of you in the beginning that some of you feel like you're at situations where you have some innovation that works well and some that doesn't. Some of you feel like you're in places where it's really hard to do innovation.
And at the time we took the poll, nobody felt like they were in a place where innovation was really, really great and exciting and happening just the way everyone might hope. So we'd like to hear from you. What sorts of obstacles are the ones that you've encountered when you've been trying to advance innovation in your own space? I'll give people a second to fill that out.
And while we're filling that out, I guess. I guess I'll. As the speakers to turn their videos back on and we'll move into a discussion time. All right, great. So a lot of people say lack of time, money, skills and resources.
Um, some people say, well, one person says too many silos. 25% of people say discomfort with innovation. Um, I'm kind of surprised that nobody felt like there was a lack of organizational support or the culture. So, um, so that's kind of interesting. Thank you for all of that. Uh, and now, um, yeah, I guess I would like to have a conversation with the speakers.
There are many obstacles to innovation and collaboration, such as the ones we've listed. I wonder if you could talk about some in your own experience that you've either seen as obstacles that were unsurmountable and maybe reasons about why or if there were obstacles that you were able to overcome how you were able to do that. We heard some specific examples in the presentations, but maybe some other examples that can give people something to envision when they're thinking about how they might apply what we're talking about here to their own situations.
Anyone want to start? What are some obstacles that have? Great I'll get that. I'll get started. So I'll talk about a very different place than where I am right now, which is Creative Commons. A lot smaller, a lot more agile. I used to work for the federal government in Canada.
That's a really big unmovable machine that has processes in place. And even if you want to make change, it has to happen really slow kind of by design, because it is a risk averse organization. Again, for reasons of that ultimately come down to sort of national security. So how do you innovate in a system like that where there's a lot of potential to take this machine and make changes to do good for canadians?
In my case, I think what I found that was really successful is to think about aligning goals. So how could I speak to a goal of mine and make sure that it aligned with the goals of the organization to talk about how those things were actually in parallel, that the thing that I wanted to innovate or change ultimately also helped the mandate of my particular department or section or subsection.
There I could then find that there was a little bit more movement in what is really not very agile organization. And I take that across, you know, the, you know, in my personal life, in my like in even in the work that I do now, which as I said, is a little bit more agile, but that can be really helpful to always think about what's the big picture of the organization that you're embedded in and how can you align the things that you want to change with the goals of the larger organization in which you are in?
Yeah and Ashley, that makes me curious about when you were pulling the different publishers together into the consortium, you know, was that that's not an easy thing to do to get five different publishers to all work together on something. Can you share a little bit about how, you know, was that the core thing you were able to agree on a goal? Or how did you how did you overcome that challenge?
Sure so part of this was kind of done at the account management level, so not quite our implementation project kind of boots on the ground. But you know, essentially there was a time pressure that was a motivator. Everyone had a date by which they wanted to launch, and this was also really a kind of focus factor for us. So we knew we had to reach agreement quickly and move quickly.
And that happened really early on. So the way we were able to kind of meet that kind of time requirement was by extending Duke University press's kind of proven and trusted business models, practices, teams, technology to all of those partners. So we were really careful from that initial conversation all the way through today to be very transparent and say, here's how we know this will work.
Will this work for you? And so far, those answers have been yes. And things like here's what we know we can do and here's what we know we cannot do. Can you sign? Are you signing on board for that? And again, so far, those answers have been yes. So the collective kind of satisfaction has been high, but we expect this will kind of become more challenging to manage as the current partners settle into the tools and the capabilities they now have and begin to imagine what they might want.
And as we also continue to grow the collective with new partners, new content that may bring greater diversity of publishing tools, goals and missions. But I think a clear piece there comes in with that communication very transparent. This is what we can do. This is what we can't do. How do you guys think about that?
And so far everyone's really been on board with it. And this conversation surely has. What Ashley has said and what Monica has said has been made me think of a few other things that we haven't necessarily talked about. And I think Monica hit on a bit of it with the change in the model, and Ashley talked about the memorialization of decisions. Those are so critical because the one key aspect we all deal with in all of this is people and change management so often goes undervalued in what the impacts are to the people.
So we can come up with the best ideas, the best solutions, having clear change management plans and having people bought into those goals, as Monica said, and Ashley illuminated so that they're all moving in the same direction is very critical because and that memorialization and there's lots of tools you can use, whether it's a Google Doc or Jira or, you know, confluence or whatever you happen to have at your disposal.
As I've said many times, history is long and memories are short. And so having that memorialized, so that even if you're not part of the conversation in the future, people are like, well, they didn't think about, well, actually they did. And they made the decision for the following reasons. So having that change management component aligned with the goals and then a memorialization of the decisions is really critical on innovation projects.
But frankly, most projects that you're delivering against because, you know, it helps you avoid some of those second guessing points down the road. And nothing can slow something down then know rehashing a decision you guys made a couple of months ago or trying to remember why you made a decision and having to spend time going back through it. That's that's always a tough part. Documentation is really key.
Yeah another thing you mentioned, Ashley, when you were talking was trust. And I know that, you know, in my experience with trying to lead cross-departmental groups of people who don't know each other and don't report into the same group and they're trying to accomplish something, it seems like having trust or building trust or not having trust can be a huge issue in whether people feel comfortable doing innovation and risking failure and trying something new and different.
And I wonder, you know, if any of you have any thoughts about that, about the central importance of trust and collaboration and how one might build trust or foster that. Think Duke University Press. There's kind of two things that play into that for us. One is having a company culture where it's OK to make mistakes. You we learn from it, we address it, and we move on. And you know, what you don't want is kind of that analysis paralysis where you're too worried to fail, that you don't try anything.
So thus you're not learning. And I think kind of the other piece to that for dup is that we because of needing to tackle projects like this on whether they're innovative or just trying to get a new vendor selected for a tool, we really started to establish a kind of project methodology, practice and prioritization that kind of happens here quarterly at the press. And so any group can kind of put forth a project.
There's a form that we're all now used to doing. It helps identify that business rationale to align to those goals that Monica and rich both talked about. It provides scope and after, you know, this process was successful, a couple of times people started to trust in it. And so, you know, one of the great things of what I get to do is I get to work with so many of the different great people that work here at the press through projects like this.
And so that kind of helps break down some of those silos. So even if the work is different, kind of that structural foundation is the same. There's going project meetings, there's going to be a project plan, there's a prioritization and buy in from the organization. And so even if what we're doing or what we're tackling is different kind of those that scaffolding is the same and it makes that a little less scary.
So while the work may be scary, kind of the process is known and vetted and trusted through the organization. Yeah, heard sort three themes that jumped out at me was first, like your reputation is good, so people are inclined to trust Duke University Press to begin with. And then you did things to prove trust you. You did things and you, you know, delivered what you thought you would said you deliver and built the trust and then also transparency.
So you gave everyone a chance to validate if they were not sure about something, it was open. And so they could like reinforce trust, which seems like a really nice sort of principle. Anybody else have thoughts on trust? Monica yeah, just building a little bit about on like taking that to sort of a, a scale here. Something we like to implement in the work that I'm doing is to do pilot projects.
So, you know, do things on a, on a bit of a smaller scale where like the risk is a little bit lower. It's just a lot more it's easier for people to buy into, OK, let's try a pilot. And then if that is successful, then you've automatically build that trust like, oh, it worked on that scale. Now I'm, I'm more confident that we could scale this up and, you know, involve more people, involve more resources.
So I found that thinking about maybe decisions that could be that people have trepidation around to start small and think about, is there a way that we could do this in a pilot, like as a pilot on a smaller scale and then scale up from there to build trust? Absolutely Yeah. Um, so rich talked about the need to quickly discard solutions that didn't work, and Ashley shared the example of the pivot that the collective did.
Um, how, how do you determine when is the time to pivot and how do you help colleagues resist an impulse to just hold on to ideas that are really vested in love with? Anybody have a plan. Like, have, like, um, you know, figure out the, the mandate was actually just at an event in Amsterdam this weekend. And we were talking about like what are great quotes?
And somebody was like, oh, you know, if you're a project manager like, you know, figure out the mandate, figure out the mandate, figure out the mandate. Like if what your objectives are, you can always use those objectives to like realign like your vision, but also to like, help resolve conflict and to figure out if you need to like, move on.
Because if you connect it to, you know, or assess whether it's aligned with like the mandate or with your objectives, and if it's not or if it's not moving you towards that, it's a good way for you to make a like yes, no decision about moving on or including a new opportunity that may come as well. Right it's so easy to say yes to things when you're building a project and you're working on a new innovation.
But if it doesn't fit within the scope of the project and the objectives that you have, you know, you have to say no to it because it can jeopardize the other pieces. So just have that be very clear. And I think Ashley talked about that a lot in sort of the management of the work. and I was going to say too that Shirley and think a little bit and I don't want to jump ahead of you on the question that Todd asked, but I think answering a little bit about getting your organization to come along on the journey.
Following Monica's and Ashley's comments, having those clear set of goal alignments and being able to walk away from something, but as importantly and spend this with a lot of time. If you remember from my talk at the beginning of being very clear on what the measures of success are, how it ties to the goals of your group and to the ties of the organization. And it takes time to build those and being everybody being able to do the elevator pitch of what they're doing.
Because at the end of the day, what you want to be able to do is say, as importantly, these are the things we're not working on because we've prioritized these five things with these five metrics to deliver. And here are the things that got deprioritized and that may be your favorite tool in the arsenal, and here's why we've deprioritized it, because then you can have that collaborative conversation that Todd's referencing to say, you know what, I you prioritize these three and mine is down at number eight.
Here's why I think that should come forward. And then you can have an open conversation about should we take number three and replace it with number eight or not amongst the people in the organization? Then everybody's bought into the things you're working on. You have a clear definition and what's coming next, but you also know what you're not working on, which so often in most of our updates, I'm guilty as anyone. We spend so much time saying, here's what we delivered, here's what we delivered, here's what we delivered, here's what we didn't do.
Didn't we do it? Because then people just assume you're not taking on their favorite project and they lose scite of the walk a mile and a person's shoes and understanding. Here's the bandwidth I had. Here's what we delivered. And let's have a conversation. And that ties to just one last thing.
If I add there, and then I'll turn it back is back to the. How do you get buy in and how do you get people to collaborate? Elsevier has spent a lot of time on something called psychological safety. And making sure the participants feel that they can actually speak up in a safe way, even if they come from a different geographic background, a different educational background. Um, because if they don't, it ends up being far off more often than not.
Unfortunately, the highest paid the hippo, the highest paid person's opinion is what we end up following because people don't feel safe in saying, you know what, I would like to challenge that idea. So how do you get more people bringing their whole selves to the table? And again, a cliche, I'm known for these, but checking your title at the door and focusing more on solving the customer problem and less about who has what title sitting in that room.
Yeah thanks, rich. Yeah and I think that the whole psychological safety thing, having been a part of going through that, gives people that space and, you know, maybe all of you on the webinar can think about ways when you're on teams to. Affirm people to check titles at the door to make sure people have space, to have ideas, good ideas, bad ideas without public shaming for the bad ones or whatever you can do to even in just one meeting to make that a safe place for creativity.
Um, so that people don't wish they hadn't spoken up, you know. Um, as we've all seen happen. Um, I love the way what you were saying, which kind tied into the question that Todd raised asking if the panelists can talk more about how you've had to educate different work units in the organization about what your project is and help them.
Other groups have the ability to help and collaborate with them, because I think so much of what we do, it's not just our own group that's doing it. We need input from various groups. So think we'd love to hear ideas from the three of you on how you may have seen that work well in the past. So the need to do that is kind of what bore out our project methodology and prioritization. Realizing that for us to do projects, it does need to be a collaborative piece and there is this educational piece of it of we all need to work together and need to know what you need to know and you need to know what I know for us to be able to make this happen.
And so coming up with a, you know, organization wide, here is how we propose projects and all the questions that need to be answered that we can all walk through together and be on the same page at the beginning. And then quarterly our directors meet to prioritize those projects and those move up and down. And that like kind of process wide prioritization is a really helpful tool. When there becomes those decisions of what are you not going to do?
And it becomes really transparent of this is a high priority project this quarter for the press. So that means that maybe this low or medium one isn't going to get as much traction. And that is just now something that it's kind of accepted because it's been in practice for a number of years here. And so kind of having that organizational wide approach as opposed to one department approaches projects this way.
And another department approaches projects that way, has really kind of helped with that transparency, with that communication and kind of people knowing what to expect by projects that are occurring. I would say just underlying everything that Ashley just said is also just having a tool that everyone is comfortable using that has all of that information and that everybody's bought into using that tool just because there's so many different options out there.
And you can have different parts of your organization using one tool and others using a different tool that it ends up becoming a bit of a barrier because people don't want to, you know, if everything, for example, is on slack, they also don't want to get an email about it or like they just want to focus on Slack. And I've just found that that actually has been quite the barrier of communication to get that information.
Is that like you tools are so great, but you have to make sure that everybody is like is using that method of communication so that you don't get like a bit of burnout but that it's also all centralized and that the information on like what projects are prioritized or what has the CEO said is going to have to go out this week to all be on in the tool that everyone uses.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely sorry, Shirley. I was just to add to what Monica and Ashley have said again, is that. I think the other piece, you know, the tools are absolutely spot on. You know, everything that's been said here is completely spot on. Because the other thing that and listen, I'm saying this as if we do this all the time and this is just the way we work and everything.
And that's not the case at all. This is best practice. But we certainly have a long way to go in making this right as well. Um, organizations tend to also fall into the category of navel gazing. And what I mean by that is we talk about what's in it for us and we don't have a common definition of the customer and put it back into the customer's benefit rather than our own benefit.
And if everybody's aligned around the customer benefit, that educational piece from an organizational standpoint happens easier. It's not easy, but it's easier. And then the other piece is just making sure that when you do those alignments that again, everyone's bought in and you know, this is the benefit for the customer. And if you've done your research, the other piece that's helpful, those audiences you're trying to align with, if you understand what pains they're trying to solve and you can talk about how what you're doing will help them solve their problems eventually, that's another way to help bridge that gap in the organization, because you can say, listen, if I do this, it's going to provide this to our customers, Mr or Ms. Salesperson that will allow you to deliver x value.
Or if we do this, we're going to attract more submissions from the research community because that data, which will then help this group do the next thing that they need to deliver. So tie it back to them. At the end of the day. Again, I've said this before, we're all people and we're motivated about our own goals. So that common set of goals is great customer centricity and then helping them be successful again, making them the hero in their own teams with your deliverables also will help you bridge that gap.
Yeah, and I love that example because I think that's a key part of collaboration. It takes a little work because then you have to put yourself in your colleagues shoes and say, how does this help them? I'm doing a project now and I want my comms colleague to promote it in some of her channels. I know she needs to produce x amount of content pieces a month, and so if I can talk to her and say, actually, I'm helping you by giving you this, could you post this?
But I'm actually helping you. She wins, I win. But I need to be aware of what her goals are and what her KPIs are to be able to have that conversation. Um, and then it can be a win-win. And I think. Todd that might be one of the ways, you know, it's not always applicable, but one of the ways that people can build collaboration with other groups.
Um, one other thing I wanted to kind of pick up on a little bit is the whole decision making thing. I think. Ashley one of the things that really struck me with your project was how you were able to get so many different people to agree on decisions. And Monica can't even imagine how you got the Canadian government to agree on making decisions. And I've seen Richard in action, so I know exactly how he does it.
But, um, what are ideas people have for being able to get a consensus on decision making, perhaps ahead of time, but then also that can just be enforced when it comes to make a decision and you don't end up having people second guess or revisit the decisions or try to step back from things. Yeah, I think having very clear governance and sometimes that is built in to the organization.
If you, you know, you work in a well-established organization where like the reporting structure is very clear and it might even be in like your articles of incorporation, it's a lot harder when you have these sort of smaller spin out projects or if you're part of a nonprofit or if you're small and new. I think it's often neglected. How important, good like good clear governance is. And I've been guilty of that, of like, not thinking about the fact that you have governments before you start any kind of projects because you only realize that until you get to a, you know, a impasse in decision making and then you're like, oh, I wish we had a document that we could refer to about how we get past this impasse.
So having, I think clearer governance again, particularly if you're even if you're in an established organization, but you know, you've got a working group having like a, you know, a terms of reference or a charter that you collectively all agree on and sign that says like, here's how we make decisions here. You know, we're going to do it by consensus and not by majority. Ideally, you know, to be more inclusive, you know, how we communicate to each other, all of those things being in a document.
So that you can refer to it when invariably, even if you work with the best humans on the planet, you will hit some kind of impasse and you will need this type of document to help you through it. See here, here, here on the alignment and the governance structure. Um, and for me, I probably differ a little from Monica on this one, is that I don't necessarily shoot for consensus.
What I shoot for is alignment that we have that vibrant discussion. We have the debate, we have the discussions, and at the end of the day, we push for a decision that everyone aligns behind. And once we align behind the decision, we don't second guess the decision, even if our choice wasn't the one that won out in the conversation.
So it is a little bit more about alignment for me anyway necessarily than consensus, because the fear and consensus sometimes is you have one vocal person who's always the naysayer and then that paralyzes your ability to move forward. So it is about having that vibrant discussion and then everybody getting, do we agree to this decision now? And and everybody aligning behind the decision and moving forward.
So that there's a clear ownership, and there's a deadline behind. Think Monica and rich summed that up beautifully. It really is just being very transparent. This is this is what's happening. This is what we can agree to. This is what we can't do. Here's the reality. Working within what your reality is makes everyone kind of look at whatever the limitations are and not kind of that emotional connection to I like this idea because I invested in it, because I spent six months working towards it.
And now it's turned out that that's not the best option compared to others. And then just documenting what you determine, that's the big thing. I kind of go back to Rich's comment like, you will forget things a month down the road, a year down the road. Why did we do this? I swear, we had this conversation and we came to an agreement.
Where is that documented? Yeah well, Thank you so much to all of you. It's been certainly for me, inspiring to hear the ideas and different perspectives that people have. I hope that's true for the people attending our panel, too. Innovation isn't hard, but it isn't easy. And I think you've given all of us some real clear tools and ideas and visions for how all of us hopefully might go to continue to advance innovative, creative, collaborative thought in the various ways that we interact in our professional lives.
Think we'll hand it over to Jason, who's going to close us up. But but again, Thank you so much, Monica. Ashley rich. I really enjoyed this time and appreciate your contributions to this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you to all the panelists. This was really informative by the session today and I really appreciate all the effort that you put into it and surely the effort you put into bringing the panel together today.
Thank you to our attendees for participating as well. And again, Thanks to our 2023 education program. Sponsors silverchair, 67, bricks Taylor Francis F1000 and Mauricio. We're very grateful for their support. Attendees you will receive an evaluation form via email within 24 hours. A link to the evaluation form should also be posted in the chat.
We encourage you to provide feedback as it helps guide our future webinar programs. Please also visit the website for information on upcoming programs, including upcoming webinars and next year's annual meeting submission. This discussion was recorded and all registrants will receive a link when posted on the website. You must be logged in to view the recording. This concludes today's session.
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