Guest: Tom Serena, CEO, American Gastroenterological Association

Most organizational change happens on a clock measured in quarters. A leader arrives, launches an initiative, claims a win, and moves on before anyone can tell whether the change actually held. Every so often you meet someone who has stayed long enough to see the whole arc.

In this episode of the Human Factor Podcast, Kevin Novak is joined by Tom Serena, chief executive of the American Gastroenterological Association, who has led one institution since the nineteen nineties and steadily expanded what it believes it is even allowed to do. Drawing on institutional theory, organizational ambidexterity, and Ronald Heifetz's distinction between technical and adaptive challenges, Kevin and Tom examine what transformation looks like when it unfolds not over quarters but across decades.

Tom shares what three decades taught him. Why the denominator of change is pace and patience, why what often looks like resistance is really a pace mismatch, why you cannot change what an organization does until you change how it decides, and why a new leader should not arrive to transform but to find out what needs to be transformed.

Read the full transcript and subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations newsletter at 2040digital.com. Assess your own organization at TransformationAssessment.com.