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PS24 Welcome & Opening Keynote
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PS24 Welcome & Opening Keynote
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
WILL SCHWEITZER: Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for coming. It's actually really nice to see such a filled room. And if you're here yesterday, we started kind of our client meeting talking about a few of our core values. And there are some values that I'd like us to try to embody in the discussion today. We have five. There's three that I think apply today.
WILL SCHWEITZER: It is about assuming positive intent. We have speakers that are going to challenge us, that are going to try to make us think of the future. And we'll talk about some controversial things. In fact, I'm going to try to set the stage this morning and some of the things I say may make you mad. Not my personally held position may not Silverchair's, but my job is to provide an amuse bouche this morning.
WILL SCHWEITZER: My next ask is that you contribute generously. Everyone in this room, I think, is here because we believe technology can help fulfill the promises of science and scholarship. This is a meeting that is dedicated to the intersection of publishing technology of our businesses and thinking about our stakeholders and how we all can transform what we do. And last but not least, the Silverchairians who are here today, I'm really proud of them.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm proud of Stephanie and Sam and all the folks who helped pull this meeting together. But we're here to help. So if you need anything throughout the day, please see any one of us. We'll do our best to help you with what you need. So on to some of those controversial topics. Let's see if I can advance slides here. What I'm going to do is try to preview some of the sessions today, put some ideas in your mind so hopefully you can contribute.
WILL SCHWEITZER: You can kind of break out of all of the worries of things that you left back at the office today. And here's my very first one. Our fears are local. They're within the organization. And this isn't to dismiss some of the tactical challenges we have or the upcoming budget cycle or our strategic planning, but we operate actually in a very resilient, very stable industry.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And we can look at that either from the year-over-year growth of the [INAUDIBLE] industry. This is data from Outsell. Or we can look at it at the dollars that flow into our industry. And that's global R&D spend from our colleagues at AAAS just down the road. So in this context of the broader industry being stable, I think we can give ourselves some permission to think expansively, to experiment, to innovate, to put things like frivolous class action lawsuits just behind us for a day.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Sorry. The clicker is not working and I am under caffeinated, which is a dangerous thing. Another thing, we'll talk later today about a possible future without platforms, if publishers are disintermediated. And I'm here to say that there is a big difference between disintermediation and syndication.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thank you. Incredibly soft spoken guy and I need all the help I can get this morning. But there was a big difference between disintermediation and syndication and that it can be risky for us to try to figure out new ways to license our content that is very different than, say, someone like Google, who we've given permission to crawl our sites and somehow they've interpreted that permission to take our content, pull it into snippets and serve it as part of their general search experience.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Where if you were a news publisher or you were Bloomberg, you noticed it resulted in a 25% to 30% drop in your traffic. I don't think that's a world any of us want when we want all the downloads, all the eyeballs we can possibly get. Scholarly publishing is still investable. And these are kind of transactions or deals or companies that raised funds in the past 14 to 16 months.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And it's really interesting to see that dollars are flowing from the thousands to the millions. And we see a few things. The dollars are flowing into multimedia and particularly multimedia for education. The dollars are flowing to workflow solutions. Of course, it's flowing to research integrity. And we see a lot of work around AI and applying AI to people and knowledge and grant discovery.
WILL SCHWEITZER: On the right hand side, we've continued to see consolidation in our industry and these are acquisitions for scale. There are capability and product additions here. There are acquisitions here to help publishers expand their addressable market and to differentiate their revenue strategies. And all of these are about strategic decisions to advance businesses.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So we have a great panel later today with different types of investors that will talk about why their institutions are making these bets in startups, in mergers of equals and all types of things. I think is a really important note, maybe, maybe-- sorry if someone from Springer Nature is here and I'm about to say this-- maybe the third IPO will remind us that there's inherent value in our businesses.
WILL SCHWEITZER: The quality content we produce, the underlying subscription model affords businesses a lot of revenue, visibility, a lot of security. And that's atypical. We're not cannabis. We're not cosmetics. We're not market that are under political turmoil like oil or energy stocks. And it may hopefully remind us at a very, very large scale that what we do is valued by the World and still has economic contribution to make.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We'll have a couple talks on AI today. Our closing keynote from Reid Blackmon. I'm really excited about that. We have a session on the AI trough of disillusionment, kind of what several of us have learned in our experiments in the past year. And I just want to remind everyone that the trough is a social construct. It is the hype cycle from Gartner.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And we all know scholarly publishing doesn't do hype well. But it is actually a reflection of our collective beliefs in the technology and how it is going to be applied. And our perception of technology is deeply skewed by what we read in the news, what we may have experienced the first time we plugged kind of a query into ChatGPT 3.5. And it is hard, I think, particularly in this industry, to recognize how fast these technologies are changing.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So if any of you have played with the latest OpenAI models, you know it is far and above very early ones or even where the technology was six months ago. And we of course know about all the failings of LLMs that we see in the news. Sometimes that's exacerbated by fake headlines and misinformation. But if we just step back and we look at the market-- and this chart here is the magnificent seven stocks.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I've also added in AMD, looking at the relative change in their stock compared to the S&P 500. So it was very clear. You can see a trough here. You can also see where the Federal Reserve kind of started lowering their interest rates. But there's smart money out there in the world that thinks this technology still has room to grow.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I think we'll hear from very smart people today that have been experimenting and launching products and talking to their stakeholders about AI will tell you something very similar. It is a matter of calibration and tweaking and I think a longer term perspective. None of us are going to roll out a product next week that's suddenly going to add 10% to our top line. We're investing, I think, for the long term here.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So the big question for all of us today, if we focus in, if we think about these broad pockets, all of us are here in this industry because we support a mission. We believe in the mission of our organization. We inherently believe in the value of scholarship and creating educational or medical research materials for students and doctors. We believe that science can advance mankind.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm sure half of us from nonprofit organizations have some mission statement kind of burned into our retinas that says just that. So I think the question for us at this inflection point, whether it's from AI, all of us trying to find different revenue or diversification strategies is what is required of us in the moment. So I'm thankful for all the folks who are going to join us on stage today.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I hope it can provide some fodder for answering this question. And one last reminder, please contribute generously. Please ask questions. One of the values in bringing this community together is knowledge sharing. And all the things that we're talking about today require community scale responses. Not one single publisher is going to solve it alone.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We're all going to have to figure this out together. So I really want to thank you for investing the time and coming here. I'm very thankful for my team for helping get all of us together, and that is this period of the day. So with that, I want to introduce our good friend and partner, DCL and Mark Gross to introduce our keynote. So thank you, Mark. Thank you all.
WILL SCHWEITZER:
MARK GROSS: I was told I have exactly two minutes, which is not easy for me. So I have to stay on script. I just want to say I'm-- OK. I'm Mark Gross, President of Data Conversion Laboratory, and we're excited to sponsor this conference again. It's an important conference. I think a lot of great ideas get discussed here. And it's a little bit different from the day to day trade kind of shows.
MARK GROSS: It's really-- we get to talk about new ideas. And I'm introducing the keynote and I just love the title of what they're going to be talking about. I can't pronounce it, but transformative vision versus practical traction, which to me means that it's a constant tension between creativity and being practical. We constantly want to be moving ahead and using all this new technology.
MARK GROSS: On the other hand, you've got the realities of day to day life. And I think part of what we're hearing, going to hear about is what AIPP has done to really do some very creative things as they're going along, but to make it something that can really move along and can survive, which is really the other part of it. So we're hearing from Alix Vance, who's the CEO and President of AIP publishing.
MARK GROSS: And she's been 20 years in the technical publishing industry for academic, scholarly, professional publishing organizations. She started her career in technology of society published scholarly publishing and has held many different roles, both in startups and in established companies, commercial and nonprofit. She's really had a very broad experience. 2024 is this a pretty big number, 13 years as a CEO in scientific publishing, and it's her fourth year at AIP.
MARK GROSS: I'm looking forward to hear from her. And Sara Rouhi is-- well, what I thought was interesting in her LinkedIn profile, she calls herself an efficient machete wielder. So I don't want to get on the wrong side of that. But she is joined-- so she is director of open science and publishing innovation at AIP publishing, which is exactly what we're talking about.
MARK GROSS: She joined AIPP six months ago to lead AIP's open science work. For that, she had strategic partnership positions at Plus, Digital Science, American Chemical Society, ACS. And she served on the SSP board and was the recipient of SSP's Emerging Leader Award in 2015. So today, the two are going to share their vision of the changes they've made in AIPP, which are truly transformative and what they've discovered in enabling visionary change to be persistent, which I think we're all very interested in.
MARK GROSS: So I want to welcome Alix and Sara. And there you are. There you are.
SARA ROUHI: Good morning, everyone.
AUDIENCE: Good morning. Good morning.
SARA ROUHI: I'm Sara.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And I'm not. I'm Alix.
SARA ROUHI: And I'm deeply embarrassed about my LinkedIn profile, so I'll be changing that. We are really excited to start the morning, and a huge thank you to Silverchair for giving us the opportunity to share a little bit about this approach to transformative change. To start, I know some people were a little alarmed to see markers at their tables. We are not going to ask you to do small group work or breakouts, but we are going to ask you to start with a self reflection.
SARA ROUHI: We're going to Q&A with ourselves, and then we hope to spend the majority of the time actually doing Q&A with you. So as we are chatting, if questions come to mind, please retain them. So if you can on your phone, on a piece of paper, just take a moment and ask yourself the following question-- and I forgot to get the clicker, so I'm just going to do that.
SARA ROUHI: Thank you. Cool. Ask yourself this question, when was the last time that you felt energized and totally in sync with a piece of work that you were doing? And I actually have a timer, so I'm going to give you 30 seconds to think about that. When was the last time you felt truly energized and aligned with a piece of work that you were doing?
SARA ROUHI: And really think about that. Sit and take a second on that. And if you've-- as you're zeroing in on that moment, whenever that was, what feeling did it generate in that moment of deep alignment and deep concentration and enjoying that work? And you actually have to do it. So I'm going to sit here in silence for 15 more seconds while you think about that last moment when you felt energized and in sync and how that made you feel.
SARA ROUHI: So retain that, absorb that, put it away, and then we'll come back to it.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Excellent. OK. If you've taken a moment with that, why are we asking? First of all, I just want to say hello. It's great to see so many faces. I feel like I've been living and hiding for a very long time. So I'm really delighted to see you all. But why are we asking? So today we're talking about how mission-driven organizations can really unlock transformative change.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And we're going to dive into this topic of investing in people and human systems to transform business results with a focus on teamwork, aligning teams, tapping into intrinsic motivation. So that's the connection to the exercise.
SARA ROUHI: That's right. And we're doing this in the context of wills setup, which was so helpful, which I think is worth reiterating. While it feels like we're in this acute moment as an industry, the reality is the industry is really, really stable. And that can be a double edged sword when it comes to the question of innovation. On the one hand, that can stifle and lead to complacency. But I think on the other hand, and this is something that Alix kind of turned me on to when we were discussing this was our stability as an industry is actually a really, really deep gift because what it does gives us the opportunity to look at what kind of internal disruption can we use as fuel for transformation that we wouldn't have the luxury of doing in an industry with more volatility.
SARA ROUHI: So that context, I think, is important to remember, especially in light of wills intro. So with that, I want to ask you, Alix, as a part of our first Q&A, how is AIPP thinking about that kind of transformation in the context of the industry now, knowing that we all are facing some of the same challenges with respect to mission?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So of all the types of innovation that people talk about, my thought was that social innovation is probably one of the least utilized, at least in a wholesale manner. It can be kind of an afterthought or an add on. But I really did want to shift us away from playing defense, all the talk that we have in the industry all the time about someone else coming in to eat our lunch, external disruption, to something more positive and proactive.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So my goal was to push for this self disruption, internal innovation, having that energy come that we can really stay true to our values while boosting our problem solving skills as an organization. We've focused on breaking down silos, breaking through bottlenecks, hierarchies and empowering everyone to tackle business challenges together. And so to do this, this is the recipe that we used.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: We upped our skills and training, we distributed our decision making, we focused on coaching, specifically on teaming. We created teams that worked more collaboratively and frameworks for goal-driven, evidence-based experimentation. We aligned it all in a wrapper of common company generated values and intrinsic motivators. So Sara, you've had a chance to see this as a career transformer from both the outside and the inside.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So I'm curious, what are your impressions, what does it feel like, and what did it look like from both of those angles?
SARA ROUHI: So I've only been at AIPP for six months. Alix has been doing this work now for four years at the organization. And I'd heard about it before joining and I was curious, well, how is this actually going to work? People talk about this kind of commitment to culture and value change. And what struck me from the job description to the first interview, to the second interview, to the offer, to the first day at work, to the first week check in, to the first month check in, to the three month check in, to the note I got from HR this morning saying, well, it's your 186th day at AIPP, how is it going?
SARA ROUHI: The relentlessness of this, of being told from the jump, this is the universe in which we work, these are the ways of working that we are enabling across the business and you are going to engage with these priorities. It's not optional. And what struck me as I was trying to reflect on, well, what is this agreement that the organization and its employees are making?
SARA ROUHI: The expectation of every employee at AIPP, irrespective of level or tenure is that we are going to bring whatever we put on our sticky note to work every day. So the feeling that was generated, that means of working of creating, of communicating, that generates that deep feeling of satisfaction in the work that we do. We commit to bringing that, however we experience that right.
SARA ROUHI: And for every person in this room, that's going to be different. But AIPP conversely commits to enabling that amount of diversity by providing real scaffolding. So if you invite all these people in with very divergent ways of working and no structure, you just end up with sort of a toxic mess, not great output, conflict. It might be exciting, but it's super stressful.
SARA ROUHI: The idea here that I think is powerful and it's-- I really like this idea of flipping from the idea of inclusion to the idea of leveraging difference, is the point is we want people to come in with their different means of working, but we provide a system that allows us to speak a shared language about how we're going to deal with difference and actually make it productive. And so seeing that every day is very strange.
SARA ROUHI: You actually have peers holding you accountable. Like you sent me-- this is a very trivial example, but I sent a meeting request without the standard OPO. I won't explain what that is. It's sort of irrelevant. And everyone on the meeting was like, Sara, where's the OPO? We have a protocol here. Where's the thing? We're not going to do the meeting.
SARA ROUHI: And you're like, wow, everyone's doing it. This is not-- this is not just a training we all went to once. And then that unlocks like, OK, so meetings have to engage in a certain sort of thing and if they don't, we don't have a meeting. Wow. So extrapolate that to big bodies of work, to teams that have to work cross-functionally, to people who are doing things they've never had to do before.
SARA ROUHI: It's possible because we have scaffolding. That's my experience of it. What's yours four years in? Is it working?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: That's mine. So it's really interesting to hear that described because it sounds quite rigid. But what we talked about yesterday is how do you actually enable buoyancy? How do you actually enable authenticity, individuality? As you said, leveraging difference, right? Bringing yourself to work and all of that intrinsic motivation and energy that we want to tap requires us not just to team but to team effectively.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we really lean into all of these protocols of how effective teams have worked. And there's a lot of research behind that. And the conversation we had yesterday is this idea that the system enables the people and then the people sit on top of the system. So it's not so much that we are and forever are going to be rules based, but we're trying to inculcate the scaffolding so that people can operate actually with more ideation and more freedom, more creative freedom and work effectively in diverse groups.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And that holds true systemically inside to outside. So we're learning as we're doing this, how do we team effectively. So you can see it in the people we hire. You can see it in the ways that we work together. Most of our staff, even with great experience, will say, I've never worked in this way before. And it's kind of enlightening Dean Sanderson, who will be mad at me now, said, I've worked in this industry for 25 years.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: I've worked for the biggest company in the space and I didn't know all of these things. I'm kind of amazed. And I'm learning all the time and it's exciting. So ideas are now kind of coming to us through a flywheel of everybody who works in the business, not only from the top. And when I first joined, I really felt like I had to push that vision.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Sometimes I said it's like pushing a mound of mud up the hill. And the big transformation about three years in was that I didn't have to do that anymore. So I just said to Lauren, I said, now it's like shaping the bonsai. The energy has its own form, the organization-- all of this is really taking hold and now we're really working to systematize it.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we're not retracting. We're growing and we're shaping. Internally, we avoid office politics. We have real conversations about team goals. We encourage people to take risks in a supportive, high trust environment. One of my favorite comments recently was here, I feel like I really can have ideas and they can be done, right?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: This is all real. And that's the environment, looking at Mark Jacobson, that I really wanted to create, right? This sense of possibility, community potential and ideation. And that's frankly-- one of the challenges that we have, I think, is this idea that our business has been pretty traditional. And so it was easy to get into deep grooves of the way that we do things.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Despite the conversation about journal disruption, the journal is still as an object based on the print form. We haven't disrupted the article of the future. All of those conferences about the article of the future, I'm not sure we're at the article of the future. So my concern was that we just are so in this sort of stability of our industry, so accustomed to doing things extremely well in the same replicable way.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And that's what I wanted to shift. I actually really wanted not somebody from out there to come in and disrupt us, I wanted to say we're the experts in what we do. So we need to teach ourselves to be the disruptors of us. So that was exciting to me.
SARA ROUHI: So where are we?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Where are we now? Yes. Where are we now? So initially, the team's really-- so we could put in place strategies that were progressive, but the teams couldn't really generate those or necessarily build upon them. And so that's an important change that we've seen. Now they can. We haven't quite hit extraordinary, but we have some really interesting and positive results.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: I'm happy to address KPI improvements in the Q&A that follows with the audience. As I mentioned, right now, we're really talking about harnessing and shaping the energy that we have. The other kind of mindset that we're focused on is people can tire, systems don't. So we're laying in these practices because we want them to be the new deep grooves for the organization.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we're systematizing. Things are really trending positively, but the true gem is buoyancy. A palpable sense in the organization that much more is possible at AIPP. And that we're working together to do it. And that's what I got.
SARA ROUHI: Cool. So before we transition into an Q&A-- and I hope you all have questions. We'd really like to engage with them. Just a couple closing thoughts. So the first is you might have noticed these beautiful printed cards on your seat. They're by a Brooklyn printmaker named Ravi Zupa. And he takes everything from Kendrick Lamar and Wu-Tang Clan lyrics all the way to the Mahabharata and the Tao Te Ching and makes these beautiful prints.
SARA ROUHI: And so I thought, well, for a bunch of industry leaders, challenging them to try something different, let's use those as a place to ground. So there's three cards. Collect them all. What are they? Let me see. Let me check. To be content with what you have is to be truly wealthy.
SARA ROUHI: That's one. Accomplish without doing. That is the secret is another one. And then the third one, I forget. Someone can shout it out if they have it. But we'll start with to be content with what you have is to be truly wealthy. What we have is a really stable industry, which I think, again, is a unique opportunity to invest in this kind of transformation.
SARA ROUHI: What we have are really amazing people. The smartest people I've ever sort of engaged with have been at the places that I've worked in this industry. And we have really important missions. I think we're really rich in a commitment and alignment with the things our organizations do. So we shouldn't lose sight of those things whilst navigating what feels like a really acute time. And then alongside of that, I think getting back to our sticky notes, when you or engaging in that kind of really intrinsically aligned work that generates a feeling of deep satisfaction and wanting to do more, suddenly doing becomes quite easy.
SARA ROUHI: The systems start to work for themselves and you can-- we've all been in that moment where the production of the thing you want is sort of happening on its own and you're just part of it. And that's what the hope is, right? That we can revisit our sticky note and it's not two years ago that we had that feeling or two months ago, it was two days ago. So I think this kind of work can start that, but I certainly wouldn't say that it's easy or quick.
SARA ROUHI: But those are kind of the thoughts. You can stick those cards up somewhere and hopefully give a thought to some of this in the future. So with that, we would love to chat with you all and take any questions you might have. Sir.
AUDIENCE: I have to ask, how big of a shift was this from the culture that was in place, your processes that you had in place, and did you get pushback?
SARA ROUHI: Can I repeat the question so everyone can hear it?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Of course.
SARA ROUHI: How big of this was a shift from the culture that was in place before you commenced the work?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: It's a pretty significant shift. AIPP was led by smart people with a keen eye for innovation, but based on Long Island, we had a real emphasis on cost reduction and production value. So there was a lot of replication. Also hiring people from a scientific or an academic background. We had a lot of people-- and we heard this for a long time.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Now people are too afraid to say it to me. Just give me the instructions. I want to know exactly what to do to get an A plus. And so I did a kind of culture status check in before I arrived. I did it with my team when I arrived. And then we created these common culture values that are now our collective practices. But they were about experimentation and evidence-based decision making and distributed team leadership and all of this stuff.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And people were like, I never even wanted to solve a problem by myself. So that would be probably a pretty significant shift of shifting that responsibility and ownership. And we came in and we were like, oh my God, it's going to be amazing. You've never before had the chance to generate your own ideas and make your own decisions and do all of this independently.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: It's going to be so liberating. People are like, what?
SARA ROUHI: But it was kind of terrifying, I think.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: It is. Yeah. So you work with this. And the other thing I would say is that the coaching team that we work with-- I mean, we do an enormous amount of coaching. There was another slide we didn't put up that says like, this is all the kind of coursework that we've done with the different teams. It's very persistent.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: But the coaches will say it's not two years of work. It's probably several years of work. We're probably kind of in the middle of it, but it's turned around some things that really needed to be turned around. So happily, I was hired kind of with that. That was the pitch that I pitched and someone amazingly was willing to buy it. But it was-- I came in because you had these sort of intractable problems.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And you couldn't-- they weren't shifting through all of the kind of conventional wisdom, smart people, tactics. And so we really needed to try something new. And that's why I said I don't want to solve one journal problem at a time. I want to get into the system and like create a self-healing body.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you. That was really-- Hi. Thank you. That was a really fascinating talk. One of the earliest slides you did was staff development-- that one. Staff training and development. And it mentions at the end that in-person training proved most effective.
AUDIENCE: And my question is is that physically in-person training? And if so, what impact does that have on our increasing reliance on Zoom and Slack and remote, et cetera?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we are 150 people and we are remote first. When I started, we were more Long Island centric. Actually, when I started, we had a 45,000 square foot building in Melville and now we don't. We work now across eight states up and down the Amtrak Corridor. So what we've found doing this work is the way that the trainings really take hold is that you work in teams or groups of varying sizes on real work problems.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So you'll do a teach piece and then you'll do an integrated kind of practice piece. And that's where you tend to get the AHAs. And you start with smaller AHAs because people need to experience the winds as you go along to get from that like, I'm not having it to some curiosity to this worked, I'll try a second one. So we're really laying that in. So we have definitely found that the in-person facilitated sessions with real work and real problems are very powerful.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: We certainly supplement that with online curriculum and training tools and all of this, but we go back to that when you really want to engender something in a team, let's try to get together. And the reason that we're on the Amtrak corridor is so that we can convene. So convening is still a part of our culture, but we don't have office days. We convene as-- what Sara said was the OPO, which is objective processes and outcome, that every meeting has to have a desired outcome with a process that supports what you're trying to generate.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And we meet, we use RACI decision making. And so everything is oriented to the purpose or the problem you're trying to solve. And our training does the same thing.
SARA ROUHI: Over here.
AUDIENCE: So you said you're about halfway through this process. How does what you thought it was going to look like at the beginning-- looking towards now that you're halfway, do you still think that your end result that you started with two years ago is the end result you want to achieve now, or is that kind of morphed with the times?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: I try not to think too much. I didn't have a fixed mind state about what the outcome was going to look like. I had this more philosophical belief that I wanted to implement. And we do have very much a kind of an experiential learning culture. So it's learn by doing, learn, be agile, adjust, take the evidence, do the retrospective, make the next adjustment.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: In a way, going back to this, things of the gifts of stability. We also had the gifts of knowing what was not going to work and staying the way we were was not going to work. So it was pretty, again, liberating to say, well, we're going to try this because it seems pretty good in principle, in theory, and we're going to put it into practice. And to be honest, we did some of this at GeoScienceWorld when I was there.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So I got to experiment with it in a smaller environment. And we keep building out the curriculum. So it's a living curriculum. But what I would say is we've seen this buoyancy. I did reference that we are, in fact, seeing really big differences in our KPIs and our business results, also in our collaboration, our partnerships. So I think the ways of working are kind of giving us-- delivering what we want.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Our aspirations keep expanding. Our targets keep expanding. So as we develop the capabilities, we can reach for and leverage more. And the question is-- the questions that I think actually in this setting we've grappled with for a long time is scale. So part of the experiment was actually can this team building scale?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: How do you scale buoyant teaming? How do you scale distributed, how do you scale remote, and how much scale do you need as you keep generating more ideas and want to extend into more ambitious work? And one of the nuts that we all keep circulating around in the industry is how do you get collaborative scale? So actually teaching our teams collaboration and teamwork from the inside hopefully also helps us do things like we're doing with the purpose-led publishing coalition.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Developing more collaboration at scale.
SARA ROUHI: I have to push. You have to explain what you mean by buoyancy because you're the person who has introduced me to this term. And I think unpacking it would be--
ALEXANDRA VANCE: OK. So buoyancy--
SARA ROUHI: Because you don't like energy.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Oh yes. I did say that. I was like--
SARA ROUHI: It's not to generate excitement.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: It's grounded buoyancy. But it's actually what Will was kind of speaking to I think, is a kind of grounded goodwill. It's a little bit of a-- we've done state of mind check ins at the beginning. I know Silverchair has done this because they've done some of this work, too. You do state of mind check ins at the beginning of a meeting. You are oriented to where your people are coming from at the start of that engagement.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: You can do a state of mind check out as you exit. So gauging kind of the energy and where people are in the room and having that kind of positive-- assuming positive intent. That's kind of a level of buoyancy. Yeah, it's true. I said to you, I'm not pro excitement because you need to be grounded. The initial topic that we had for this was sort of-- I was working this polarity idea, which was we want to be bold in our mission work and we don't want to be fly by night.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And so the polarity that I was seeing was there's a lot of idealism, disruptive idealism. And the stuff that often works and lasts is financially pragmatic. So that's also the polarity. You've got the ground-- it's like-- what do they say? The anchor and the kite. So we want to exist somewhere in that space. As you said, you were kind of describing a flow state where you have alignment of people to strategy and people are satisfied, they feel buoyant, they have a high level of trust, and they're coming in to do work that they honestly believe in.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: The mission is not so grand and far off that it's abstract. We're kind of engaging in an aligned way every day.
SARA ROUHI: And to come back to this question of being done-- not to get all it's about the journey, buy you're not done. You're never done, right? We have new people starting all the time. I was sitting down with 26-year-olds just out of grad school at the last time we had a community meeting a month ago and they're like, what is Alix talking about you? And so you're constantly unpacking this and then sort of learning more about it as you're having to convey it over and over and over again to new people.
SARA ROUHI: And then you have people leaving who you've turned into baby vampires who are going to take it with them hopefully and do it in other places.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: I'm very excited about the baby vampires. So yeah, that was another thing, was like, we're here to solve these business challenges and get different results out of the business. But it is equally satisfying for me, this idea that we're hatching baby vampires, apparently who-- but it doesn't bother me if you embrace this way of working and you enjoy it and you can go out and work somewhere else and kind of spread it somewhere else. Because the main premise was life is too short.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: We're doing really good, important work. I love the people in this industry. We are a really amazing group of people and we should enjoy the kinds of transformation that we're trying to seed together. We really have the potential to do it, to work in different ways and not have it just be a grind. And I would love for more people to leave AIPP and take this with them and start it and spawn it and have that chessboard effect.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So that is an equally satisfying aspiration for me.
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Before we head back to the audience, we do have a question in the app. What was some level of training or transformation necessary for staff to effectively generate values?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Actually, no. So happily, we have some people who came to the organization with values. We started-- at the very get go, the first thing I said was-- Dean Sanderson came in. He's our chief strategy officer. We were designing-- we used the OGSM strategic framework. And I said, well, we can have a certain number of strategies, but culture is a first class strategy. So one of the primary teams that we have-- we have, depending on the year, five or six major strategies.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Culture is one of them. We have a culture RACI group that leads that cascading strategy. And one of the first activities was really identifying the values that we collectively wanted to source and embrace. So it certainly-- I couldn't have a distributed flatter organization and come in and say, my values are this so we're all going to have these values, right?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we had to generate them. And then the values, ultimately, we kind of hybridized into a series of collective practices that we measure on and we kind of thoughtfully try to train on and improve. There was no training to really collect people and have the conversation about the culture that we want that would really feel good to us for our collaboration.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And it's really this-- it anchors a lot in this. We want it to be dynamic. We want it to be learning. We wanted to be able to experiment. We wanted to be candid. We wanted to be effective. But one of the biggest ones that always comes back is authenticity. People really get to be pretty weird and--
SARA ROUHI: Don't look at me.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Sorry. I was looking in the mirror. Sorry. Mirror. People know people really get to be themselves, whomever themselves is, right? And that's not just people who are bright and shiny. It's all people. You can be an introvert and you can be-- so we really embrace the diversity of our teams with this idea that it's going to make the team product stronger.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And we do that. That's our value externally and internally. So that's a really-- but as I said, one of the things-- I was talking to Alexander [INAUDIBLE] at [? Correntes ?] is putting together a diverse team, does not immediately make it generate better results. The team actually has to learn to work with that diversity in a way that it becomes effective.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And there are some collective practices to enable that. So that's where the training comes in, not at the value generation, but as we incrementally develop those teaming skills.
SARA ROUHI: There is a question here. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Lara D'errico with ASTM International. So many questions. So where do I begin? You had mentioned that you wanted this coming from internally. So when you say internally, did you hire outside agencies to help with the coaching or did you determine, you know what, you guys are going to be really good coaches, we want you to lead the teams internally.
AUDIENCE: So if you could expand on that, and then I have a secondary question.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: OK. Do you want to say your secondary question? I'll try to remember the first one.
AUDIENCE: So in looking at how you approach your meetings and you want to see that state of mind, how long do you determine how long meetings should be? So is there a time limit that you give to this, or are you saying our meetings are going to be an hour, or only 45 minutes, or we're giving 10 minutes? Like, how are you time blocking that as well for the good of your people?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we do work with [? Correntes, ?] which is a-- I have an executive coach who I actually found through Silverchair ages ago and they had done some work with Silverchair. And we've stuck with them, but I'd worked with them in my former business. And so that's been a long relationship. So I sort of came to it with a lot of these protocols. And we have a few people from GSW who'd been exposed to them as well.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we'd already had a little bit of that seasoning. We also use trainers for other things, but we try to follow the curriculum. Not because it's the one only best, but because the consistency of the curriculum is well researched. And we do actually need to stay the course to have this deepen and get into those grooves. So we do use external help.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: There's always that question of when do you migrate from your trainer to internal kind of train the trainer systems. And we're really coming along in that regard, because the adoption is not uniform. It's going to be different in different departments and different people depending on what they're practicing and using. So now actually, most recently, we're talking about there's sort of 100 level.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Everybody kind of needs 100 level. 200 level if you're curious and working more complex problems. 300 level, you can start going off the grid. You can start really playing with it and experimenting. So that's that theory. In terms of meeting times, every meeting is designed about the objective, the outcome you're trying to get. And ideally, you're using different processes that are fit to what you need out of that meeting.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And you can do pre-work and you can do lots of different kinds of process styles. So it's not really about the duration it has to fit. I'm very much about keep your operational work async when you can. Don't come into the meeting and do a ton of updates and operational work together. Let's really get-- at least for my meetings, let's get into those strategic challenges, let's get into those juicier topics and let's have processes that really will allow us to work some of those complexities.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we do that. So the time is a little bit fungible, but we do have bio breaks. So we do start on the five or the 10. So that's kind of one of the culture pieces is everybody-- you don't get into that Zoom to Zoom to Zoom meeting without. And we also have the things like go walk your dog during the day. How do you give people peace and space in their days so that they can really embrace the cadence that works for them?
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Well, thank you both so much. You can find Alix and Sarah throughout the day with your further burning questions. But thank you so much for kicking us off.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Thank you.
Segment:0 .
WILL SCHWEITZER: Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for coming. It's actually really nice to see such a filled room. And if you're here yesterday, we started kind of our client meeting talking about a few of our core values. And there are some values that I'd like us to try to embody in the discussion today. We have five. There's three that I think apply today.
WILL SCHWEITZER: It is about assuming positive intent. We have speakers that are going to challenge us, that are going to try to make us think of the future. And we'll talk about some controversial things. In fact, I'm going to try to set the stage this morning and some of the things I say may make you mad. Not my personally held position may not Silverchair's, but my job is to provide an amuse bouche this morning.
WILL SCHWEITZER: My next ask is that you contribute generously. Everyone in this room, I think, is here because we believe technology can help fulfill the promises of science and scholarship. This is a meeting that is dedicated to the intersection of publishing technology of our businesses and thinking about our stakeholders and how we all can transform what we do. And last but not least, the Silverchairians who are here today, I'm really proud of them.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm proud of Stephanie and Sam and all the folks who helped pull this meeting together. But we're here to help. So if you need anything throughout the day, please see any one of us. We'll do our best to help you with what you need. So on to some of those controversial topics. Let's see if I can advance slides here. What I'm going to do is try to preview some of the sessions today, put some ideas in your mind so hopefully you can contribute.
WILL SCHWEITZER: You can kind of break out of all of the worries of things that you left back at the office today. And here's my very first one. Our fears are local. They're within the organization. And this isn't to dismiss some of the tactical challenges we have or the upcoming budget cycle or our strategic planning, but we operate actually in a very resilient, very stable industry.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And we can look at that either from the year-over-year growth of the [INAUDIBLE] industry. This is data from Outsell. Or we can look at it at the dollars that flow into our industry. And that's global R&D spend from our colleagues at AAAS just down the road. So in this context of the broader industry being stable, I think we can give ourselves some permission to think expansively, to experiment, to innovate, to put things like frivolous class action lawsuits just behind us for a day.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Sorry. The clicker is not working and I am under caffeinated, which is a dangerous thing. Another thing, we'll talk later today about a possible future without platforms, if publishers are disintermediated. And I'm here to say that there is a big difference between disintermediation and syndication.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Thank you. Incredibly soft spoken guy and I need all the help I can get this morning. But there was a big difference between disintermediation and syndication and that it can be risky for us to try to figure out new ways to license our content that is very different than, say, someone like Google, who we've given permission to crawl our sites and somehow they've interpreted that permission to take our content, pull it into snippets and serve it as part of their general search experience.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Where if you were a news publisher or you were Bloomberg, you noticed it resulted in a 25% to 30% drop in your traffic. I don't think that's a world any of us want when we want all the downloads, all the eyeballs we can possibly get. Scholarly publishing is still investable. And these are kind of transactions or deals or companies that raised funds in the past 14 to 16 months.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And it's really interesting to see that dollars are flowing from the thousands to the millions. And we see a few things. The dollars are flowing into multimedia and particularly multimedia for education. The dollars are flowing to workflow solutions. Of course, it's flowing to research integrity. And we see a lot of work around AI and applying AI to people and knowledge and grant discovery.
WILL SCHWEITZER: On the right hand side, we've continued to see consolidation in our industry and these are acquisitions for scale. There are capability and product additions here. There are acquisitions here to help publishers expand their addressable market and to differentiate their revenue strategies. And all of these are about strategic decisions to advance businesses.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So we have a great panel later today with different types of investors that will talk about why their institutions are making these bets in startups, in mergers of equals and all types of things. I think is a really important note, maybe, maybe-- sorry if someone from Springer Nature is here and I'm about to say this-- maybe the third IPO will remind us that there's inherent value in our businesses.
WILL SCHWEITZER: The quality content we produce, the underlying subscription model affords businesses a lot of revenue, visibility, a lot of security. And that's atypical. We're not cannabis. We're not cosmetics. We're not market that are under political turmoil like oil or energy stocks. And it may hopefully remind us at a very, very large scale that what we do is valued by the World and still has economic contribution to make.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We'll have a couple talks on AI today. Our closing keynote from Reid Blackmon. I'm really excited about that. We have a session on the AI trough of disillusionment, kind of what several of us have learned in our experiments in the past year. And I just want to remind everyone that the trough is a social construct. It is the hype cycle from Gartner.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And we all know scholarly publishing doesn't do hype well. But it is actually a reflection of our collective beliefs in the technology and how it is going to be applied. And our perception of technology is deeply skewed by what we read in the news, what we may have experienced the first time we plugged kind of a query into ChatGPT 3.5. And it is hard, I think, particularly in this industry, to recognize how fast these technologies are changing.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So if any of you have played with the latest OpenAI models, you know it is far and above very early ones or even where the technology was six months ago. And we of course know about all the failings of LLMs that we see in the news. Sometimes that's exacerbated by fake headlines and misinformation. But if we just step back and we look at the market-- and this chart here is the magnificent seven stocks.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I've also added in AMD, looking at the relative change in their stock compared to the S&P 500. So it was very clear. You can see a trough here. You can also see where the Federal Reserve kind of started lowering their interest rates. But there's smart money out there in the world that thinks this technology still has room to grow.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I think we'll hear from very smart people today that have been experimenting and launching products and talking to their stakeholders about AI will tell you something very similar. It is a matter of calibration and tweaking and I think a longer term perspective. None of us are going to roll out a product next week that's suddenly going to add 10% to our top line. We're investing, I think, for the long term here.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So the big question for all of us today, if we focus in, if we think about these broad pockets, all of us are here in this industry because we support a mission. We believe in the mission of our organization. We inherently believe in the value of scholarship and creating educational or medical research materials for students and doctors. We believe that science can advance mankind.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm sure half of us from nonprofit organizations have some mission statement kind of burned into our retinas that says just that. So I think the question for us at this inflection point, whether it's from AI, all of us trying to find different revenue or diversification strategies is what is required of us in the moment. So I'm thankful for all the folks who are going to join us on stage today.
WILL SCHWEITZER: I hope it can provide some fodder for answering this question. And one last reminder, please contribute generously. Please ask questions. One of the values in bringing this community together is knowledge sharing. And all the things that we're talking about today require community scale responses. Not one single publisher is going to solve it alone.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We're all going to have to figure this out together. So I really want to thank you for investing the time and coming here. I'm very thankful for my team for helping get all of us together, and that is this period of the day. So with that, I want to introduce our good friend and partner, DCL and Mark Gross to introduce our keynote. So thank you, Mark. Thank you all.
WILL SCHWEITZER:
MARK GROSS: I was told I have exactly two minutes, which is not easy for me. So I have to stay on script. I just want to say I'm-- OK. I'm Mark Gross, President of Data Conversion Laboratory, and we're excited to sponsor this conference again. It's an important conference. I think a lot of great ideas get discussed here. And it's a little bit different from the day to day trade kind of shows.
MARK GROSS: It's really-- we get to talk about new ideas. And I'm introducing the keynote and I just love the title of what they're going to be talking about. I can't pronounce it, but transformative vision versus practical traction, which to me means that it's a constant tension between creativity and being practical. We constantly want to be moving ahead and using all this new technology.
MARK GROSS: On the other hand, you've got the realities of day to day life. And I think part of what we're hearing, going to hear about is what AIPP has done to really do some very creative things as they're going along, but to make it something that can really move along and can survive, which is really the other part of it. So we're hearing from Alix Vance, who's the CEO and President of AIP publishing.
MARK GROSS: And she's been 20 years in the technical publishing industry for academic, scholarly, professional publishing organizations. She started her career in technology of society published scholarly publishing and has held many different roles, both in startups and in established companies, commercial and nonprofit. She's really had a very broad experience. 2024 is this a pretty big number, 13 years as a CEO in scientific publishing, and it's her fourth year at AIP.
MARK GROSS: I'm looking forward to hear from her. And Sara Rouhi is-- well, what I thought was interesting in her LinkedIn profile, she calls herself an efficient machete wielder. So I don't want to get on the wrong side of that. But she is joined-- so she is director of open science and publishing innovation at AIP publishing, which is exactly what we're talking about.
MARK GROSS: She joined AIPP six months ago to lead AIP's open science work. For that, she had strategic partnership positions at Plus, Digital Science, American Chemical Society, ACS. And she served on the SSP board and was the recipient of SSP's Emerging Leader Award in 2015. So today, the two are going to share their vision of the changes they've made in AIPP, which are truly transformative and what they've discovered in enabling visionary change to be persistent, which I think we're all very interested in.
MARK GROSS: So I want to welcome Alix and Sara. And there you are. There you are.
SARA ROUHI: Good morning, everyone.
AUDIENCE: Good morning. Good morning.
SARA ROUHI: I'm Sara.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And I'm not. I'm Alix.
SARA ROUHI: And I'm deeply embarrassed about my LinkedIn profile, so I'll be changing that. We are really excited to start the morning, and a huge thank you to Silverchair for giving us the opportunity to share a little bit about this approach to transformative change. To start, I know some people were a little alarmed to see markers at their tables. We are not going to ask you to do small group work or breakouts, but we are going to ask you to start with a self reflection.
SARA ROUHI: We're going to Q&A with ourselves, and then we hope to spend the majority of the time actually doing Q&A with you. So as we are chatting, if questions come to mind, please retain them. So if you can on your phone, on a piece of paper, just take a moment and ask yourself the following question-- and I forgot to get the clicker, so I'm just going to do that.
SARA ROUHI: Thank you. Cool. Ask yourself this question, when was the last time that you felt energized and totally in sync with a piece of work that you were doing? And I actually have a timer, so I'm going to give you 30 seconds to think about that. When was the last time you felt truly energized and aligned with a piece of work that you were doing?
SARA ROUHI: And really think about that. Sit and take a second on that. And if you've-- as you're zeroing in on that moment, whenever that was, what feeling did it generate in that moment of deep alignment and deep concentration and enjoying that work? And you actually have to do it. So I'm going to sit here in silence for 15 more seconds while you think about that last moment when you felt energized and in sync and how that made you feel.
SARA ROUHI: So retain that, absorb that, put it away, and then we'll come back to it.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Excellent. OK. If you've taken a moment with that, why are we asking? First of all, I just want to say hello. It's great to see so many faces. I feel like I've been living and hiding for a very long time. So I'm really delighted to see you all. But why are we asking? So today we're talking about how mission-driven organizations can really unlock transformative change.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And we're going to dive into this topic of investing in people and human systems to transform business results with a focus on teamwork, aligning teams, tapping into intrinsic motivation. So that's the connection to the exercise.
SARA ROUHI: That's right. And we're doing this in the context of wills setup, which was so helpful, which I think is worth reiterating. While it feels like we're in this acute moment as an industry, the reality is the industry is really, really stable. And that can be a double edged sword when it comes to the question of innovation. On the one hand, that can stifle and lead to complacency. But I think on the other hand, and this is something that Alix kind of turned me on to when we were discussing this was our stability as an industry is actually a really, really deep gift because what it does gives us the opportunity to look at what kind of internal disruption can we use as fuel for transformation that we wouldn't have the luxury of doing in an industry with more volatility.
SARA ROUHI: So that context, I think, is important to remember, especially in light of wills intro. So with that, I want to ask you, Alix, as a part of our first Q&A, how is AIPP thinking about that kind of transformation in the context of the industry now, knowing that we all are facing some of the same challenges with respect to mission?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So of all the types of innovation that people talk about, my thought was that social innovation is probably one of the least utilized, at least in a wholesale manner. It can be kind of an afterthought or an add on. But I really did want to shift us away from playing defense, all the talk that we have in the industry all the time about someone else coming in to eat our lunch, external disruption, to something more positive and proactive.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So my goal was to push for this self disruption, internal innovation, having that energy come that we can really stay true to our values while boosting our problem solving skills as an organization. We've focused on breaking down silos, breaking through bottlenecks, hierarchies and empowering everyone to tackle business challenges together. And so to do this, this is the recipe that we used.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: We upped our skills and training, we distributed our decision making, we focused on coaching, specifically on teaming. We created teams that worked more collaboratively and frameworks for goal-driven, evidence-based experimentation. We aligned it all in a wrapper of common company generated values and intrinsic motivators. So Sara, you've had a chance to see this as a career transformer from both the outside and the inside.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So I'm curious, what are your impressions, what does it feel like, and what did it look like from both of those angles?
SARA ROUHI: So I've only been at AIPP for six months. Alix has been doing this work now for four years at the organization. And I'd heard about it before joining and I was curious, well, how is this actually going to work? People talk about this kind of commitment to culture and value change. And what struck me from the job description to the first interview, to the second interview, to the offer, to the first day at work, to the first week check in, to the first month check in, to the three month check in, to the note I got from HR this morning saying, well, it's your 186th day at AIPP, how is it going?
SARA ROUHI: The relentlessness of this, of being told from the jump, this is the universe in which we work, these are the ways of working that we are enabling across the business and you are going to engage with these priorities. It's not optional. And what struck me as I was trying to reflect on, well, what is this agreement that the organization and its employees are making?
SARA ROUHI: The expectation of every employee at AIPP, irrespective of level or tenure is that we are going to bring whatever we put on our sticky note to work every day. So the feeling that was generated, that means of working of creating, of communicating, that generates that deep feeling of satisfaction in the work that we do. We commit to bringing that, however we experience that right.
SARA ROUHI: And for every person in this room, that's going to be different. But AIPP conversely commits to enabling that amount of diversity by providing real scaffolding. So if you invite all these people in with very divergent ways of working and no structure, you just end up with sort of a toxic mess, not great output, conflict. It might be exciting, but it's super stressful.
SARA ROUHI: The idea here that I think is powerful and it's-- I really like this idea of flipping from the idea of inclusion to the idea of leveraging difference, is the point is we want people to come in with their different means of working, but we provide a system that allows us to speak a shared language about how we're going to deal with difference and actually make it productive. And so seeing that every day is very strange.
SARA ROUHI: You actually have peers holding you accountable. Like you sent me-- this is a very trivial example, but I sent a meeting request without the standard OPO. I won't explain what that is. It's sort of irrelevant. And everyone on the meeting was like, Sara, where's the OPO? We have a protocol here. Where's the thing? We're not going to do the meeting.
SARA ROUHI: And you're like, wow, everyone's doing it. This is not-- this is not just a training we all went to once. And then that unlocks like, OK, so meetings have to engage in a certain sort of thing and if they don't, we don't have a meeting. Wow. So extrapolate that to big bodies of work, to teams that have to work cross-functionally, to people who are doing things they've never had to do before.
SARA ROUHI: It's possible because we have scaffolding. That's my experience of it. What's yours four years in? Is it working?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: That's mine. So it's really interesting to hear that described because it sounds quite rigid. But what we talked about yesterday is how do you actually enable buoyancy? How do you actually enable authenticity, individuality? As you said, leveraging difference, right? Bringing yourself to work and all of that intrinsic motivation and energy that we want to tap requires us not just to team but to team effectively.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we really lean into all of these protocols of how effective teams have worked. And there's a lot of research behind that. And the conversation we had yesterday is this idea that the system enables the people and then the people sit on top of the system. So it's not so much that we are and forever are going to be rules based, but we're trying to inculcate the scaffolding so that people can operate actually with more ideation and more freedom, more creative freedom and work effectively in diverse groups.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And that holds true systemically inside to outside. So we're learning as we're doing this, how do we team effectively. So you can see it in the people we hire. You can see it in the ways that we work together. Most of our staff, even with great experience, will say, I've never worked in this way before. And it's kind of enlightening Dean Sanderson, who will be mad at me now, said, I've worked in this industry for 25 years.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: I've worked for the biggest company in the space and I didn't know all of these things. I'm kind of amazed. And I'm learning all the time and it's exciting. So ideas are now kind of coming to us through a flywheel of everybody who works in the business, not only from the top. And when I first joined, I really felt like I had to push that vision.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Sometimes I said it's like pushing a mound of mud up the hill. And the big transformation about three years in was that I didn't have to do that anymore. So I just said to Lauren, I said, now it's like shaping the bonsai. The energy has its own form, the organization-- all of this is really taking hold and now we're really working to systematize it.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we're not retracting. We're growing and we're shaping. Internally, we avoid office politics. We have real conversations about team goals. We encourage people to take risks in a supportive, high trust environment. One of my favorite comments recently was here, I feel like I really can have ideas and they can be done, right?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: This is all real. And that's the environment, looking at Mark Jacobson, that I really wanted to create, right? This sense of possibility, community potential and ideation. And that's frankly-- one of the challenges that we have, I think, is this idea that our business has been pretty traditional. And so it was easy to get into deep grooves of the way that we do things.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Despite the conversation about journal disruption, the journal is still as an object based on the print form. We haven't disrupted the article of the future. All of those conferences about the article of the future, I'm not sure we're at the article of the future. So my concern was that we just are so in this sort of stability of our industry, so accustomed to doing things extremely well in the same replicable way.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And that's what I wanted to shift. I actually really wanted not somebody from out there to come in and disrupt us, I wanted to say we're the experts in what we do. So we need to teach ourselves to be the disruptors of us. So that was exciting to me.
SARA ROUHI: So where are we?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Where are we now? Yes. Where are we now? So initially, the team's really-- so we could put in place strategies that were progressive, but the teams couldn't really generate those or necessarily build upon them. And so that's an important change that we've seen. Now they can. We haven't quite hit extraordinary, but we have some really interesting and positive results.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: I'm happy to address KPI improvements in the Q&A that follows with the audience. As I mentioned, right now, we're really talking about harnessing and shaping the energy that we have. The other kind of mindset that we're focused on is people can tire, systems don't. So we're laying in these practices because we want them to be the new deep grooves for the organization.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we're systematizing. Things are really trending positively, but the true gem is buoyancy. A palpable sense in the organization that much more is possible at AIPP. And that we're working together to do it. And that's what I got.
SARA ROUHI: Cool. So before we transition into an Q&A-- and I hope you all have questions. We'd really like to engage with them. Just a couple closing thoughts. So the first is you might have noticed these beautiful printed cards on your seat. They're by a Brooklyn printmaker named Ravi Zupa. And he takes everything from Kendrick Lamar and Wu-Tang Clan lyrics all the way to the Mahabharata and the Tao Te Ching and makes these beautiful prints.
SARA ROUHI: And so I thought, well, for a bunch of industry leaders, challenging them to try something different, let's use those as a place to ground. So there's three cards. Collect them all. What are they? Let me see. Let me check. To be content with what you have is to be truly wealthy.
SARA ROUHI: That's one. Accomplish without doing. That is the secret is another one. And then the third one, I forget. Someone can shout it out if they have it. But we'll start with to be content with what you have is to be truly wealthy. What we have is a really stable industry, which I think, again, is a unique opportunity to invest in this kind of transformation.
SARA ROUHI: What we have are really amazing people. The smartest people I've ever sort of engaged with have been at the places that I've worked in this industry. And we have really important missions. I think we're really rich in a commitment and alignment with the things our organizations do. So we shouldn't lose sight of those things whilst navigating what feels like a really acute time. And then alongside of that, I think getting back to our sticky notes, when you or engaging in that kind of really intrinsically aligned work that generates a feeling of deep satisfaction and wanting to do more, suddenly doing becomes quite easy.
SARA ROUHI: The systems start to work for themselves and you can-- we've all been in that moment where the production of the thing you want is sort of happening on its own and you're just part of it. And that's what the hope is, right? That we can revisit our sticky note and it's not two years ago that we had that feeling or two months ago, it was two days ago. So I think this kind of work can start that, but I certainly wouldn't say that it's easy or quick.
SARA ROUHI: But those are kind of the thoughts. You can stick those cards up somewhere and hopefully give a thought to some of this in the future. So with that, we would love to chat with you all and take any questions you might have. Sir.
AUDIENCE: I have to ask, how big of a shift was this from the culture that was in place, your processes that you had in place, and did you get pushback?
SARA ROUHI: Can I repeat the question so everyone can hear it?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Of course.
SARA ROUHI: How big of this was a shift from the culture that was in place before you commenced the work?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: It's a pretty significant shift. AIPP was led by smart people with a keen eye for innovation, but based on Long Island, we had a real emphasis on cost reduction and production value. So there was a lot of replication. Also hiring people from a scientific or an academic background. We had a lot of people-- and we heard this for a long time.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Now people are too afraid to say it to me. Just give me the instructions. I want to know exactly what to do to get an A plus. And so I did a kind of culture status check in before I arrived. I did it with my team when I arrived. And then we created these common culture values that are now our collective practices. But they were about experimentation and evidence-based decision making and distributed team leadership and all of this stuff.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And people were like, I never even wanted to solve a problem by myself. So that would be probably a pretty significant shift of shifting that responsibility and ownership. And we came in and we were like, oh my God, it's going to be amazing. You've never before had the chance to generate your own ideas and make your own decisions and do all of this independently.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: It's going to be so liberating. People are like, what?
SARA ROUHI: But it was kind of terrifying, I think.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: It is. Yeah. So you work with this. And the other thing I would say is that the coaching team that we work with-- I mean, we do an enormous amount of coaching. There was another slide we didn't put up that says like, this is all the kind of coursework that we've done with the different teams. It's very persistent.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: But the coaches will say it's not two years of work. It's probably several years of work. We're probably kind of in the middle of it, but it's turned around some things that really needed to be turned around. So happily, I was hired kind of with that. That was the pitch that I pitched and someone amazingly was willing to buy it. But it was-- I came in because you had these sort of intractable problems.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And you couldn't-- they weren't shifting through all of the kind of conventional wisdom, smart people, tactics. And so we really needed to try something new. And that's why I said I don't want to solve one journal problem at a time. I want to get into the system and like create a self-healing body.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you. That was really-- Hi. Thank you. That was a really fascinating talk. One of the earliest slides you did was staff development-- that one. Staff training and development. And it mentions at the end that in-person training proved most effective.
AUDIENCE: And my question is is that physically in-person training? And if so, what impact does that have on our increasing reliance on Zoom and Slack and remote, et cetera?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we are 150 people and we are remote first. When I started, we were more Long Island centric. Actually, when I started, we had a 45,000 square foot building in Melville and now we don't. We work now across eight states up and down the Amtrak Corridor. So what we've found doing this work is the way that the trainings really take hold is that you work in teams or groups of varying sizes on real work problems.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So you'll do a teach piece and then you'll do an integrated kind of practice piece. And that's where you tend to get the AHAs. And you start with smaller AHAs because people need to experience the winds as you go along to get from that like, I'm not having it to some curiosity to this worked, I'll try a second one. So we're really laying that in. So we have definitely found that the in-person facilitated sessions with real work and real problems are very powerful.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: We certainly supplement that with online curriculum and training tools and all of this, but we go back to that when you really want to engender something in a team, let's try to get together. And the reason that we're on the Amtrak corridor is so that we can convene. So convening is still a part of our culture, but we don't have office days. We convene as-- what Sara said was the OPO, which is objective processes and outcome, that every meeting has to have a desired outcome with a process that supports what you're trying to generate.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And we meet, we use RACI decision making. And so everything is oriented to the purpose or the problem you're trying to solve. And our training does the same thing.
SARA ROUHI: Over here.
AUDIENCE: So you said you're about halfway through this process. How does what you thought it was going to look like at the beginning-- looking towards now that you're halfway, do you still think that your end result that you started with two years ago is the end result you want to achieve now, or is that kind of morphed with the times?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: I try not to think too much. I didn't have a fixed mind state about what the outcome was going to look like. I had this more philosophical belief that I wanted to implement. And we do have very much a kind of an experiential learning culture. So it's learn by doing, learn, be agile, adjust, take the evidence, do the retrospective, make the next adjustment.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: In a way, going back to this, things of the gifts of stability. We also had the gifts of knowing what was not going to work and staying the way we were was not going to work. So it was pretty, again, liberating to say, well, we're going to try this because it seems pretty good in principle, in theory, and we're going to put it into practice. And to be honest, we did some of this at GeoScienceWorld when I was there.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So I got to experiment with it in a smaller environment. And we keep building out the curriculum. So it's a living curriculum. But what I would say is we've seen this buoyancy. I did reference that we are, in fact, seeing really big differences in our KPIs and our business results, also in our collaboration, our partnerships. So I think the ways of working are kind of giving us-- delivering what we want.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Our aspirations keep expanding. Our targets keep expanding. So as we develop the capabilities, we can reach for and leverage more. And the question is-- the questions that I think actually in this setting we've grappled with for a long time is scale. So part of the experiment was actually can this team building scale?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: How do you scale buoyant teaming? How do you scale distributed, how do you scale remote, and how much scale do you need as you keep generating more ideas and want to extend into more ambitious work? And one of the nuts that we all keep circulating around in the industry is how do you get collaborative scale? So actually teaching our teams collaboration and teamwork from the inside hopefully also helps us do things like we're doing with the purpose-led publishing coalition.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Developing more collaboration at scale.
SARA ROUHI: I have to push. You have to explain what you mean by buoyancy because you're the person who has introduced me to this term. And I think unpacking it would be--
ALEXANDRA VANCE: OK. So buoyancy--
SARA ROUHI: Because you don't like energy.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Oh yes. I did say that. I was like--
SARA ROUHI: It's not to generate excitement.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: It's grounded buoyancy. But it's actually what Will was kind of speaking to I think, is a kind of grounded goodwill. It's a little bit of a-- we've done state of mind check ins at the beginning. I know Silverchair has done this because they've done some of this work, too. You do state of mind check ins at the beginning of a meeting. You are oriented to where your people are coming from at the start of that engagement.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: You can do a state of mind check out as you exit. So gauging kind of the energy and where people are in the room and having that kind of positive-- assuming positive intent. That's kind of a level of buoyancy. Yeah, it's true. I said to you, I'm not pro excitement because you need to be grounded. The initial topic that we had for this was sort of-- I was working this polarity idea, which was we want to be bold in our mission work and we don't want to be fly by night.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And so the polarity that I was seeing was there's a lot of idealism, disruptive idealism. And the stuff that often works and lasts is financially pragmatic. So that's also the polarity. You've got the ground-- it's like-- what do they say? The anchor and the kite. So we want to exist somewhere in that space. As you said, you were kind of describing a flow state where you have alignment of people to strategy and people are satisfied, they feel buoyant, they have a high level of trust, and they're coming in to do work that they honestly believe in.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: The mission is not so grand and far off that it's abstract. We're kind of engaging in an aligned way every day.
SARA ROUHI: And to come back to this question of being done-- not to get all it's about the journey, buy you're not done. You're never done, right? We have new people starting all the time. I was sitting down with 26-year-olds just out of grad school at the last time we had a community meeting a month ago and they're like, what is Alix talking about you? And so you're constantly unpacking this and then sort of learning more about it as you're having to convey it over and over and over again to new people.
SARA ROUHI: And then you have people leaving who you've turned into baby vampires who are going to take it with them hopefully and do it in other places.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: I'm very excited about the baby vampires. So yeah, that was another thing, was like, we're here to solve these business challenges and get different results out of the business. But it is equally satisfying for me, this idea that we're hatching baby vampires, apparently who-- but it doesn't bother me if you embrace this way of working and you enjoy it and you can go out and work somewhere else and kind of spread it somewhere else. Because the main premise was life is too short.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: We're doing really good, important work. I love the people in this industry. We are a really amazing group of people and we should enjoy the kinds of transformation that we're trying to seed together. We really have the potential to do it, to work in different ways and not have it just be a grind. And I would love for more people to leave AIPP and take this with them and start it and spawn it and have that chessboard effect.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So that is an equally satisfying aspiration for me.
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Before we head back to the audience, we do have a question in the app. What was some level of training or transformation necessary for staff to effectively generate values?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Actually, no. So happily, we have some people who came to the organization with values. We started-- at the very get go, the first thing I said was-- Dean Sanderson came in. He's our chief strategy officer. We were designing-- we used the OGSM strategic framework. And I said, well, we can have a certain number of strategies, but culture is a first class strategy. So one of the primary teams that we have-- we have, depending on the year, five or six major strategies.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Culture is one of them. We have a culture RACI group that leads that cascading strategy. And one of the first activities was really identifying the values that we collectively wanted to source and embrace. So it certainly-- I couldn't have a distributed flatter organization and come in and say, my values are this so we're all going to have these values, right?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we had to generate them. And then the values, ultimately, we kind of hybridized into a series of collective practices that we measure on and we kind of thoughtfully try to train on and improve. There was no training to really collect people and have the conversation about the culture that we want that would really feel good to us for our collaboration.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And it's really this-- it anchors a lot in this. We want it to be dynamic. We want it to be learning. We wanted to be able to experiment. We wanted to be candid. We wanted to be effective. But one of the biggest ones that always comes back is authenticity. People really get to be pretty weird and--
SARA ROUHI: Don't look at me.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Sorry. I was looking in the mirror. Sorry. Mirror. People know people really get to be themselves, whomever themselves is, right? And that's not just people who are bright and shiny. It's all people. You can be an introvert and you can be-- so we really embrace the diversity of our teams with this idea that it's going to make the team product stronger.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And we do that. That's our value externally and internally. So that's a really-- but as I said, one of the things-- I was talking to Alexander [INAUDIBLE] at [? Correntes ?] is putting together a diverse team, does not immediately make it generate better results. The team actually has to learn to work with that diversity in a way that it becomes effective.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And there are some collective practices to enable that. So that's where the training comes in, not at the value generation, but as we incrementally develop those teaming skills.
SARA ROUHI: There is a question here. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Lara D'errico with ASTM International. So many questions. So where do I begin? You had mentioned that you wanted this coming from internally. So when you say internally, did you hire outside agencies to help with the coaching or did you determine, you know what, you guys are going to be really good coaches, we want you to lead the teams internally.
AUDIENCE: So if you could expand on that, and then I have a secondary question.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: OK. Do you want to say your secondary question? I'll try to remember the first one.
AUDIENCE: So in looking at how you approach your meetings and you want to see that state of mind, how long do you determine how long meetings should be? So is there a time limit that you give to this, or are you saying our meetings are going to be an hour, or only 45 minutes, or we're giving 10 minutes? Like, how are you time blocking that as well for the good of your people?
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we do work with [? Correntes, ?] which is a-- I have an executive coach who I actually found through Silverchair ages ago and they had done some work with Silverchair. And we've stuck with them, but I'd worked with them in my former business. And so that's been a long relationship. So I sort of came to it with a lot of these protocols. And we have a few people from GSW who'd been exposed to them as well.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we'd already had a little bit of that seasoning. We also use trainers for other things, but we try to follow the curriculum. Not because it's the one only best, but because the consistency of the curriculum is well researched. And we do actually need to stay the course to have this deepen and get into those grooves. So we do use external help.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: There's always that question of when do you migrate from your trainer to internal kind of train the trainer systems. And we're really coming along in that regard, because the adoption is not uniform. It's going to be different in different departments and different people depending on what they're practicing and using. So now actually, most recently, we're talking about there's sort of 100 level.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Everybody kind of needs 100 level. 200 level if you're curious and working more complex problems. 300 level, you can start going off the grid. You can start really playing with it and experimenting. So that's that theory. In terms of meeting times, every meeting is designed about the objective, the outcome you're trying to get. And ideally, you're using different processes that are fit to what you need out of that meeting.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: And you can do pre-work and you can do lots of different kinds of process styles. So it's not really about the duration it has to fit. I'm very much about keep your operational work async when you can. Don't come into the meeting and do a ton of updates and operational work together. Let's really get-- at least for my meetings, let's get into those strategic challenges, let's get into those juicier topics and let's have processes that really will allow us to work some of those complexities.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: So we do that. So the time is a little bit fungible, but we do have bio breaks. So we do start on the five or the 10. So that's kind of one of the culture pieces is everybody-- you don't get into that Zoom to Zoom to Zoom meeting without. And we also have the things like go walk your dog during the day. How do you give people peace and space in their days so that they can really embrace the cadence that works for them?
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Well, thank you both so much. You can find Alix and Sarah throughout the day with your further burning questions. But thank you so much for kicking us off.
ALEXANDRA VANCE: Thank you.
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