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AI Lab Reports: Cultivating Creativity: Tips for Fostering a Culture of Innovation & Adaptability
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AI Lab Reports: Cultivating Creativity: Tips for Fostering a Culture of Innovation & Adaptability
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LILY GARCIA WALTON: Thank you, Stephanie. And welcome again, everyone. I think we can all agree that one of the most obvious outcomes of the advent of AI technologies is change, and with it the need for people and organizations to adapt and to innovate. Therefore, the subject of our timely conversation today is how organizations and their teams can actively foster the culture of innovation that is necessary to survive and thrive through this formidable time.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: I am delighted to be joined by several esteemed co-panelists today. But before we get to the introductions, I'd like to launch a poll. And Stephanie will do that for us. How satisfied are you with the current innovation culture at your organization? And while you take a moment to answer that poll, I'm going to go ahead and introduce our speakers.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: We have with us today Barbara Kline Pope who is Executive Director of Johns Hopkins University Press, as well Ann Michael who is Chief Transformation Officer of AIP Publishing. And then, finally, Alistair Reece who is product manager at GeoScienceWorld. Thank you for joining us today. All right, Stephanie, what have we here?
LILY GARCIA WALTON: OK, well, there is a high degree of satisfaction, I would say, with cultures of innovation, and also some opportunities. And so I'm hoping the conversation today will inform and inspire you and give you some practical tools that you can take back to your organizations to drive the sort of innovation that is necessary today. I would like for each of our speakers to answer the following introductory question.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: What has been your personal experience with actively crafting cultures of innovation in to not just passively allowing change to happen, but how do you get in there and start to create the systems and processes and tools necessary to make satisfactory change possible? And I'd love for Ann to kick us off.
ANN MICHAEL: I had this feeling you were going to begin with me. I've actually been thinking about this, and it's funny because the question that we had on our little prep sheet, I don't think it had actively crafting in it. So one of the things I had in my response that I was thinking about was actively crafting, so I'm really glad that you brought that up. I think that one of the interesting things we're finding right now is that culture has not been actively crafted much.
ANN MICHAEL: We hear stories, but much before the last maybe 10 years. All of a sudden I think what happened is the concreteness of the other levers at the disposal of leaders wound up kind of getting exhausted in a lot of ways, and so they went to culture. And I say that because I think there's some surprises when you get to culture, and I think there are some variations from the previous levers that were used that are worth noting and that I've certainly experienced.
ANN MICHAEL: So it kind of gets back to your question, and that is culture is one of those funny things that is both concrete and not concrete at the exact same time. And so when you start to actively think about who you want to be and what you want to do, it's very easy at the extremes to say what you don't want your culture to do or what you do want it to do. But when you move away from those extremes, it gets difficult.
ANN MICHAEL: Here's an example. I want a transparent culture. Does everybody know everything about everything? That would be one extreme. That would be full, 100% transparency and conversely, zero would be no one except needs to know knows anything about anything. And the reality is you can't just say where you want to be on that continuum often without experimenting, without trying, and without understanding what we're going to try to open up more and more and we're going to see what happens.
ANN MICHAEL: But conversely, the organization itself needs to be ready to consume that transparency in a productive way. So you find out that every aspect, in my opinion, most aspects-- let's not go every-- of culture as we've been playing and-- not playing but working on it, but it is fun-- at AIP and-- just to let people know, I mean, I've also been a consultant for 15 years prior to that, so I've watched a lot of different cultures and a lot of different organizations work to attain a cultural goal to be-- to get to a certain culture.
ANN MICHAEL: And it is a lot harder than a lot of the levers that we've tried to influence in the past. And, ironically, it's even more critical as we're stepping into an environment where, for example, we need to be able to experiment more, we need to be able to consume risk and think about our risk mitigation strategies differently than we have in the past. We need to embark on things that we really don't know about, whereas a lot of people, especially, book and journal publishers, if you're thinking about that 20 years ago, you kind of knew how things worked and you could rely on things working.
ANN MICHAEL: Of course, there were variations, but for the most part-- and now we don't. And so now we're asking people to think about culture change at the same time that the world seems more tumultuous and they want the security of a known and instantiated culture, but that's something that also has to change. And so I think that that-- I mean, I'll leave it at that.
ANN MICHAEL: In my experience, the hard part is figuring out not just where you need to set yourself on these different think of on a radio, an old fashioned equalizer on these different continuum that make up the attributes of the culture you want, but also how you are going to adjust those as time goes on. Because no matter where you are now, I can guarantee you that for certain situations, it's not all the same answer and in the future it'll be a little different.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Ann, I'm so glad that you led with that. As we prepared for this conversation, part of what we discussed is that traditional principles of change management in the current environment kind of start to fail us. And so there's really a call for something that is more iterative and responsive to people as we think about change in this current environment. I'm wondering, Barbara, what you would add to that. What is your personal experience?
LILY GARCIA WALTON: And how does what Ann shared resonate with you?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Before I share the personal experiences that I've had, I just want to say two short things. And one is that organizational culture is incredibly important. Needs to be a priority not just for innovation, but I think for success every day in what we do. So defining your culture allows us to have common language and to be explicit. Like you said, actively crafting a culture allows us to make sure that people understand our goals and our culture.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So I wanted to say that one thing. The second thing that I want to say is that culture work is never done. There are times when people say, when are we going to be done with this work? And the answer is never. And some people don't like that answer but that's absolutely the truth. So I've had a very long career with most of my experience with culture in the last six years, believe it or not.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: I've been in publishing for 40 some years. But we did do some culture work when I worked at the National Academies, which is where I was before this. And I was head of publishing and communications there. And in the late '80s and early '90s, we went through reorganizing ourselves completely into self-directed work teams, and that required a lot of culture work. And we had a consultant help us with that work, and the same consultant I called when I got to Hopkins six years ago to help us actively work on our culture here.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And at that time we worked with scores of our staff members across our organization to define our current culture, to decide what future culture we wanted for ourselves, and then to work on activities to fill in that gap from our current culture to the culture that we wanted to see. And we decided together that that's what we wanted to do. And we used the framework called eight types of company culture because we started to work on this.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: We did surveys, we did in-depth interviews, and then we found that we really needed some kind of framework to base our measure of our current culture on and to look at our future culture. And that's our research-based framework that was led by a team by Boris Groysberg. And it was published in Harvard Business Review. Seems like a long time ago now. It was 2018.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: But I came to Hopkins in 2017 when we started to work on our culture and it seemed very good then, and we continue to think that it's a very good framework for at least for us to use. So in that framework, there are eight types of company culture. And what we decided over the course of a really long time trying to define all of this is that we wanted a culture that was more heavily weighted on learning, caring, and job fulfillment.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And less weighted on what we defined as our current culture, which was safety, purpose, and order. The thing I really like about this framework is that none of these types of company culture are negative. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of them. So I encourage all of you to go read this and get an idea of this framework. But in the middle of this really long time that we were building our culture, we read a book by Donna Hicks called Leading With Dignity.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And we had her come and talk to the press about this book because when I first read it, I saw a lot of links to this framework that we were using and the way in which we wanted to build our culture and the way in which we wanted to define how we treat each other every day in our work. So we were so inspired by that, that those concepts of honoring other people's dignity is the foundation of our culture work.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: On top of that is the learning, caring, and fulfilling and all of the activities that go to that. So, together, that's the infrastructure that we use. So in a very short period of time, that's my experience with building cultures of innovation and cultures of success.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: That's so beautifully stated, Barbara. I couldn't agree more about culture being a priority in the worst and best of times, right. Culture isn't just a tool that we use to manage change. It is necessary to the integrity of an organization, the well-being of its people and its success. So I really appreciate you elevating that. And also the importance of actively engaging staff, culture is not something we impose on people. It is something the organization tells us about, and that we then encapsulate and play back.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Alistair, as we turn to you, one of the things that you said as we were preparing for this session is your organization is about 12 people, right? So it's significantly smaller than Barbara's. It's about 1/10 the size. And as you talk about your experience with managing cultural change around innovation, I'm wondering if you could speak to what might be some of those differences for people who are attending the webinar and are in smaller organizations trying to manage change?
ALISTAIR REECE: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we are a much smaller organization at GeoScienceWorld. I think we are about 12, 14 people right now. And so for us its-- culture is very personal to the entire group because we do spend a lot of time speaking with each other, meeting with each other. It's very difficult in a small organization of only 12 people to end up being siloed because we're constantly interacting with each other.
ALISTAIR REECE: But one of the things that I have felt throughout my career, both in scholarly publishing-- I've been at GeoScienceWorld for six years, I was with Silverchair for a while before that, but also when I worked overseas in the Czech Republic managing language schools-- was the importance of open communication and how you really cannot create any form of culture within an organization where people can thrive.
ALISTAIR REECE: And, really, you need people to be thriving in order to innovate without open communication. And so there were several times when I would take on management leadership role within a new language school that had had a very domineering management system where people were just told, this is what you do, and it was very strict. And the minute you opened up the communication and allowed people to give their opinions because we had-- people have a wealth of experience that they need to share, it releases some kind of energy within them to be finally, I'm being listened to.
ALISTAIR REECE: And so coming forward to GeoScienceWorld, one of the things that we've been really focused on in the last couple of years, two to three years, is undergoing a form of agile transformation. And when I say agile transformation, I don't mean necessarily implementing one of the popular methodologies like Scrum or Kanban or Safe or extreme programming, because that wouldn't be appropriate to an organization of our size.
ALISTAIR REECE: What I'm really thinking here is-- and to get a little bit Martin Luther and go ad fontes-- going back to the Agile Manifesto and the four values that were originally written down in the Agile Manifesto of valuing certain characteristics over other characteristics. So, for example, valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools, valuing impactful outcomes over comprehensive documentation.
ALISTAIR REECE: Yes, originally coming out of software, the original version was working software, I'm not going to create working software. However, being agile we can create impactful outcomes. Also valuing customer collaboration. And then the final one, you're being responsive to change. And so for us, thinking about those four values, it's all about an agile mindset. And that's the culture that we're trying to create, is an agile culture that really focuses in on those four values as guiding lights for the work that we do.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: I'm so glad you led with that Alistair because the next thing I wanted to ask you about-- and MaryJane, we'll get to your question in just a moment, I see it in the chat-- is we often speak of leaders fostering innovation. It's very easy to fall into that trope of talking about what leadership is doing, but that truly invites a narrow perspective. And so I'm wondering, starting with you Alistair and maybe speaking more about this agile framework, could you speak about how you incorporate diverse voices as you advance cultural efforts.
ALISTAIR REECE: Absolutely. I think one of the things that we kind of need to separate in our minds here, though, is the difference between management and leadership. They're not necessarily the same groups of people. It can sometimes be a little bit of a cliche that leadership can come from anywhere within the organization, but it's really true. And so for us at GSW, how we identify those leaders within the organization is through cross-functional teams.
ALISTAIR REECE: For a long time it's very easy for product to become siloed over here and marketing and sales over here and they don't talk to each other. So one of the things that we've implemented that is-- we've seen great benefit from is having cross-functional teams where, for example, we have an ebooks program that was very much kind of left over here to do its own thing. And once we brought together our sales team, the technical side with product management, as well as customer service and we understood the issues that were being faced within the ebooks program, we could start working through them and incrementally making them better and better.
ALISTAIR REECE: Because, finally, we were actually talking to each other kind of face to face on a Zoom meeting rather than talking about each other in our own silos and making assumptions as to what other people were doing, was happening that weren't necessarily true. And so we've seen our ebooks program improve in the last couple of years because of that cross-functional bringing together of perspectives and understandings that makes the sum of the parts greater.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: I love that approach and I couldn't agree more. I'm wondering, Ann, how you think about tapping into those leaders, not conflating leadership and management but the true leaders in your organization as you navigate change.
ANN MICHAEL: So it's interesting. As Alistair was talking, I found myself a couple of times writing something down and literally you said it right after I wrote it. So I think there's a lot of alignment here. The idea of cross-functional teaming is huge, the idea of as appropriate and possible, bringing together different voices. One of the things at AIP publishing that we ran into was prior to the pandemic, in a very physically, in-person oriented office environment, AIP would hire locally.
ANN MICHAEL: They would hire from Long Island where they're located, AIP Publishing. I was born and raised on Long Island to just out of-- just in a weird coincidence. And there's not a lot of other publishing houses that are there. So we would get individuals, really smart folks who would come and work at different issues and they built a very successful publishing house on Long Island, however, they didn't always have the opportunity to have cross-fertilization.
ANN MICHAEL: And so what we've seen since the pandemic is that I believe something like-- and I can get the exact number but I want to say it's something like 40 out of the last 42 hires have not been on Long Island. There's nothing wrong with Long Island but the idea is where these people have come from are diverse experiences with different organizations. So we have one guy that just joined us from American Express, we have people that joined us from other publishers, we have people that joined us from other service providers, and so that has been really helpful in getting different perspectives around the table.
ANN MICHAEL: The one thing we do struggle with still, and I think organizations have to struggle with, is there was also a benefit to everyone being together. And so now we're working through how to really optimize this kind of remote first work environment. And some of the things that I think Alistair alluded to as he was talking, we're getting really good coaching and education on now. And, for example, one of them is when you don't see someone and you don't interact with them, you can accidentally fill in the blanks in a way that are not actually accurate.
ANN MICHAEL: You can assume different motivations. You basically create a narrative around a circumstance. And it's been very interesting to work with folks to say, OK, what do we actually know is happening here? And what we don't know, let's just go ask and let's work that through. I mean, so I think that the diversity-- again, back to the question, the cross-functional teaming is huge.
ANN MICHAEL: The inter-dispersing team that had been very geographically contained and extending to other geographics, which included other previous experiences, has been really, really helpful. And the idea of really encouraging people to be reflective about what they're seeing and understand how much of what they're seeing is something they need to inquire about. They need to ask questions before we fill in the gaps with potentially inaccurate or incomplete information.
ANN MICHAEL: And that's been really helpful, the whole training aspect.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, that's terrific. I'd love that you're incorporating this idea of cultural competency and just really interrogating your own assumptions and being self-aware about that. Barbara, getting back to the cultural framework that you introduced, how does that show up for you as you think about incorporating diverse leadership perspectives into this idea of cultural transformation?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Well, I think if we actually looked at the two dimensions on which all of those eight types of company culture are on, one of them is about how receptive you are to change. One is flexibility, the other is stability that you look for that. The three areas that our staff together decided on are all on the upper two quadrants of wanting to be more flexible. Now, that doesn't happen overnight.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: There will be people who are going to be incredibly flexible. For example, we opened up a walled garden of ChatGPT to the whole staff. And said, just go experiment. Let's see what can happen with this, right. At the same time we started an AI committee where people who are super interested in AI could go and talk about use cases and those kinds of things. And that was across all four of our divisions and across all levels.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And so we have somebody who is responsible for writing copy in our marketing group in there, along with our CIO. But I'll get-- maybe I should tell the story that you asked me to tell about this AI and experimenting. So lots of people were experimenting with AI, and I thought, OK, well, we've gone through all this culture work. I can just put it out there, everybody will start experimenting.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: But we have this meeting called Let's Chat, where after COVID I decided we needed to all get together in an informal way and get to know each other again. And we talk about various things. And we're talking about AI, and I was asking people to share their experimentation. And one person raised their hand and said, I really need some guidance here. We need some kind of policy because I'm afraid I'm going to cross the line and get fired for doing something.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So here we thought we were up in this flexibility area, but there was some people who still felt that they needed a little more safety in doing this. The safety aspect of our culture. Which is fine, we're not trying to wipe out safety. So, of course, I first said, nobody's going to get fired for this. I want people to experiment. But right away after that meeting, I went up to my office and asked ChatGPT to write me a policy.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And edited that, got it out, and we've been making great progress ever since. And so there are surprising aspects to your culture. There's culture that's going to be a little bit legacy there, but reacting to that quickly is also incredibly important. And that person was so thrilled that we all found that to be important. And she was probably speaking for other people who weren't speaking up.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Exactly Barbara. And I love that what you're illustrating, right, is the process of recognizing your own privilege as a leader. You know nobody's going to get in trouble but it's this realization, like, other people are in different positions of power in the organization, and so important to invite those diverse voices and then be responsive. Because as you said, those who dare to speak up are likely representing a multiplicity of perspectives that you haven't yet recognized.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yes, go ahead.
ANN MICHAEL: I just wanted to jump in there because, Barbara, I think that is such a huge and important point. And that is, again, going back to the opening to walk the line between there are some things that the culture that is present. Like it's not like that culture is bad or wrong, and there are attributes that are gold. And one of those is people that really understand what's going on. And so to make sure that folks who feel like, for lack of a better term, they haven't completely drunk the Kool-Aid, they need a voice too.
ANN MICHAEL: They need to be able to say, hey, is this not right? Or I'm not sure about this. So I find it like courageous that someone even said, hey, I could get fired for this. And if that's what some people are believing, then it's an important thing that needs to be stated.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, absolutely.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Yeah, it was a good lesson. Good lesson for me as a leader, right.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, yeah. We're going to-- I'm going to pivot to MaryJane Newton's question here in the chat because it does go to an aspect of the change management or transition management that we've talked about, which is how do you measure success. And the question is we operate in PE backed environment, how do you show Roi on an innovation capability when the reality is your innovation programs may fail? And I'll say, MaryJane, Silverchair is PE backed, and we have no problem just saying there is a discernible through line between the culture change efforts we've been engaging in and the investments of our people and what then were able to accomplish over here on our AI team.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Like this environment enables that. And we haven't been challenged on that but I do realize that can feel a little bit squishy. So whoever would like to jump in, I'd love for our panelists to share, what are some of the specific ways that you measure the import of these investments?
ALISTAIR REECE: So I think I'll jump in first. At GSW we are a non-profit organization. We are not backed or anything else like that. But when I think about the term return on investment and I think about this idea of innovation programs failing, I mean, we're in the process right now of investigating potential new products and approaches to a new product that we feel within the marketplace has value. And we've been told by stakeholders that they really want us to work towards this particular goal or in this area.
ALISTAIR REECE: And so we have that kind of interest from our stakeholder groups. But when think about that return on investment, what is the return? Is it always financial? And I think that's part of an important thing that we need to keep in mind is that what we have invested so far in the development work that we've done as part of our alpha and beta testing programs has given us many soft benefits in terms of greater engagement with our stakeholder communities.
ALISTAIR REECE: It's given us a better understanding of where researchers in our industry are finding blockers to the research and how we can potentially overcome them with AI tools. And so it has informed where we go next. So at this point, it would be very easy to say, well, we haven't developed this full scale product. Based on the development that we've done, the innovation has failed.
ALISTAIR REECE: And I would argue that no, it hasn't. The innovation has learned, and that's why agile approaches are so important. When we talk about continuous learning, we talk about responding to change. Yes, the aim is to get to a product that we can take out to market, but we need to be learning as we're going and all of that information needs to be informing how we develop next.
ALISTAIR REECE: Because at the end of the day, our researcher community, our primary market, really, the people who are actually consuming the content, consuming the knowledge that is being produced, they're the ones who we ultimately have to make happy. And to get there will take going around and around and around in circles quite a bit-- get a bit more Hegelian, we'll go up and down in spirals. And that investment, that return is soft, but it's so valuable to the organization and to where we go.
ALISTAIR REECE: Because it would be easy just to fling things out at market and go, hey, hey, hey, see what sticks, but been flinging just stuff out to the market, does your target market just give up and walk away because you're not actually listening to what they need? So I would say that the innovation program doesn't fail, it learns. And it has to and continue learning.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: That's absolutely right. And the road to success is littered with failures. You cannot innovate without failing. Ann, Barbara, what would you add?
ANN MICHAEL: So we actually so one of the things that was added to our org structure when we created the transformation office was a product innovation team, small product innovation team. But it is board funded and we did need to make a case to the board to fund this team. And so the approach that we took which kind of, I think, encapsulates a lot of what Alistair was talking about and what you mentioned yourself, Lily, is MaryJane, we started thinking about it this way.
ANN MICHAEL: There's a period of time in which an innovation function-- whether it's AI innovation or any kind of innovation-- is in that foundational set up phase. You have to set up the funnel. So you can't be saying, well, this is going to create X amount of money on year two. So the way we presented it was the first metrics we have for the first few years, it would be probably two to three years of the innovation function is-- and this isn't always the best but it's all we have with activity-based.
ANN MICHAEL: How many inquiries are we doing into the market? How many problems did we identify to be solved? How many prototypes did we build? What information did we get on those prototypes? How many of those prototypes did we evolve, sunset, or progress in another way? And so that's the one thing. The second thing I would say to you is that to present your innovation as a portfolio.
ANN MICHAEL: So it's always going to be difficult if you're seeking one potential product or idea and you're, kind of, hanging everything on that. Whereas if you say, we have a portfolio and our goal is to produce x number of products or features-- I don't know what environment you're in, but another thing we found is some of what we're learning in the product innovation team aren't really meaty enough to be products, but they could be features.
ANN MICHAEL: They could be added on to other things. And so one is some kind of a funnel, two is think about it as a portfolio. And the third is take really small steps, as small as you can but more frequently so that you can show progress. You can say, we tried this, we learned this. Because of this learning we're not going to invest x dollars here, we're going to go here. So that learning had value in a tangible way because without it, we might have wasted or, maybe had not had the best return on this other investment.
ANN MICHAEL: So that's kind of the way we're approaching it. But there will come a time when you're going to have to associate dollars with this. It's just that it depending on the kind of products you're building, that might be two to five years from now, and you have to build up the tolerance to understand what's happening in the meantime.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, thanks so much for that, Ann. And that's an important reminder that we're not just measuring, the big long term accomplishments, it's measuring the smaller steps along the way and testing your hypotheses and iterating in the way that you innovate. Barbara, I'd love to give you the final word on this question. How do you measure success?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So I think the question that was asked was more about innovation, the measuring success piece of it, when measuring success on culture it's one thing, if we're measuring success on innovation, of course, that's a little bit different.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: How do you measure the Roi? Yes, thanks for the clarification.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Yeah. For our measure of success on innovations, of course, it is absolutely whether or not a product, a new product that we put out there, for example, new business model that we're putting out, is subscribed to open. And so there are little-- like Anne said, there are little pieces of success to that, right. How many publishers for Project Muse can we attract to subscribe to open?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So we just-- we thought we might get 50 journals into that program, that was going to be a big jump for that, we ended up with 100. So we're super excited about that. So the next is, are libraries going to support this? And so in 2025, beginning of 2025, we'll know that. So right now we're moving along on successes, but we also know-- and kind of a cool thing is that failure is part of the subscribe to open model, right?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So I think I gave a talk at some point called failure is always an option in subscribe to open, so that's just part of that particular model. But that also gives us an opportunity to talk about failure. And that if this does fail, that tells us something about the market and we'll need to pivot and do something else or try again the next year. So we also are measuring as we go along.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: The Roi for culture is hard. We do take surveys. I firmly believe that if we had not done this culture work, we would not be as far along as we are in experimenting with AI. And that was the reason for doing this culture work, that we all needed to be sort of rowing in a similar direction, not necessarily the same direction, in order for us to be able to be successful going forward.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And a lot of the, the measure of culture is people who want to work here in their interviews say, I want to work here because I know what your culture is like. And we're promoting that culture and people talk. And then when people get here they say, I don't understand why you had to do that culture work. Well, you weren't here then, so we needed to do this culture work to get us ready to change and to get us ready to move forward.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, that's right. Barbara, it's sometimes hard to crisply substantiate but it shows up in the commentary, It's very clear. Like if you can attract and retain the best, if your customers, if your community is happy, that's where it starts to show up. That's where you see echoes of this important work. Before I move to our final question, for fun, I'd like each of you to briefly share what not to do. Like, what are some real innovation culture killers that those who attend this webinar need to try to avoid?
LILY GARCIA WALTON: For me it's like anything that stokes fear.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: I would say not allowing failure.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, exactly.
ANN MICHAEL: So the first thing that came to my head-- and this is kind of a personal thing too that I've kind of always watching for-- is really be mindful of how you're speaking with people because silly things like using the word like, well, just this or only this or there are these little qualifiers that can really just burst someone's bubble. So what I try to think about is regardless of my opinion, my gut first opinion of an idea or something that someone is talking with me about, can I just take that and put it over here and just ask some questions?
ANN MICHAEL: So I think the worst thing that you can do in an environment is think you know what someone means without asking. I have found that to be, yes, of course, we could talk about risk aversion and some of these other things, but just at a fundamental human to human level, I feel as though thinking you already know the answer, thinking you already know someone's intent or meaning without asking fundamentally creates misaligned expectations and a lot of turmoil where there doesn't need to be turmoil.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So can I just quickly add on to that because Ann talked about this? And one of the main ways in which you can honor somebody's dignity is to give them the benefit of the doubt. And I think that's what Ann is talking about. So not assume intent, but give that person the benefit of the doubt. And that's one of our top 10 ways of honoring other's dignity.
ANN MICHAEL: And to be curious, to truly be curious.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Alistair.
ALISTAIR REECE: When it comes to squashing a culture of innovation, I mean, really, Ann and Barbara said everything that I would have said anyway. I would also add, though, that the very term innovation can be terrifying to people. How many times have we sat in-- earlier in our careers have we sat in a room with the leadership of that day and they said, right, we're going to innovate, and everybody cringes.
ALISTAIR REECE: And everybody goes, oh god, now I've got to think of big ideas in the moment, in the pressure of this meeting. And, really, what we need to do is-- one of the things that we've implemented at GeoScienceWorld is a tool that we use called the innovation canvas where if you have an idea, we have a structured format that you sit down by yourself and you thrash out your idea to the best of your ability and then bring it to the collective to help bring more perspectives.
ALISTAIR REECE: And we've seen that approach leads to programs that we've launched this year. Had we sat in a meeting and said, OK, who's got ideas? Some of those things would never have come up. And so I think we need to de-terrify innovation, if that's a phrase.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yes, yeah.
ANN MICHAEL: Alistair, adding on to that, you just made me think of this. Like, I think one thing you have to be really careful of and it's so easy to have happen is it's not like the cool kids versus everyone else. And what I mean by that is innovation, new ideas, new ways of doing things come in all shapes and sizes from all over the place. And you never want anyone in the organization to feel that somehow they're excluded.
ANN MICHAEL: Like, I actually kind of don't like in a way having a group called product innovation because product innovation occurs everywhere. And I've tried to be really clear that this is just a hub and a clearinghouse and it's working, but it doesn't mean that it's cornered the market on innovation in the organization. So I think that could be crippling, really, if people think that innovation is someone else's job and it's not just their own natural interest in what they do and their curiosity about what happens in the world or what happens in someone else's world.
ANN MICHAEL: It doesn't have to be. You don't have to only think about what you do and how it could do better, you have eyes. Like you might see something else in another place. So having that feeling, you can do that. So I will probably bend over backwards not to use the word empowered because it just pisses me off because it sounds like-- it just sounds so God like. I'm empowering you, like seriously?
ANN MICHAEL: So I would rather think if people feel that belonging and they feel that they're part of this team, they're going to feel safe to talk about things in their world and maybe in their adjacent world, because the reality is the whole organization is their world. It's not just where they might sit every day.
ALISTAIR REECE: Yeah, and I think also it's worth saying that innovation is not just about new product. We tend to think like, I need a new business line, I need a new product, innovation can be something as simple as on your internal intranet, creating a page that has everybody's details in a single place and helps everybody else. That's an innovation as well and it's just as valuable. And I think you're right, it's very easy for.
ALISTAIR REECE: more introverted, quieter people to fall out of the loop because when you get in that big meeting situation, it's the same people who always talk. And we've got to have more voices, a multiplicity of voices within the organization. And they don't have to be spoken voices, they can be written voices, they can be-- just we've got to find ways to get people to communicate so that we can learn from everybody within our culture.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: That's a really good point, Alistair. And it makes me think about when we were working on our first strategic plan and we wanted as many ideas as possible, and so we had workshops and people could be in meetings and talk. But in addition we use this platform called IdeaScale where anybody could put any ideas in there and then you could vote on them and that kind of thing. And I think Ann talked earlier about a filter, it had that kind of thing on it so we got a lot of good ideas from that.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: You're right, from people who wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable speaking up in a meeting. And no matter how well you build your culture, you're not turning people from introverts into extroverts. I mean, that's just not going to happen.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: And I'm really struck from each of you the way in which you're embodying the kind of culture that you want to create. I mean, that these leadership principles that invoke humility and inclusivity and just humbly elevating the voices of others are so necessary to demystify innovation and to create the kind of safety that does allow people to come forward with ideas that might otherwise be overlooked.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: So thank you. Thank you very much for sharing those valuable perspectives. I'd love to pivot to some questions, and there's a question around how, if at all, the change that AI innovation has brought feels different from other changes that we've navigated as an industry. Is there something that's qualitatively different now or is this just another change?
ANN MICHAEL: Speed, that is quantitatively different. No, obviously, we've had-- and not that we've always done it well, in all honesty-- we've had time, more time to adapt to different changes. And I think the speed at which all of a sudden we're starting to realize that things are being adopted, things can make certain jobs easier, are we going to be at a disadvantage if our production process doesn't include x or y and someone else's does.
ANN MICHAEL: And that speed means it's all hands on deck. And all hands on deck means is those hands need to trust each other. And so it goes back to culture again. It goes back to-- it always-- all roads lead to culture. So I don't know, that was just the first thing that hit me when you said-- it was like, this is really fast.
ANN MICHAEL: And the only way to deal with something that's super fast is to just go-- [SIGH] and let go. You have to let go because you're trying to hold on to anything, it's like the waves are just going to crash. So let go and kind of figure things out a little more flexibly. And that's really hard, especially in our case for an industry of scientists, and like-- and not scientists are used to things changing, but that detail orientation of how you prove something out.
ANN MICHAEL: And I just had a conversation like literally yesterday that said, you know, I know it's best practice to do x, however, in this case, since I feel we need certain guidance, I think it's better for us to just do y and get the feedback based on that. So rather than going through this, let's do this market research first, then let's figure out the job that needs to be done, then let's put it-- I was like, let's pick something and test it.
ANN MICHAEL: And when we do, they'll tell us where we screwed up and we'll move. Because no matter what happens, even if we listen to them, we are going to screw up. So let's just start.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, that's right. And Alistair, when we were preparing for this session you mentioned-- you said something about the printing press. So it's not like the printing press--
ALISTAIR REECE: I mean, I think Ann's completely right that it is the speed of change, that is the big driving force behind AI. When we were talking-- we've as a culture or as a society, we've gone through inflections of major change like this before. The invention of the printing press was revolutionary. Maybe the scriveners were sitting in the monastery worrying about they were going to be unemployed because of the invention of the printing press, and then we did it the same when the internet became a thing.
ALISTAIR REECE: So we are as a species given to development and want constantly improving and constantly wanting something better, quicker, faster. And I think we need to remember that fact that this isn't the one great change that has happened in the last 500 years. It is the end product, perhaps, of the printing press. It's where we've got to as we have developed over the last 500 years.
ALISTAIR REECE: So I don't feel as though there's anything substantively new beyond the speed of the change. And I feel that-- I remember when the internet-- I'm showing my age now-- I remember when the internet came out. I remember AOL disks on the front of a magazine and all that fun stuff. And I remember being stunned at the speed of being able to find stuff then.
ALISTAIR REECE: And so it's that same reaction again. So I think Ann's absolutely spot on, it's all just speed.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Thanks, Alistair. Barbara, would you agree?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Absolutely, I'm nodding my head constantly. Yes, it is the speed. And, yes, I was in-- I started in published in 1983, I believe so I was here for the internet. And I was marketing director and thought that as we were putting books online, free to read at the National Academies to meet our mission, that my job would definitely go away. And it didn't.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: It made the discovery of our content so much broader and just allowed us to meet our mission so much better. So there's always that fear factor at the beginning when these things come on, and AI has the same fear factor for ethics and bias. I don't mean to belittle those, we need to think about those too. But we also need to think about harnessing the best of AI. And as Ann said, our competitiveness gets to us too.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Like if we don't do this, we're going to end up behind. And AI has similar kinds of things to the internet. It can not only change your job, but it could change all of our business models. And the way in which people seek out information may change very dramatically, and we better be on top of that.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah. So it's both speed and intensity perhaps. So we are coming to a close here and so I'd like to leave you with one final question. You're all very far along on this journey and I so appreciate your wisdom and the thoughtfulness with which you presented these ideas. I'm wondering if you could just step back and for those who are just getting started on this journey, who are just beginning, what is one practical piece of advice that you could give?
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Where do you even start? And I'm not going to play hide the ball, let's go with Ann, Alistair, and, Barbara, you can close us out.
ANN MICHAEL: So, actually, I'm going to interpret that question around AI and innovation, not necessarily around culture, just to get back to the series roots here. So I think that you start-- and I think this would probably apply with culture too-- you start by experimenting. You start by saying, what's a thing I could do? And try it. And not allowing yourself to get mired in the, well, this won't work because of this and this won't work because of this and this won't work because of this.
ANN MICHAEL: So the way we got started at AIP with our AI initiatives was very simple. What would happen if we took 5,000 open access articles and basically-- you know, and got someone to build us a little chatbot-- because that was before GPTs-- so that we could interact with that and see what it does. And so we just did that and we started to ask questions and we said, wouldn't it be great if we could ask this question or it would be great if we could ask it that question.
ANN MICHAEL: And then we started to brainstorm use cases and what we could do. And then we looked at the environment and we said, OK, well, this use case and this use case it seems like there's tons of people doing that so let's forget about that. Like, what are the use cases where we then have something special and unique that we can add to it that might be compelling as a feature or a product down the line?
ANN MICHAEL: And so that's how we got started. We got started first by saying, I'm not going to put a business case together for creating a sandbox. I'm just going to create a sandbox and then we're going to figure it out. The business cases will come when we know enough about what we're trying to do and when we need more money, like significant money, but for right now we're just going to keep going.
ANN MICHAEL: And I almost think that culture might be the same way. Like, you get people together and you talk about like, what's the world you want to live in? What's the culture you want to live in? And how does that culture help your organization to be successful? Because let's not forget, it's not the picnic culture in our yard. We're talking about a professional organization that has a mission.
ANN MICHAEL: And to start experimenting with, well, where can we do that? Where can we see how would that impact us working here? How would that impact us working there? And then grow from there rather than trying to define it all up front in advance, the classic old waterfall approach. But, quite frankly, even the agile approach sometimes has almost more overhead to start than I think some of these tiny little experiments require.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Thanks Ann. So don't overthink it, experiment. Begin. Alistair, what have you got?
ALISTAIR REECE: I would say-- I mean, I'm actually going to bring it back to culture from the AI side because there's nothing I could add to what Ann has just said. But I think the first step that you can really make on the culture journey as leaders within an organization is to listen. It's very easy for us to talk. It's very difficult for us to take that step back, shut up for 10 minutes, and just listen to what the people are saying and what they are experiencing and what their concerns are.
ALISTAIR REECE: And then rather than saying, well, here's the solution, say, how do we work this out together? Because I think that's the only way we move forward is by working this out together in a spirit-- in the spirit of the scientific method. Let's try things, fails, try something else, if succeeds we change it again. So we're continually having our development cycles going and moving forward and learning.
ALISTAIR REECE: But I think it comes from listening and being honest. The importance in my own life and in my own career, in a very radical honesty, it's like I call a spade a spade quite often without needing to mention spades at all. But I think it's important to be honest and to listen and to take that time to really hear what other people are saying and understand where they're coming from.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Thank you all, Alistair, stop talking and listen. Barbara.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So I believe that culture is the foundation for success and the foundation for innovation, and that that needs to be a major priority. And you'll find success as you work on your culture as well and experiment with that. And, of course, investing in this process, it costs money to do this, but in the end you will get an Roi from investing in culture.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Wonderful. So you heard it here, folks, invest in culture, experiment, and listen. It's been a delight. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your perspectives with our audience.
Segment:0 .
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Thank you, Stephanie. And welcome again, everyone. I think we can all agree that one of the most obvious outcomes of the advent of AI technologies is change, and with it the need for people and organizations to adapt and to innovate. Therefore, the subject of our timely conversation today is how organizations and their teams can actively foster the culture of innovation that is necessary to survive and thrive through this formidable time.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: I am delighted to be joined by several esteemed co-panelists today. But before we get to the introductions, I'd like to launch a poll. And Stephanie will do that for us. How satisfied are you with the current innovation culture at your organization? And while you take a moment to answer that poll, I'm going to go ahead and introduce our speakers.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: We have with us today Barbara Kline Pope who is Executive Director of Johns Hopkins University Press, as well Ann Michael who is Chief Transformation Officer of AIP Publishing. And then, finally, Alistair Reece who is product manager at GeoScienceWorld. Thank you for joining us today. All right, Stephanie, what have we here?
LILY GARCIA WALTON: OK, well, there is a high degree of satisfaction, I would say, with cultures of innovation, and also some opportunities. And so I'm hoping the conversation today will inform and inspire you and give you some practical tools that you can take back to your organizations to drive the sort of innovation that is necessary today. I would like for each of our speakers to answer the following introductory question.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: What has been your personal experience with actively crafting cultures of innovation in to not just passively allowing change to happen, but how do you get in there and start to create the systems and processes and tools necessary to make satisfactory change possible? And I'd love for Ann to kick us off.
ANN MICHAEL: I had this feeling you were going to begin with me. I've actually been thinking about this, and it's funny because the question that we had on our little prep sheet, I don't think it had actively crafting in it. So one of the things I had in my response that I was thinking about was actively crafting, so I'm really glad that you brought that up. I think that one of the interesting things we're finding right now is that culture has not been actively crafted much.
ANN MICHAEL: We hear stories, but much before the last maybe 10 years. All of a sudden I think what happened is the concreteness of the other levers at the disposal of leaders wound up kind of getting exhausted in a lot of ways, and so they went to culture. And I say that because I think there's some surprises when you get to culture, and I think there are some variations from the previous levers that were used that are worth noting and that I've certainly experienced.
ANN MICHAEL: So it kind of gets back to your question, and that is culture is one of those funny things that is both concrete and not concrete at the exact same time. And so when you start to actively think about who you want to be and what you want to do, it's very easy at the extremes to say what you don't want your culture to do or what you do want it to do. But when you move away from those extremes, it gets difficult.
ANN MICHAEL: Here's an example. I want a transparent culture. Does everybody know everything about everything? That would be one extreme. That would be full, 100% transparency and conversely, zero would be no one except needs to know knows anything about anything. And the reality is you can't just say where you want to be on that continuum often without experimenting, without trying, and without understanding what we're going to try to open up more and more and we're going to see what happens.
ANN MICHAEL: But conversely, the organization itself needs to be ready to consume that transparency in a productive way. So you find out that every aspect, in my opinion, most aspects-- let's not go every-- of culture as we've been playing and-- not playing but working on it, but it is fun-- at AIP and-- just to let people know, I mean, I've also been a consultant for 15 years prior to that, so I've watched a lot of different cultures and a lot of different organizations work to attain a cultural goal to be-- to get to a certain culture.
ANN MICHAEL: And it is a lot harder than a lot of the levers that we've tried to influence in the past. And, ironically, it's even more critical as we're stepping into an environment where, for example, we need to be able to experiment more, we need to be able to consume risk and think about our risk mitigation strategies differently than we have in the past. We need to embark on things that we really don't know about, whereas a lot of people, especially, book and journal publishers, if you're thinking about that 20 years ago, you kind of knew how things worked and you could rely on things working.
ANN MICHAEL: Of course, there were variations, but for the most part-- and now we don't. And so now we're asking people to think about culture change at the same time that the world seems more tumultuous and they want the security of a known and instantiated culture, but that's something that also has to change. And so I think that that-- I mean, I'll leave it at that.
ANN MICHAEL: In my experience, the hard part is figuring out not just where you need to set yourself on these different think of on a radio, an old fashioned equalizer on these different continuum that make up the attributes of the culture you want, but also how you are going to adjust those as time goes on. Because no matter where you are now, I can guarantee you that for certain situations, it's not all the same answer and in the future it'll be a little different.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Ann, I'm so glad that you led with that. As we prepared for this conversation, part of what we discussed is that traditional principles of change management in the current environment kind of start to fail us. And so there's really a call for something that is more iterative and responsive to people as we think about change in this current environment. I'm wondering, Barbara, what you would add to that. What is your personal experience?
LILY GARCIA WALTON: And how does what Ann shared resonate with you?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Before I share the personal experiences that I've had, I just want to say two short things. And one is that organizational culture is incredibly important. Needs to be a priority not just for innovation, but I think for success every day in what we do. So defining your culture allows us to have common language and to be explicit. Like you said, actively crafting a culture allows us to make sure that people understand our goals and our culture.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So I wanted to say that one thing. The second thing that I want to say is that culture work is never done. There are times when people say, when are we going to be done with this work? And the answer is never. And some people don't like that answer but that's absolutely the truth. So I've had a very long career with most of my experience with culture in the last six years, believe it or not.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: I've been in publishing for 40 some years. But we did do some culture work when I worked at the National Academies, which is where I was before this. And I was head of publishing and communications there. And in the late '80s and early '90s, we went through reorganizing ourselves completely into self-directed work teams, and that required a lot of culture work. And we had a consultant help us with that work, and the same consultant I called when I got to Hopkins six years ago to help us actively work on our culture here.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And at that time we worked with scores of our staff members across our organization to define our current culture, to decide what future culture we wanted for ourselves, and then to work on activities to fill in that gap from our current culture to the culture that we wanted to see. And we decided together that that's what we wanted to do. And we used the framework called eight types of company culture because we started to work on this.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: We did surveys, we did in-depth interviews, and then we found that we really needed some kind of framework to base our measure of our current culture on and to look at our future culture. And that's our research-based framework that was led by a team by Boris Groysberg. And it was published in Harvard Business Review. Seems like a long time ago now. It was 2018.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: But I came to Hopkins in 2017 when we started to work on our culture and it seemed very good then, and we continue to think that it's a very good framework for at least for us to use. So in that framework, there are eight types of company culture. And what we decided over the course of a really long time trying to define all of this is that we wanted a culture that was more heavily weighted on learning, caring, and job fulfillment.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And less weighted on what we defined as our current culture, which was safety, purpose, and order. The thing I really like about this framework is that none of these types of company culture are negative. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of them. So I encourage all of you to go read this and get an idea of this framework. But in the middle of this really long time that we were building our culture, we read a book by Donna Hicks called Leading With Dignity.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And we had her come and talk to the press about this book because when I first read it, I saw a lot of links to this framework that we were using and the way in which we wanted to build our culture and the way in which we wanted to define how we treat each other every day in our work. So we were so inspired by that, that those concepts of honoring other people's dignity is the foundation of our culture work.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: On top of that is the learning, caring, and fulfilling and all of the activities that go to that. So, together, that's the infrastructure that we use. So in a very short period of time, that's my experience with building cultures of innovation and cultures of success.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: That's so beautifully stated, Barbara. I couldn't agree more about culture being a priority in the worst and best of times, right. Culture isn't just a tool that we use to manage change. It is necessary to the integrity of an organization, the well-being of its people and its success. So I really appreciate you elevating that. And also the importance of actively engaging staff, culture is not something we impose on people. It is something the organization tells us about, and that we then encapsulate and play back.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Alistair, as we turn to you, one of the things that you said as we were preparing for this session is your organization is about 12 people, right? So it's significantly smaller than Barbara's. It's about 1/10 the size. And as you talk about your experience with managing cultural change around innovation, I'm wondering if you could speak to what might be some of those differences for people who are attending the webinar and are in smaller organizations trying to manage change?
ALISTAIR REECE: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we are a much smaller organization at GeoScienceWorld. I think we are about 12, 14 people right now. And so for us its-- culture is very personal to the entire group because we do spend a lot of time speaking with each other, meeting with each other. It's very difficult in a small organization of only 12 people to end up being siloed because we're constantly interacting with each other.
ALISTAIR REECE: But one of the things that I have felt throughout my career, both in scholarly publishing-- I've been at GeoScienceWorld for six years, I was with Silverchair for a while before that, but also when I worked overseas in the Czech Republic managing language schools-- was the importance of open communication and how you really cannot create any form of culture within an organization where people can thrive.
ALISTAIR REECE: And, really, you need people to be thriving in order to innovate without open communication. And so there were several times when I would take on management leadership role within a new language school that had had a very domineering management system where people were just told, this is what you do, and it was very strict. And the minute you opened up the communication and allowed people to give their opinions because we had-- people have a wealth of experience that they need to share, it releases some kind of energy within them to be finally, I'm being listened to.
ALISTAIR REECE: And so coming forward to GeoScienceWorld, one of the things that we've been really focused on in the last couple of years, two to three years, is undergoing a form of agile transformation. And when I say agile transformation, I don't mean necessarily implementing one of the popular methodologies like Scrum or Kanban or Safe or extreme programming, because that wouldn't be appropriate to an organization of our size.
ALISTAIR REECE: What I'm really thinking here is-- and to get a little bit Martin Luther and go ad fontes-- going back to the Agile Manifesto and the four values that were originally written down in the Agile Manifesto of valuing certain characteristics over other characteristics. So, for example, valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools, valuing impactful outcomes over comprehensive documentation.
ALISTAIR REECE: Yes, originally coming out of software, the original version was working software, I'm not going to create working software. However, being agile we can create impactful outcomes. Also valuing customer collaboration. And then the final one, you're being responsive to change. And so for us, thinking about those four values, it's all about an agile mindset. And that's the culture that we're trying to create, is an agile culture that really focuses in on those four values as guiding lights for the work that we do.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: I'm so glad you led with that Alistair because the next thing I wanted to ask you about-- and MaryJane, we'll get to your question in just a moment, I see it in the chat-- is we often speak of leaders fostering innovation. It's very easy to fall into that trope of talking about what leadership is doing, but that truly invites a narrow perspective. And so I'm wondering, starting with you Alistair and maybe speaking more about this agile framework, could you speak about how you incorporate diverse voices as you advance cultural efforts.
ALISTAIR REECE: Absolutely. I think one of the things that we kind of need to separate in our minds here, though, is the difference between management and leadership. They're not necessarily the same groups of people. It can sometimes be a little bit of a cliche that leadership can come from anywhere within the organization, but it's really true. And so for us at GSW, how we identify those leaders within the organization is through cross-functional teams.
ALISTAIR REECE: For a long time it's very easy for product to become siloed over here and marketing and sales over here and they don't talk to each other. So one of the things that we've implemented that is-- we've seen great benefit from is having cross-functional teams where, for example, we have an ebooks program that was very much kind of left over here to do its own thing. And once we brought together our sales team, the technical side with product management, as well as customer service and we understood the issues that were being faced within the ebooks program, we could start working through them and incrementally making them better and better.
ALISTAIR REECE: Because, finally, we were actually talking to each other kind of face to face on a Zoom meeting rather than talking about each other in our own silos and making assumptions as to what other people were doing, was happening that weren't necessarily true. And so we've seen our ebooks program improve in the last couple of years because of that cross-functional bringing together of perspectives and understandings that makes the sum of the parts greater.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: I love that approach and I couldn't agree more. I'm wondering, Ann, how you think about tapping into those leaders, not conflating leadership and management but the true leaders in your organization as you navigate change.
ANN MICHAEL: So it's interesting. As Alistair was talking, I found myself a couple of times writing something down and literally you said it right after I wrote it. So I think there's a lot of alignment here. The idea of cross-functional teaming is huge, the idea of as appropriate and possible, bringing together different voices. One of the things at AIP publishing that we ran into was prior to the pandemic, in a very physically, in-person oriented office environment, AIP would hire locally.
ANN MICHAEL: They would hire from Long Island where they're located, AIP Publishing. I was born and raised on Long Island to just out of-- just in a weird coincidence. And there's not a lot of other publishing houses that are there. So we would get individuals, really smart folks who would come and work at different issues and they built a very successful publishing house on Long Island, however, they didn't always have the opportunity to have cross-fertilization.
ANN MICHAEL: And so what we've seen since the pandemic is that I believe something like-- and I can get the exact number but I want to say it's something like 40 out of the last 42 hires have not been on Long Island. There's nothing wrong with Long Island but the idea is where these people have come from are diverse experiences with different organizations. So we have one guy that just joined us from American Express, we have people that joined us from other publishers, we have people that joined us from other service providers, and so that has been really helpful in getting different perspectives around the table.
ANN MICHAEL: The one thing we do struggle with still, and I think organizations have to struggle with, is there was also a benefit to everyone being together. And so now we're working through how to really optimize this kind of remote first work environment. And some of the things that I think Alistair alluded to as he was talking, we're getting really good coaching and education on now. And, for example, one of them is when you don't see someone and you don't interact with them, you can accidentally fill in the blanks in a way that are not actually accurate.
ANN MICHAEL: You can assume different motivations. You basically create a narrative around a circumstance. And it's been very interesting to work with folks to say, OK, what do we actually know is happening here? And what we don't know, let's just go ask and let's work that through. I mean, so I think that the diversity-- again, back to the question, the cross-functional teaming is huge.
ANN MICHAEL: The inter-dispersing team that had been very geographically contained and extending to other geographics, which included other previous experiences, has been really, really helpful. And the idea of really encouraging people to be reflective about what they're seeing and understand how much of what they're seeing is something they need to inquire about. They need to ask questions before we fill in the gaps with potentially inaccurate or incomplete information.
ANN MICHAEL: And that's been really helpful, the whole training aspect.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, that's terrific. I'd love that you're incorporating this idea of cultural competency and just really interrogating your own assumptions and being self-aware about that. Barbara, getting back to the cultural framework that you introduced, how does that show up for you as you think about incorporating diverse leadership perspectives into this idea of cultural transformation?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Well, I think if we actually looked at the two dimensions on which all of those eight types of company culture are on, one of them is about how receptive you are to change. One is flexibility, the other is stability that you look for that. The three areas that our staff together decided on are all on the upper two quadrants of wanting to be more flexible. Now, that doesn't happen overnight.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: There will be people who are going to be incredibly flexible. For example, we opened up a walled garden of ChatGPT to the whole staff. And said, just go experiment. Let's see what can happen with this, right. At the same time we started an AI committee where people who are super interested in AI could go and talk about use cases and those kinds of things. And that was across all four of our divisions and across all levels.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And so we have somebody who is responsible for writing copy in our marketing group in there, along with our CIO. But I'll get-- maybe I should tell the story that you asked me to tell about this AI and experimenting. So lots of people were experimenting with AI, and I thought, OK, well, we've gone through all this culture work. I can just put it out there, everybody will start experimenting.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: But we have this meeting called Let's Chat, where after COVID I decided we needed to all get together in an informal way and get to know each other again. And we talk about various things. And we're talking about AI, and I was asking people to share their experimentation. And one person raised their hand and said, I really need some guidance here. We need some kind of policy because I'm afraid I'm going to cross the line and get fired for doing something.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So here we thought we were up in this flexibility area, but there was some people who still felt that they needed a little more safety in doing this. The safety aspect of our culture. Which is fine, we're not trying to wipe out safety. So, of course, I first said, nobody's going to get fired for this. I want people to experiment. But right away after that meeting, I went up to my office and asked ChatGPT to write me a policy.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And edited that, got it out, and we've been making great progress ever since. And so there are surprising aspects to your culture. There's culture that's going to be a little bit legacy there, but reacting to that quickly is also incredibly important. And that person was so thrilled that we all found that to be important. And she was probably speaking for other people who weren't speaking up.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Exactly Barbara. And I love that what you're illustrating, right, is the process of recognizing your own privilege as a leader. You know nobody's going to get in trouble but it's this realization, like, other people are in different positions of power in the organization, and so important to invite those diverse voices and then be responsive. Because as you said, those who dare to speak up are likely representing a multiplicity of perspectives that you haven't yet recognized.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yes, go ahead.
ANN MICHAEL: I just wanted to jump in there because, Barbara, I think that is such a huge and important point. And that is, again, going back to the opening to walk the line between there are some things that the culture that is present. Like it's not like that culture is bad or wrong, and there are attributes that are gold. And one of those is people that really understand what's going on. And so to make sure that folks who feel like, for lack of a better term, they haven't completely drunk the Kool-Aid, they need a voice too.
ANN MICHAEL: They need to be able to say, hey, is this not right? Or I'm not sure about this. So I find it like courageous that someone even said, hey, I could get fired for this. And if that's what some people are believing, then it's an important thing that needs to be stated.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, absolutely.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Yeah, it was a good lesson. Good lesson for me as a leader, right.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, yeah. We're going to-- I'm going to pivot to MaryJane Newton's question here in the chat because it does go to an aspect of the change management or transition management that we've talked about, which is how do you measure success. And the question is we operate in PE backed environment, how do you show Roi on an innovation capability when the reality is your innovation programs may fail? And I'll say, MaryJane, Silverchair is PE backed, and we have no problem just saying there is a discernible through line between the culture change efforts we've been engaging in and the investments of our people and what then were able to accomplish over here on our AI team.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Like this environment enables that. And we haven't been challenged on that but I do realize that can feel a little bit squishy. So whoever would like to jump in, I'd love for our panelists to share, what are some of the specific ways that you measure the import of these investments?
ALISTAIR REECE: So I think I'll jump in first. At GSW we are a non-profit organization. We are not backed or anything else like that. But when I think about the term return on investment and I think about this idea of innovation programs failing, I mean, we're in the process right now of investigating potential new products and approaches to a new product that we feel within the marketplace has value. And we've been told by stakeholders that they really want us to work towards this particular goal or in this area.
ALISTAIR REECE: And so we have that kind of interest from our stakeholder groups. But when think about that return on investment, what is the return? Is it always financial? And I think that's part of an important thing that we need to keep in mind is that what we have invested so far in the development work that we've done as part of our alpha and beta testing programs has given us many soft benefits in terms of greater engagement with our stakeholder communities.
ALISTAIR REECE: It's given us a better understanding of where researchers in our industry are finding blockers to the research and how we can potentially overcome them with AI tools. And so it has informed where we go next. So at this point, it would be very easy to say, well, we haven't developed this full scale product. Based on the development that we've done, the innovation has failed.
ALISTAIR REECE: And I would argue that no, it hasn't. The innovation has learned, and that's why agile approaches are so important. When we talk about continuous learning, we talk about responding to change. Yes, the aim is to get to a product that we can take out to market, but we need to be learning as we're going and all of that information needs to be informing how we develop next.
ALISTAIR REECE: Because at the end of the day, our researcher community, our primary market, really, the people who are actually consuming the content, consuming the knowledge that is being produced, they're the ones who we ultimately have to make happy. And to get there will take going around and around and around in circles quite a bit-- get a bit more Hegelian, we'll go up and down in spirals. And that investment, that return is soft, but it's so valuable to the organization and to where we go.
ALISTAIR REECE: Because it would be easy just to fling things out at market and go, hey, hey, hey, see what sticks, but been flinging just stuff out to the market, does your target market just give up and walk away because you're not actually listening to what they need? So I would say that the innovation program doesn't fail, it learns. And it has to and continue learning.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: That's absolutely right. And the road to success is littered with failures. You cannot innovate without failing. Ann, Barbara, what would you add?
ANN MICHAEL: So we actually so one of the things that was added to our org structure when we created the transformation office was a product innovation team, small product innovation team. But it is board funded and we did need to make a case to the board to fund this team. And so the approach that we took which kind of, I think, encapsulates a lot of what Alistair was talking about and what you mentioned yourself, Lily, is MaryJane, we started thinking about it this way.
ANN MICHAEL: There's a period of time in which an innovation function-- whether it's AI innovation or any kind of innovation-- is in that foundational set up phase. You have to set up the funnel. So you can't be saying, well, this is going to create X amount of money on year two. So the way we presented it was the first metrics we have for the first few years, it would be probably two to three years of the innovation function is-- and this isn't always the best but it's all we have with activity-based.
ANN MICHAEL: How many inquiries are we doing into the market? How many problems did we identify to be solved? How many prototypes did we build? What information did we get on those prototypes? How many of those prototypes did we evolve, sunset, or progress in another way? And so that's the one thing. The second thing I would say to you is that to present your innovation as a portfolio.
ANN MICHAEL: So it's always going to be difficult if you're seeking one potential product or idea and you're, kind of, hanging everything on that. Whereas if you say, we have a portfolio and our goal is to produce x number of products or features-- I don't know what environment you're in, but another thing we found is some of what we're learning in the product innovation team aren't really meaty enough to be products, but they could be features.
ANN MICHAEL: They could be added on to other things. And so one is some kind of a funnel, two is think about it as a portfolio. And the third is take really small steps, as small as you can but more frequently so that you can show progress. You can say, we tried this, we learned this. Because of this learning we're not going to invest x dollars here, we're going to go here. So that learning had value in a tangible way because without it, we might have wasted or, maybe had not had the best return on this other investment.
ANN MICHAEL: So that's kind of the way we're approaching it. But there will come a time when you're going to have to associate dollars with this. It's just that it depending on the kind of products you're building, that might be two to five years from now, and you have to build up the tolerance to understand what's happening in the meantime.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, thanks so much for that, Ann. And that's an important reminder that we're not just measuring, the big long term accomplishments, it's measuring the smaller steps along the way and testing your hypotheses and iterating in the way that you innovate. Barbara, I'd love to give you the final word on this question. How do you measure success?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So I think the question that was asked was more about innovation, the measuring success piece of it, when measuring success on culture it's one thing, if we're measuring success on innovation, of course, that's a little bit different.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: How do you measure the Roi? Yes, thanks for the clarification.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Yeah. For our measure of success on innovations, of course, it is absolutely whether or not a product, a new product that we put out there, for example, new business model that we're putting out, is subscribed to open. And so there are little-- like Anne said, there are little pieces of success to that, right. How many publishers for Project Muse can we attract to subscribe to open?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So we just-- we thought we might get 50 journals into that program, that was going to be a big jump for that, we ended up with 100. So we're super excited about that. So the next is, are libraries going to support this? And so in 2025, beginning of 2025, we'll know that. So right now we're moving along on successes, but we also know-- and kind of a cool thing is that failure is part of the subscribe to open model, right?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So I think I gave a talk at some point called failure is always an option in subscribe to open, so that's just part of that particular model. But that also gives us an opportunity to talk about failure. And that if this does fail, that tells us something about the market and we'll need to pivot and do something else or try again the next year. So we also are measuring as we go along.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: The Roi for culture is hard. We do take surveys. I firmly believe that if we had not done this culture work, we would not be as far along as we are in experimenting with AI. And that was the reason for doing this culture work, that we all needed to be sort of rowing in a similar direction, not necessarily the same direction, in order for us to be able to be successful going forward.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: And a lot of the, the measure of culture is people who want to work here in their interviews say, I want to work here because I know what your culture is like. And we're promoting that culture and people talk. And then when people get here they say, I don't understand why you had to do that culture work. Well, you weren't here then, so we needed to do this culture work to get us ready to change and to get us ready to move forward.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, that's right. Barbara, it's sometimes hard to crisply substantiate but it shows up in the commentary, It's very clear. Like if you can attract and retain the best, if your customers, if your community is happy, that's where it starts to show up. That's where you see echoes of this important work. Before I move to our final question, for fun, I'd like each of you to briefly share what not to do. Like, what are some real innovation culture killers that those who attend this webinar need to try to avoid?
LILY GARCIA WALTON: For me it's like anything that stokes fear.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: I would say not allowing failure.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, exactly.
ANN MICHAEL: So the first thing that came to my head-- and this is kind of a personal thing too that I've kind of always watching for-- is really be mindful of how you're speaking with people because silly things like using the word like, well, just this or only this or there are these little qualifiers that can really just burst someone's bubble. So what I try to think about is regardless of my opinion, my gut first opinion of an idea or something that someone is talking with me about, can I just take that and put it over here and just ask some questions?
ANN MICHAEL: So I think the worst thing that you can do in an environment is think you know what someone means without asking. I have found that to be, yes, of course, we could talk about risk aversion and some of these other things, but just at a fundamental human to human level, I feel as though thinking you already know the answer, thinking you already know someone's intent or meaning without asking fundamentally creates misaligned expectations and a lot of turmoil where there doesn't need to be turmoil.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So can I just quickly add on to that because Ann talked about this? And one of the main ways in which you can honor somebody's dignity is to give them the benefit of the doubt. And I think that's what Ann is talking about. So not assume intent, but give that person the benefit of the doubt. And that's one of our top 10 ways of honoring other's dignity.
ANN MICHAEL: And to be curious, to truly be curious.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Alistair.
ALISTAIR REECE: When it comes to squashing a culture of innovation, I mean, really, Ann and Barbara said everything that I would have said anyway. I would also add, though, that the very term innovation can be terrifying to people. How many times have we sat in-- earlier in our careers have we sat in a room with the leadership of that day and they said, right, we're going to innovate, and everybody cringes.
ALISTAIR REECE: And everybody goes, oh god, now I've got to think of big ideas in the moment, in the pressure of this meeting. And, really, what we need to do is-- one of the things that we've implemented at GeoScienceWorld is a tool that we use called the innovation canvas where if you have an idea, we have a structured format that you sit down by yourself and you thrash out your idea to the best of your ability and then bring it to the collective to help bring more perspectives.
ALISTAIR REECE: And we've seen that approach leads to programs that we've launched this year. Had we sat in a meeting and said, OK, who's got ideas? Some of those things would never have come up. And so I think we need to de-terrify innovation, if that's a phrase.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yes, yeah.
ANN MICHAEL: Alistair, adding on to that, you just made me think of this. Like, I think one thing you have to be really careful of and it's so easy to have happen is it's not like the cool kids versus everyone else. And what I mean by that is innovation, new ideas, new ways of doing things come in all shapes and sizes from all over the place. And you never want anyone in the organization to feel that somehow they're excluded.
ANN MICHAEL: Like, I actually kind of don't like in a way having a group called product innovation because product innovation occurs everywhere. And I've tried to be really clear that this is just a hub and a clearinghouse and it's working, but it doesn't mean that it's cornered the market on innovation in the organization. So I think that could be crippling, really, if people think that innovation is someone else's job and it's not just their own natural interest in what they do and their curiosity about what happens in the world or what happens in someone else's world.
ANN MICHAEL: It doesn't have to be. You don't have to only think about what you do and how it could do better, you have eyes. Like you might see something else in another place. So having that feeling, you can do that. So I will probably bend over backwards not to use the word empowered because it just pisses me off because it sounds like-- it just sounds so God like. I'm empowering you, like seriously?
ANN MICHAEL: So I would rather think if people feel that belonging and they feel that they're part of this team, they're going to feel safe to talk about things in their world and maybe in their adjacent world, because the reality is the whole organization is their world. It's not just where they might sit every day.
ALISTAIR REECE: Yeah, and I think also it's worth saying that innovation is not just about new product. We tend to think like, I need a new business line, I need a new product, innovation can be something as simple as on your internal intranet, creating a page that has everybody's details in a single place and helps everybody else. That's an innovation as well and it's just as valuable. And I think you're right, it's very easy for.
ALISTAIR REECE: more introverted, quieter people to fall out of the loop because when you get in that big meeting situation, it's the same people who always talk. And we've got to have more voices, a multiplicity of voices within the organization. And they don't have to be spoken voices, they can be written voices, they can be-- just we've got to find ways to get people to communicate so that we can learn from everybody within our culture.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: That's a really good point, Alistair. And it makes me think about when we were working on our first strategic plan and we wanted as many ideas as possible, and so we had workshops and people could be in meetings and talk. But in addition we use this platform called IdeaScale where anybody could put any ideas in there and then you could vote on them and that kind of thing. And I think Ann talked earlier about a filter, it had that kind of thing on it so we got a lot of good ideas from that.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: You're right, from people who wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable speaking up in a meeting. And no matter how well you build your culture, you're not turning people from introverts into extroverts. I mean, that's just not going to happen.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: And I'm really struck from each of you the way in which you're embodying the kind of culture that you want to create. I mean, that these leadership principles that invoke humility and inclusivity and just humbly elevating the voices of others are so necessary to demystify innovation and to create the kind of safety that does allow people to come forward with ideas that might otherwise be overlooked.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: So thank you. Thank you very much for sharing those valuable perspectives. I'd love to pivot to some questions, and there's a question around how, if at all, the change that AI innovation has brought feels different from other changes that we've navigated as an industry. Is there something that's qualitatively different now or is this just another change?
ANN MICHAEL: Speed, that is quantitatively different. No, obviously, we've had-- and not that we've always done it well, in all honesty-- we've had time, more time to adapt to different changes. And I think the speed at which all of a sudden we're starting to realize that things are being adopted, things can make certain jobs easier, are we going to be at a disadvantage if our production process doesn't include x or y and someone else's does.
ANN MICHAEL: And that speed means it's all hands on deck. And all hands on deck means is those hands need to trust each other. And so it goes back to culture again. It goes back to-- it always-- all roads lead to culture. So I don't know, that was just the first thing that hit me when you said-- it was like, this is really fast.
ANN MICHAEL: And the only way to deal with something that's super fast is to just go-- [SIGH] and let go. You have to let go because you're trying to hold on to anything, it's like the waves are just going to crash. So let go and kind of figure things out a little more flexibly. And that's really hard, especially in our case for an industry of scientists, and like-- and not scientists are used to things changing, but that detail orientation of how you prove something out.
ANN MICHAEL: And I just had a conversation like literally yesterday that said, you know, I know it's best practice to do x, however, in this case, since I feel we need certain guidance, I think it's better for us to just do y and get the feedback based on that. So rather than going through this, let's do this market research first, then let's figure out the job that needs to be done, then let's put it-- I was like, let's pick something and test it.
ANN MICHAEL: And when we do, they'll tell us where we screwed up and we'll move. Because no matter what happens, even if we listen to them, we are going to screw up. So let's just start.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah, that's right. And Alistair, when we were preparing for this session you mentioned-- you said something about the printing press. So it's not like the printing press--
ALISTAIR REECE: I mean, I think Ann's completely right that it is the speed of change, that is the big driving force behind AI. When we were talking-- we've as a culture or as a society, we've gone through inflections of major change like this before. The invention of the printing press was revolutionary. Maybe the scriveners were sitting in the monastery worrying about they were going to be unemployed because of the invention of the printing press, and then we did it the same when the internet became a thing.
ALISTAIR REECE: So we are as a species given to development and want constantly improving and constantly wanting something better, quicker, faster. And I think we need to remember that fact that this isn't the one great change that has happened in the last 500 years. It is the end product, perhaps, of the printing press. It's where we've got to as we have developed over the last 500 years.
ALISTAIR REECE: So I don't feel as though there's anything substantively new beyond the speed of the change. And I feel that-- I remember when the internet-- I'm showing my age now-- I remember when the internet came out. I remember AOL disks on the front of a magazine and all that fun stuff. And I remember being stunned at the speed of being able to find stuff then.
ALISTAIR REECE: And so it's that same reaction again. So I think Ann's absolutely spot on, it's all just speed.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Thanks, Alistair. Barbara, would you agree?
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Absolutely, I'm nodding my head constantly. Yes, it is the speed. And, yes, I was in-- I started in published in 1983, I believe so I was here for the internet. And I was marketing director and thought that as we were putting books online, free to read at the National Academies to meet our mission, that my job would definitely go away. And it didn't.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: It made the discovery of our content so much broader and just allowed us to meet our mission so much better. So there's always that fear factor at the beginning when these things come on, and AI has the same fear factor for ethics and bias. I don't mean to belittle those, we need to think about those too. But we also need to think about harnessing the best of AI. And as Ann said, our competitiveness gets to us too.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: Like if we don't do this, we're going to end up behind. And AI has similar kinds of things to the internet. It can not only change your job, but it could change all of our business models. And the way in which people seek out information may change very dramatically, and we better be on top of that.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Yeah. So it's both speed and intensity perhaps. So we are coming to a close here and so I'd like to leave you with one final question. You're all very far along on this journey and I so appreciate your wisdom and the thoughtfulness with which you presented these ideas. I'm wondering if you could just step back and for those who are just getting started on this journey, who are just beginning, what is one practical piece of advice that you could give?
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Where do you even start? And I'm not going to play hide the ball, let's go with Ann, Alistair, and, Barbara, you can close us out.
ANN MICHAEL: So, actually, I'm going to interpret that question around AI and innovation, not necessarily around culture, just to get back to the series roots here. So I think that you start-- and I think this would probably apply with culture too-- you start by experimenting. You start by saying, what's a thing I could do? And try it. And not allowing yourself to get mired in the, well, this won't work because of this and this won't work because of this and this won't work because of this.
ANN MICHAEL: So the way we got started at AIP with our AI initiatives was very simple. What would happen if we took 5,000 open access articles and basically-- you know, and got someone to build us a little chatbot-- because that was before GPTs-- so that we could interact with that and see what it does. And so we just did that and we started to ask questions and we said, wouldn't it be great if we could ask this question or it would be great if we could ask it that question.
ANN MICHAEL: And then we started to brainstorm use cases and what we could do. And then we looked at the environment and we said, OK, well, this use case and this use case it seems like there's tons of people doing that so let's forget about that. Like, what are the use cases where we then have something special and unique that we can add to it that might be compelling as a feature or a product down the line?
ANN MICHAEL: And so that's how we got started. We got started first by saying, I'm not going to put a business case together for creating a sandbox. I'm just going to create a sandbox and then we're going to figure it out. The business cases will come when we know enough about what we're trying to do and when we need more money, like significant money, but for right now we're just going to keep going.
ANN MICHAEL: And I almost think that culture might be the same way. Like, you get people together and you talk about like, what's the world you want to live in? What's the culture you want to live in? And how does that culture help your organization to be successful? Because let's not forget, it's not the picnic culture in our yard. We're talking about a professional organization that has a mission.
ANN MICHAEL: And to start experimenting with, well, where can we do that? Where can we see how would that impact us working here? How would that impact us working there? And then grow from there rather than trying to define it all up front in advance, the classic old waterfall approach. But, quite frankly, even the agile approach sometimes has almost more overhead to start than I think some of these tiny little experiments require.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Thanks Ann. So don't overthink it, experiment. Begin. Alistair, what have you got?
ALISTAIR REECE: I would say-- I mean, I'm actually going to bring it back to culture from the AI side because there's nothing I could add to what Ann has just said. But I think the first step that you can really make on the culture journey as leaders within an organization is to listen. It's very easy for us to talk. It's very difficult for us to take that step back, shut up for 10 minutes, and just listen to what the people are saying and what they are experiencing and what their concerns are.
ALISTAIR REECE: And then rather than saying, well, here's the solution, say, how do we work this out together? Because I think that's the only way we move forward is by working this out together in a spirit-- in the spirit of the scientific method. Let's try things, fails, try something else, if succeeds we change it again. So we're continually having our development cycles going and moving forward and learning.
ALISTAIR REECE: But I think it comes from listening and being honest. The importance in my own life and in my own career, in a very radical honesty, it's like I call a spade a spade quite often without needing to mention spades at all. But I think it's important to be honest and to listen and to take that time to really hear what other people are saying and understand where they're coming from.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Thank you all, Alistair, stop talking and listen. Barbara.
BARBARA KLINE POPE: So I believe that culture is the foundation for success and the foundation for innovation, and that that needs to be a major priority. And you'll find success as you work on your culture as well and experiment with that. And, of course, investing in this process, it costs money to do this, but in the end you will get an Roi from investing in culture.
LILY GARCIA WALTON: Wonderful. So you heard it here, folks, invest in culture, experiment, and listen. It's been a delight. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your perspectives with our audience.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
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Form Title Share
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Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
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Embed Size
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You Size - Responsive
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We Size - Responsive
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Picture Overlay Popup
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400 x 225
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512 x 288
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400 x 700
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768 x 1024
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1024 x 512
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1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
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Info
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Thumbnails
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Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode