Available July 2, 2026

Episode 030: The Long Game – Leading Institutional Transformation Across Decades

DURATION: 55 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak

GUEST: Tom Serena

SHOW: The Human Factor Podcast

COLD OPEN

Kevin Novak: A board chair at a client once told me that her organization had a five-year strategic plan, a three-year operating plan, and a one-year budget. So I asked her how far back the organization’s memory actually went. She paused, and then she admitted it went back about eighteen months, which was roughly the tenure of her average senior leader. We plan in years. We remember in months. And then we wonder why transformation never seems to take hold.

Most of what we call organizational change happens on a clock measured in quarters. A new leader arrives, launches an initiative, claims a win, and moves on before anyone can tell whether the change actually held. But every so often you meet someone who has stayed long enough to see the entire arc. Someone who was in the room when a decision was made, there again when it failed, and there a decade later when it finally worked. That perspective is rare, and it is exactly what today’s episode is all about.

Introduction

Kevin Novak: I’m Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital, professor at the University of Maryland, and author of the book The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty, and Human Complexity, along with the Ideas and Innovations weekly newsletter. Welcome to the Human Factor Podcast, the show that explores the intersection of humanity, technology, and transformation, along with the psychology behind transformation success.

Today’s episode is called The Long Game: Leading Institutional Transformation Across Decades. This season, we have been focused on the gap between what research predicts about organizational change and what actually happens in practice. And there may be no dimension of that gap less studied than time. What happens to transformation when it unfolds not over quarters, and not even over a few years, but across decades?

Guest introduction

Kevin Novak: To explore that question, I am joined by someone with a vantage point almost no one in this field has. Tom Serena is the chief executive officer of the American Gastroenterological Association, one of the most prominent medical associations in the country, if not the world. Tom has been with the AGA since 1994, and he has served as its CEO since 2010. Across that tenure, he has led the organization well beyond its traditional mission, into health equity through the Equity Project, into venture investment through the GI Opportunity Fund, into workforce development, and through multiple governance transformations. Very few leaders have guided a single institution through three decades of change. Fewer still have done it while expanding what that institution believes it is even allowed to do. Tom, welcome to the Human Factor Podcast. I am grateful you made the time today.

Tom Serena: Kevin, I am honored to be invited. Thank you, though that laudatory introduction is not deserved.

Kevin Novak: It is very much deserved. Here is how I would like to spend our time together. I will bring a piece of research to each part of the conversation, the way scholars have tried to explain why organizations change, or fail to. And then I will turn it over to you, because you have lived the reality that the research only describes from the outside. Neither one of us gets the last word. The whole idea is that the research and the experience inform each other.

Resisting the gravity of sameness

Kevin Novak: Let me start with a puzzle that organizational scholars have wrestled with for decades. In 1983, two sociologists, Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, published a paper asking why organizations in the same field tend to look more and more alike over time. They called it institutional isomorphism, and they identified three forces that drive it. Coercive pressure, from regulation and funders. Mimetic pressure, where under uncertainty organizations simply copy whoever appears to be succeeding. And normative pressure, from the professions, the conferences, and the credentials that quietly define what a serious organization is supposed to look like. The result is convergence. Medical associations, like organizations in almost every field, tend to drift toward the same committee structures, the same programs, the same language, and the same priorities. So my question is about resistance to that gravity. Across your tenure, how has the AGA navigated the pressure to conform to what every other association is doing? And where have you deliberately chosen a path that made the AGA distinct, even when following the field would have been the safer and easier call?

Tom Serena: There is an advantage to having been with the organization this long. The longer I am here, the more I understand where the pitfalls and the risks are, and which leaders are willing to take a chance. That is hard to do coming into an organization, where you are just trying to keep your hand on the tiller and stay on course. Some of this is forced on us. Society has democratized in so many ways. We are doing this podcast, which in the past would have required a very expensive studio. It is no different at the AGA. When I started, expertise and seniority ruled. You joined the organization your training director told you to join, without question. That is now completely different. We have members forming their own informal groups, everything from a Facebook group to their own 501(c)(3), because they want what they want rather than what the AGA is offering. And you can see it in the membership numbers. It is tougher to keep somebody now, because it is so easy for them to form their own organization. We have to figure out what they want in order to keep an affinity for the AGA. Some of it is forced on us by business models. The classic membership dues, publications, and education are all under stress. Medical education companies are nimble; they move faster. There is organizational ego involved in all of this. But no money, no mission, and you need to pivot. The startups in our venture fund have taught me a lot. They do not wait around before they make a change, because they move to where the market is going. I used to feel that medical associations could make the market. That is no longer true.

Kevin Novak: Because we talk a lot about the human factor on the show, let me ask it this way. Leading your staff through all of that change, that pivoting is not easy. People get used to what they are doing, and then the responsibilities change. What has led to your success in that regard?

Tom Serena: A lot of the time you need board buy-in and physician buy-in before you can ask the staff to switch business models. Some people embrace change; they want to innovate. Others want to hunker down, even in an area that is in decline. To be honest, I do not think you can convince everybody to change. You find the people who are willing and anxious to do something new, and we have a lot of them at the AGA. That has been huge for us. And then others follow when they see the momentum. There is a vortex. There is leadership, and people follow it.

Kevin Novak: Eric Hoplin, the CEO of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, was on the show a few weeks ago, and he talked about that in thirds. When he comes into an organization, he looks for three thirds. The adopters who want change, the people in the middle who are ready for it but will follow, and the final third who are not ready for any change and need to be curated along by the other two thirds. I had never heard it framed quite that way.

Tom Serena: That is a great way to frame it. And I cannot imagine doing culture change at real scale. We have a hundred employees. I do not know how you change something in a very large organization. That is a different level for me.

Sustaining the core while building the new

Kevin Novak: That distinctiveness leads me to another tension, because choosing your own path is one thing, and sustaining it while keeping the core running is another problem entirely. You have an entire audience with expectations of the AGA, across a range of demographics, each with its own needs. There is a body of research from Charles O’Reilly at Stanford and Michael Tushman at Harvard on what they call organizational ambidexterity. The core finding is that enduring organizations have to do two contradictory things at once. They have to exploit, which means running and refining what they are already good at. And they have to explore, which means building capabilities that do not yet exist and may not pay off for years. The hard part is that these two compete, for budget, for attention, for talent, and for the leader’s own time. And exploitation almost always wins in the short run, because it is measurable and it feels safe. The AGA has had to do both. You have sustained the core, the clinical guidelines, the education, the research, the advocacy, the work members count on every year. And at the same time you have stood up entirely new institutional capabilities. So how do you hold that tension? When the core is what funds you, and the new work is the very thing that unsettles the comfort of the core, how do you protect the explore side from being quietly starved by the exploit side?

Tom Serena: That is profound. Coming back to your thirds, there is the group that keeps the current programs running. The two biggest things we have changed are the innovation and venture capital fund and our governance, and I had a heavy hand in both. I was the one with the extra time and the desire, so leadership is a big part of it. As for operationalizing it, again, I had people who were anxious to try something new. I had not thought about that tension you describe, but it probably caused problems I was not even aware of, invisible friction that kept me from going faster. One of the things I did, Kevin, when you posed the questions ahead of the show, is reduce this down. The denominator in change, for me, is pace and patience. You generally do not control the pace, other than in an emergency. And if you try to, you are going to be frustrated, because you really have to build a foundation before the change you want is visible to everybody.

Pace and patience

Kevin Novak: That is exactly where I wanted to go. Your tenure alone required you to be incredibly patient. In contrast, when you look at the average tenure across organizations, and this is not just associations, the average tenure of a chief marketing officer has gone from eighteen months to twelve. Last week, we were exploring what the issue is. Is it adaptability? Is it that things are moving too fast? Or is it that the organization does not have the patience to let something mature, or that the person or team does not? I will add my own experience with the AGA. In the early career professionals research study, sitting in a room downtown asking young physicians a range of questions, they told us the AGA should stop talking to them on general platforms. They use niche communications. They do not want the email; they want it another way. That creates friction. So how do you manage your own patience?

Tom Serena: I have been burned enough times. One of the difficult things, and it is a two-edged sword, is the turnover on the governing board. Most members serve two- or three-year terms, the officers serve four-year terms. Back when I was starting, there was a new set of priorities every year, because the president had a lot of prerogative. Having watched that for the fifteen years before I was CEO, it was very frustrating, and it did not matter, because seniority and expertise ruled. That was fine when all you were doing was the annual meeting and the publication, and all the cylinders were hitting and the funding was coming in. You could have pet projects. But then it became an inhibitor. The old business lines were starting to flatline, and we needed significant new initiatives. We had to end the pet projects. I can point to two former presidents who allowed us to change governance, to bring the governing board from what was basically a supercommittee to an executive body focused on strategy and the purpose of the organization. And there was continuity from one board to the next. It did not change every year. We have completely turned the board over several times since, but it has stuck. They know we need to focus on a few things to maintain viability. My bottom line is that if your leadership is not aligned and focused, you will be fighting to bring any kind of change, because everybody has their own idea of what change should be.

Kevin Novak: In the association context, so many organizations try to alter their governance. Across the more than forty organizations I have worked with over the years, some have boards of fifty, sixty, seventy people, and the tension is recognizing that decision-making needs to sit with a smaller executive body. It is very difficult to get seventy people focused. What were the success factors that allowed you to make those governance changes?

Tom Serena: We got the board down to thirteen. I think that is a good number. As I said, two presidents allowed us to try new things. Before, a board meeting was somewhat satisfactory, because you would come in with a list of decisions and they would make them. It was very black and white. But it was not worthy of the brain power in the room. These are physicians, people who run hospitals, and we were asking them for mundane decisions. That is satisfying, because there is a beginning and an end. The questions we turned to were more existential. Where are we going? Membership is flatlining, and we have a lot of competition in publications. Once they got into a mode of learning more about the industry and what is happening, and had time to think, they appreciated it, because physicians are curious people and they like that work. So giving the board a new way to work, and showing them it was a better way, that buy-in was huge. If I had had resistance, I am not sure we would be where we are today.

Kevin Novak: That is not atypical. There always seems to be resistance from multiple groups. Resistance is a very human thing.

Tom Serena: Some of these people were successful in the old system, and it is hard to tell them the system that brought them here needs to change. You want to avoid insulting them. But it does not work that way today. As you said, when you speak to early career physicians, it does not work that way for them. And if you do not bring new blood into the system, your system is going to ossify. Our board did recognize that.

The Equity Project and the groundwork of readiness

Kevin Novak: I gave a presentation at ASAE’s membership, marketing, and communications conference a few weeks ago, about using psychological demographics. One point I made draws on research in the association space where staff were asked whether they believe in their own value proposition. If only seventeen percent of association staff believe their association’s value proposition is compelling, what do you think the audience is feeling? There is a lag. You have been forward-thinking and opportunistic, willing to say that yes, membership is declining, and there are other things we need to do to adapt to what the audience believes we should bring. You have built several things that did not exist before, so let us start with one of the most significant, the Equity Project. One thing the research consistently underestimates is timing. The same initiative can fail in one year and succeed in another, and the only thing that changed was readiness. The organization had quietly built the relationships, the credibility, the internal language, and the trust the work needed to survive contact with reality. Think of it as invisible groundwork, the work that never shows up in an announcement but determines whether the announcement means anything at all. My question is not really about the initiative itself. It is about what came before it. What made the AGA ready for that work at the moment it launched? And what groundwork had to be in place, maybe years in advance, for it to take hold rather than become one more well-intentioned program that quietly fades?

Tom Serena: I would characterize gastroenterology and our association as having a diverse constituency. It existed. Equity was at the forefront, and the organization realized it needed to do something more deliberate. I will give credit to a great staff person, and to our current president, Byron Cryer, who was one of the leaders of that project. So you had a committed leader. The other thing they did was provide clarity about what we were doing. Rather than create standardized language, they developed a tool that described several domains of equity and what we were trying to achieve, and identified a future state and the steps to get there. They were very specific about what we were trying to achieve and how. When people know where we are going, they took the ball and ran with it. It has been inculcated in the culture here. It started with clarity and good leadership.

The GI Opportunity Fund and the boundaries of legitimacy

Kevin Novak: Let me ask about the GI Opportunity Fund, because nothing tests an institution’s sense of what it is allowed to do quite like that, and what you have done there is very atypical. There is a concept in institutional theory called institutional entrepreneurship. It describes leaders who do not simply operate within the boundaries of what their institution is allowed to do, but who actually move those boundaries, who expand the definition of what counts as legitimate activity for an organization like theirs. It is genuinely risky, because the moment you step outside the expected boundary, you invite the question: that is not what an organization like yours is supposed to do. And with the AGA’s demographics, you have constituents who look to you to be what you have always been. A medical association entering venture investment is exactly that kind of move. The GI Opportunity Fund sits well outside the traditional boundary of what a medical association does. So I am curious about two things. What was the institutional logic that made the move make sense from the inside? And how did you build the legitimacy for it? How did you bring a board and a membership along to something that, on its face, sat outside the lines of what they thought they had signed up for?

Tom Serena: There were two parallel things going on. About fifteen years ago we formed a Center for GI Innovation and Technology. It was a recognition that startups were inhibited in GI for multiple reasons: funding, regulatory, and clinical diligence. We would give advice to startups, and then wish them good luck. That was part one. Part two: I read a headline in 2014. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation had sold the royalties to a drug it invested in for 3.3 billion dollars. I said, we need to sign up for that. Financially, that got my attention, and it would complement our work in innovation. This is a story of failure, and failure, and failure. When I first introduced the concept to the board, I thought I had everything lined up. I thought I had a compelling story, the potential for remuneration, and it was mission-oriented, and I had a great champion, a well-respected former board chairman. And the idea went down in flames. We brought in a venture capitalist to explain how it worked, and this person spoke too fast, spoke in jargon, and almost spoke down to the board. It gave them discomfort, an uncertainty about the risk. Their reaction was, we are fine today; we do not need to take on this risk. I had to wait for some turnover. I viewed it as resistance. I thought, you need to take on risk. But it was less that than it was not allowing the pace to happen at the rate they could absorb. A few years later, things lined up again. I had a great champion, Mike Coachman, our current treasurer, someone well respected on the board. We slowed it down. We did much more foundational work, explaining how it worked, framing the risk, and framing the fact that the AGA could establish an identity, that we wanted to distinguish ourselves rather than keep doing what was not working anymore. I find these startups the source of more ideas than the traditional association role. Letting the process follow its natural pace, the board let us establish the fund. And the most impressive thing to me is that the fund is funded by members, most of whom I do not even know. They are new to me, and I have been around a long time. There is a thirst to be attached to innovation. It would be great if everyone made money on it, but the most important thing is that we are catalyzing innovation. So again, at first I failed to recognize how the system could absorb a new idea like that.

Kevin Novak: That connects to the human factor of resistance, and there are many flavors of it. It is often not intended resistance. As you said, the consultant came in and talked too fast, assuming everyone understood. The board was lost and became defensive. I see that so often, where an organization is trying to move fast and forgets the necessity of informing people and building the foundation so they come along. And to your point, you have great staff ready to pick up the ball.

Tom Serena: As I prepared for this, I tried to reduce it to the nuggets, what I learned. There is a lot of complex research, and it devolves into these human lessons: what people are capable of, what they want to do, and pace.

Kevin Novak: When you recognized the right time to bring it back, how did you prepare yourself to re-educate those people and lead through it?

Tom Serena: It was educating them so they were comfortable making decisions. That is what we do with the board now. The board has to wrestle with a lot of things they have not seen before, like AI. Some know more than others, but we do not want one expert on the board swaying a decision. So we spend a lot of time bringing in speakers to get everyone to a common understanding, so everyone is making a decision with some knowledge and some confidence. Most of the academics know scholarly publishing, but not everyone in private practice knows the finances or peer review. People might not even know the questions to ask. So we spend time helping people get up to speed with learning sessions during our board meetings.

What governance enables and what it constrains

Kevin Novak: Institutional theory has a lot to say about structure, and one of its more uncomfortable insights is that the formal structures we build to enable action eventually constrain it. Governance is the clearest example. The committees, the bylaws, the approval pathways, the composition of the board itself- all of it exists to create legitimacy and accountability, and all of it can quietly become the reason nothing is able to change. Researchers often find that governance reform is a prerequisite for deeper transformation, that you cannot change what an organization does until you change how it decides. You have navigated multiple governance transformations. What has that taught you about the relationship between governance and an institution’s capacity to transform? And to be specific, where have you seen governance genuinely enable change, and where have you watched it constrain change, even with the best possible people around the table?

Tom Serena: The line we have learned is, prepare for loss of control. In a positive way, the board tries not to do the committee and staff work. Be confident that you have established a direction and a vision with enough clarity that they can execute, or even develop their own strategy. Where it does not work, you can establish all the bureaucracy you want, but one maverick can topple it and divert the organization. That person might succeed for a while, but it is so disruptive that eventually we bring them back into conformity, and it costs so much time and energy. An individual can upset the structure, depending on what the organization lets an individual do. I think we have done a good job of balancing, of planning for loss of control. You do not need to make every decision. Others are charged with that, and you have to be comfortable with that.

Kevin Novak: It does answer it. As you said, the newer things the AGA is doing are necessary, because the older model is not working. That creates a situational anxiousness on the board side and for the practitioners, whose fields are changing rapidly with technology, and for the staff. Does that anxiousness feed into popping a wheel off the bus, and become an inhibitor that you have to spend time facilitating and reducing?

Tom Serena: Planned change is one thing, and unplanned is another. It is the unplanned, when somebody comes in with an idea and wants to jump the line, that is very disruptive. I try to guard against being overly bureaucratic, against a lot of layers. I think we move things through pretty quickly. It is when someone tries to jump the line. They might succeed once or twice, but it is so disruptive to the system. Those unplanned ones are difficult to manage. The planned ones, we have been able to introduce new things with the board and staff we have. Some people are just motivated to try new things, and we are fortunate in that.

What three decades revised

Kevin Novak: Let me shift from the institution to you, because three decades does not only change an organization, it changes the person leading it. Ronald Heifetz at Harvard drew a distinction I come back to constantly. He separated technical problems from adaptive challenges. A technical problem has a known solution and an expert who can apply it. You can project manage your way through it. An adaptive challenge is different. The problem is tangled up in people’s values, their habits, and their identities. There is no expert with the answer, and the solution has to be learned, often by the very people who would rather not change. Heifetz’s argument is that the most common failure in leadership is treating an adaptive challenge as if it were a technical one. Having led the AGA through multiple strategic cycles since 1994, what did you believe about leading change early in your tenure that you have since revised, or even abandoned outright? Put another way, what does the version of you leading today understand that the version of you in the nineteen nineties simply did not?

Tom Serena: I want to give credit to my coach, Bridget Tyre. I badly needed guidance when I took this job, and I learned a lot from her and from experience. The first thing is self-awareness. Early on, I underestimated the gap between what you think you are communicating and how people are receiving it. Being the CEO does not mean you say it and they get it. You need to say things over and over. I kept using the word clarity during this conversation, because it is one of the most important things I have learned. The second is managing your internal state. Bridget calls it being a step-down transformer, because your feelings radiate and affect the system, as anyone’s do. If you walk into a room and someone has a frown on their face, it affects you. I try not to negatively affect people. I sometimes have a stern face, so I do not always succeed, but it matters. The third is patience with change. Again, you think you are the CEO and you can get something done, and you cannot. You have to manage it through a process the system can absorb, at a pace that is comfortable for them. So, clarity, self-awareness about how people are receiving you, keeping the system calm so they can process things, and bringing change at a pace they can absorb.

Kevin Novak: I appreciate that you gave credit to your coach. When I was deciding what to do eight years ago, my coach, Peggy Cooper, told me you cannot be one foot here and one foot there, that everybody will pick that up and you will not appear committed. If you are going to start a business, you need to be two feet in. External perception is really helpful if you are open to the criticism and willing to adapt. So much of what we say, we do not take the moment to understand how it is being received. To your point on clarity, you have to watch the body language to see whether people have actually understood, or understood enough to ask the questions they have. A lot of leaders just do not do that.

Tom Serena: That is a good way to frame it.

Strategy or improvisation

Kevin Novak: Karl Weick, an organizational psychologist, spent his career studying how organizations make sense of what happens to them. One of his more provocative ideas is that strategy is often clearer in hindsight than it ever was in the moment. We act, then we make sense of what we did, and then we tell a coherent story about it afterward, as if it had been the plan all along. He argued that a great deal of organizational change is really improvisation that only later gets narrated as strategy. When you think about the moments that most fundamentally shaped the AGA’s trajectory, how many were deliberate strategic decisions, and how many were responses to something you did not see coming? And when it was the latter, what allowed the organization to turn an unexpected disruption into a real turning point rather than just a crisis it managed to survive?

Tom Serena: By and large, it has been deliberate. I came in after we had a well-established membership, publications, and education. Two things were developed early, after I arrived. One was the gastroenterology teaching project. A president noticed that the fellowship programs needed to measure and calibrate themselves against others, and he advocated for it, and we eventually established a national testing platform. It goes back to the late nineties, and it is essentially a monopoly. Every training program in the country uses it. I was amazed at how prescient that was, but he was in it and he noticed the gap. The other was our self-assessment program. A lot of organizations have self-assessment, but we started ours early, very intentionally, to help prepare people for their boards. COVID was the crisis moment you are referring to, where we had to develop a process to produce guidelines quickly, and that was to our benefit. Even the venture capital fund was a response to us wanting to do more than say good luck to a startup, to offer them financial and ongoing support when they went to market. So by and large we have not had many lightning strikes. It has been pretty deliberate.

Kevin Novak: The stability and predictability have come from your leadership over all these years. When I look at client organizations that are continuously riding a roller coaster, internally and externally, that alone creates so much friction and tension, and it inhibits where they need to go in a dynamic world.

Advice for the long game

Kevin Novak: This brings me to where I want to end. I want to close with the question I most want to ask you. Imagine a newly appointed CEO of a major medical association, someone with real ambition to lead genuine transformation, not the theater of it, but the real thing. They have the energy. What they do not have yet is the one thing you cannot hand someone in a briefing, which is time, and what time teaches. What would you tell them about the patience it actually requires? About the mistakes they are going to make, and which of those mistakes truly matter? And maybe most of all, about the invisible work, the years of groundwork that nobody sees and nobody applauds, that transformation across decades actually demands?

Tom Serena: It is funny you ask, because just before we recorded, I met with a small group of other CEOs. The four of us meet and exchange stories, and we were talking about exactly this. There is a lot of turnover in the association world right now. These are all long-tenured CEOs, and we were talking about the first ninety days, and that there is a tacit handbook. One of my colleagues said he came in like a hailstorm, and it took most of his career to learn not to. Some people are supposed to do a listening tour, and I get that. I would err on the side of: do not come in to transform. Find out what needs to be transformed. It took me a long time to realize our governance was hindering us, and that did not come from studying the board. I had to be immersed in it for a while. Who are the players? Who is willing to come along? Who wants to make change? Where does the change need to take place? Learn that first.

Kevin Novak: How does a young leader find that balance, when they feel they have a mandate from governance to move quickly, and yet the recognition that governance itself needed to change took you patience and the openness to understand the dynamics first, before inserting something that might blow things up?

Tom Serena: I can imagine a first-time CEO wanting to make an impression, especially when you hire someone to do some things. Is there a crisis, or do you simply need to evolve the organization? I do not think there is anything magic. One of our jobs is to be clear communicators about what is going to happen, and people want to know how it is going to affect them. You have to get clear on that, and that takes time, because you need to know where each person is, what they are capable of absorbing, and what they want to absorb. I do not think there is any quick way to get there, unless you are in a crisis and you have to act.

Close

Kevin Novak: Tom, this has been exactly the conversation I hoped it would be. What strikes me listening to you is that the through line of three decades is not a strategy. It is patience held in tension with conviction, the willingness to do the invisible work for years and trust that it compounds. We measure leadership by the decisions people announce. We rarely measure it by the groundwork they laid a decade earlier that made those decisions possible. You have spent a career on the part nobody claps for, and the institution itself is the evidence. Thank you for being so generous with what you have learned.

Tom Serena: Kevin, I am flattered to have been asked. All of this is born of painful lessons, for the most part, and my coaching. Thank you for inviting me.

Kevin Novak: Thanks for being here, Tom.

Kevin Novak: And to everyone listening, thank you for spending this time with us. Tom gave us something rare today, the long view, and a reminder that the most consequential work in any institution is usually the work no one sees while it is happening.

If today’s conversation gave you a new way to think about the long arc of change in your own organization, here is how you can go deeper. The themes Tom and I explored- institutional memory, organizational ambidexterity, readiness, and the invisible groundwork that transformation across decades demands- run throughout my Transformation Psychology series at 2040digital.com. The Human Factor Method and the Transformation Readiness Assessment are both available at TransformationAssessment.com. They measure not just whether people support change, but whether the organization is psychologically prepared for what real change actually demands.

Subscribe to the Human Factor Podcast wherever you watch or listen, and please leave a rating and a comment. Share this episode with a leader who is playing their own long game and wondering whether the groundwork is worth it. Sometimes the most useful thing you can give someone is the language for what they are already living. And if you want weekly insights on transformation psychology, organizational behavior, and the human factors that determine success, subscribe to my Ideas and Innovations newsletter at 2040digital.com or on Substack. Every Thursday, I share practical frameworks and research on why change succeeds or fails.

Until next time, remember, the institutions that endure are not built by the decisions we announce. They are built by the invisible work we are willing to do for years before anyone applauds. This is the Human Factor Podcast. I’m Kevin Novak. Thanks for watching or listening.

End of Episode

🎵

Upcoming: Episode 031, Season 2 Close: Transformation IN Practice Series Episode 11 of the Series 

Season 2, Part 2 began May 1, 2026

More Episodes Coming Soon

View Main Podcast Page →