Trying to Understand SIOP 2020 and Coronavirus

Mar 17 Update: Four days after posting this (although it felt like longer!), SIOP 2020 was officially canceled. Clues from the official announcement point to financial concerns being the major issue to resolve before announcing, as I predicted below. We still don’t know if there will be an online version of the conference, but at least we know SIOPers won’t be infecting each other come April. At least not in Austin!

There’s a lot of panic and concern in relation to SIOP 2020 within the I-O psychology community right now. There have been several posts per day on the I-O psychology subreddit, Twitter has gone crazy, and the leadership has for some reason decided upon austerity in terms of communicating to the membership, which has driven people to a bit of a frenzy.

Given that, I have decided to share my thoughts on this more completely than I can on Twitter or elsewhere, as someone who is not in the leadership but who has been an active volunteer for many years and has a general sense of “how SIOP works.” So take this as you will, and please recognize that I don’t have access to any information that you don’t. So I am taking the information I do have and extrapolating a bit based on my own experience.

Let me first give a general recommendation:

Calm the f%&$ down.

Here’s the main thing to remember. SIOP is almost entirely a volunteer organization. The administrative office (affectionately referred to as “the AO”) is roughly a dozen people that keep the lights on and manage all of the technical aspects of running a many-thousands-person large non-profit organization.

The vast majority of the decision-making is actually made by the “volunteer workforce” of SIOP, which is several hundred people, all enthusiastic academics and practitioners who wanted to give back to the I-O community. I’m part of this community myself but not in the leadership; I’m the chair of the Futures Committee and head of the Technology-Enhanced Workforce Advocacy Task Force, which lobbies in Washington DC for the relevance of SIOP to federal decision-making.

The decision-making leadership of SIOP is the Executive Board (often called “the EB”), many of whom full SIOP members elect to 3-year terms in elections held every year and are themselves volunteers, typically with lots of prior experience elsewhere in the volunteer workforce. It’s the EB that makes the “big decisions,” and they’re the people managing the COVID-19 response. I think it’s around one to two dozen people, but that’s a rough guess from sitting in the room during the EB meeting at SIOP last year.

This all means that for the most part, no one on the EB or the broader volunteer workforce has any non-profit leadership training or experience, and “dealing with the fallout of coronavirus threatening to cancel SIOP” was definitely not something they had considered when volunteering.

So when you decry “SIOP,” please recognize that these are the people you are criticizing. That doesn’t let them off the hook for bad decision-making, but it’s important to keep in mind that they are doing the best they can while in way over their heads, and that they are academics and practitioners just like you and me. I can almost guarantee you that almost all the EB has been dealing with for the last week is the COVID-19 situation, often at the expense of time spent on their own (paying) jobs and families.

Given all of that, let’s explore the situation right now, as of March 11. What we know so far:

• Austin, TX has banned all gatherings larger than 2500 people. Word on the street from Austin locals is that this number is going to be reduced soon.
• Many universities and businesses (including mine!) have banned non-essential travel by their employees, which will prevent people from attending even if they still wanted to.
• Given those travel bans, many presenters will be unable to attend SIOP. I had to cancel my pre-conference workshop, for example, and I won’t be at any of the three sessions I’m attached to.
• SIOP released an extremely odd-sounding statement that they seemed to be petitioning Austin to hold SIOP anyway.
• Given how conferences work (I have organized a small conference before, so a bit of extrapolation here to big conferences), SIOP will be financially responsible for hotel rooms not paid for and for the conference space reserved, even if no one shows up. Exceptions to this would be made by Marriott International, not SIOP, and we don’t know what Marriott is willing to do (another detailed that would need to be worked out via our volunteer workforce).
• Let’s estimate that SIOP is on the hook for 2000 hotel rooms (I know SIOP booked the JW Marriott completely, which has 1012 rooms, plus due to overflow SIOP booked at least two additional hotels) at $260/night for an average of 3 nights. Conference hotel contracts typically require the organization booking them to guarantee 75% of rooms. That would be a bill of approximately $1.5 million.
• If Marriott will not grant an exception, and this would be a big bill to just waive away, SIOP will need to absorb the cost or make an insurance claim, and their insurance company is going to have specific rules about cancellations. SIOP can’t just cancel the conference because it’s scared of COVID-19 and get insurance to cover it. There are rules about what insurance will cover and under what conditions, as anyone who has had to make a claim on insurance is well-aware of. It’s very common for insurance companies to ensure you’ve “exhausted all options” before making a claim.
• There are no policies regarding pandemics at SIOP. We don’t know if registration fees would/should be refunded, for example, which is a further financial hit.
• Pre-conference workshops are a major source of annual revenue for SIOP, and they would almost certainly need to be refunded. My pre-conference workshop has been canceled, since I can’t go to SIOP, and workshops typically have 25-35 attendees. Averaging 30 attendees, at $420 registration, that’s $12000 in revenue lost from my workshop alone. There are 16 workshops, so let’s say around $200,000 in lost revenue from this. And this isn’t something insurance would cover. So not only will SIOP need to cover unexpected expenses, but it will lose revenue as well.
• There are many clues that SIOP depends on conference revenue to continue existing. For example, see the note about “decrease dependency on conference revenue” as a major strategic goal here.
• Thus, if SIOP refunds all registration fees including workshops and pays all penalties, it’s down a minimum of $1.7 million. I suspect it’s more than that, given caterers, setup crews, etc., may not have been hired through Marriott, and the $1.7 million number does not even include money already spent to reserve the rooms in the convention center.
• I would be absolutely shocked if SIOP has even close to that much cash in reserve. Most non-profits run expenses fairly close to revenues, and I suspect SIOP has done the same.

All together, that means the announcement should not be all that surprising. My tentative conclusion is: if SIOP does not respond correctly in relation to its insurance company, it will not exist next year.

There are some clues in the March 11 announcement that support this interpretation:

• SIOP is “working to find the best possible solution to ensure the integrity of public health, science-practice translation, and the financial future of SIOP”. Odd to just casually throw “financial future” in there, isn’t it? Almost like they need to resolve some background issues before they can cancel the conference?
• “We are partnering with JW Marriott and Austin Public Health to obtain an official ruling.” A lot of emphasis here on “other organizations need to make decisions before we can.”
• “The decision by Austin Public Health will help to guide our path”. I read this as “we hope we are not allowed to hold SIOP, because that will force insurance to pay up.”

So again, you might ask at this point why the leadership would not just admit all of this, and my suspicion is that they don’t know if they can. Insurance companies are notoriously finicky about what they will cover and what they won’t, and if they announce intentions to cancel ahead of a formal decision by the City of Austin, who knows what impact that would have?

So my final recommendation: let the SIOP EB work this out, and stop panicking. Give them some time and some space. I know several members of the leadership as friends and colleagues, and I can guarantee you that they are working in the best interests of SIOP. Service positions like this, in addition to being without any financial compensation beyond one or two dinners a year, are often thankless too. There is no reason to go up for one of these positions unless you want to make a positive impact on the field. I promise you they are doing their best and will let you know what’s happening as soon as they feel they can. And I’m waiting here to hear about it right beside you.