The Heart of Transformation

How do organizations truly change—not just in their processes or technology, but in the hearts and minds of their people? In The Heart of Transformation, Michael J. Leckie argues that successful, sustainable transformation begins not with digital tools, structural redesigns, or lofty strategies, but with people. What drives lasting change, he contends, is the cultivation of six core human capabilities that enable individuals—and therefore their organizations—to adapt continuously, learn deeply, and care enough to transform for good.

Leckie’s central claim is that transformation isn’t something done to people; rather, it happens through them. Drawing on decades of experience at GE, Gartner, and other global organizations, he offers a powerful shift in perspective: organizations don’t exist—only people do. Systems, technologies, and frameworks will fail unless the humans inside them possess the heart and behavioral flexibility to create change together. Real transformation, he argues, comes when people operationalize curiosity and care, building habits that reinforce empathy, learning, courage, and trust.

The Core Argument: Digital Requires Human Transformation

In a world where technology evolves faster than human systems, Leckie observes that businesses are suffering from what he calls a “fifth-generation technology, second-generation human systems” problem. While organizations adopt advanced digital tools, they often retain outdated mindsets shaped by industrial-era management. The result? Disconnected cultures, change fatigue, and resistance. The real gap isn’t technological—it’s human.

To bridge this gap, Leckie introduces six interrelated capabilities that form the “heart” of transformation: Exploring Before Executing, Learning Before Knowing, Changing Before Protecting, Pathfinding Before Path Following, Innovating Before Replicating, and Humanizing Before Organizing. Each one shifts a traditional business habit into a new way of being—centered on exploration, empathy, and courage rather than compliance and control.

A Model of Six Transformative Capabilities

Exploring Before Executing anchors transformation in curiosity—the willingness to ask questions before acting. Learning Before Knowing replaces certainty with active learning, pushing individuals to unlearn assumptions and focus on growth. Changing Before Protecting challenges our natural instinct to defend the status quo, embracing risk and vulnerability instead of safety. Pathfinding Before Path Following reframes leadership as discovering rather than dictating; leaders focus on values-driven direction, not rigid control. Innovating Before Replicating prizes experimentation and long-term thinking over mere duplication of past success. Finally, Humanizing Before Organizing reminds us that people—not processes—make organizations thrive, urging leaders to see colleagues as whole humans rather than job functions.

Together, these six human capabilities form what Leckie calls the “heart of transformation.” They operate not as a hierarchy but as interdependent muscles—each strengthening the others. Developing them means transforming how we think, converse, and behave daily, one question and one relationship at a time.

Why This Matters Now

In the age of digital acceleration, organizations face what Leckie describes as adaptive change: shifts that can’t be managed through traditional plans and processes. Adaptive change means learning while doing, solving problems no one has solved before, and dealing with emotional, cultural, and psychological resistance. In this context, leaders can’t rely on rigid models—they must lead with empathy, curiosity, and self-awareness.

By rehumanizing transformation, Leckie also redefines leadership. A leader is no longer the one with all the answers, but the one willing to ask better questions. Leadership becomes an act of service: enabling others to explore, learn, and change. The heart—symbolic of courage, care, and action—becomes the metaphor for sustainable transformation. If you want your organization to change for good, you need to first strengthen the individual heartbeats that power it.

From Theory to Application

Leckie grounds his framework in storytelling rather than theory. He opens with his own experience learning to swim—an allegory for change itself. At first, progress feels messy and uncomfortable, but through practice and reflection, new behaviors become second nature. The same applies to organizational transformation: you start imperfectly, choose one behavior to practice, reflect regularly, and keep going.

Throughout the book, Leckie blends personal narratives with corporate case studies—from GE’s failed digital pivot (a cautionary tale of executing without exploring) to Microsoft’s revival under Satya Nadella, who modeled “Changing Before Protecting” by leading with vulnerability and empathy. These stories make the six capabilities vivid and actionable, demonstrating how the human side of change determines whether technologies and strategies succeed.

The Promise of a Heart-Led Future

Ultimately, The Heart of Transformation is a call to courage. Leckie challenges you to recognize that transformation isn’t about managing systems but nurturing souls—helping people care enough to change themselves and each other. Whether you’re a CEO reshaping culture, an HR professional guiding growth, or simply an individual facing change, the path forward begins within. By strengthening curiosity, compassion, and authenticity in yourself, you seed transformation that lasts—transformation with heart.

Leckie begins with the most foundational capability: Exploring Before Executing. In a culture obsessed with getting things done, he warns against what one friend calls “the seductive lure of execution.” Doing more, faster, is not the same as doing better. Whether you’re launching an initiative, solving a problem, or leading a transformation, your first step should be exploration—asking, listening, and questioning what you believe to be true.

The GE Story: When Execution Failed Exploration

Leckie’s experience at General Electric (GE) provides a cautionary tale. When CEO Jeff Immelt declared in 2014 that GE would reinvent itself as a “digital industrial” company, the organization charged ahead with typical GE efficiency. They built the Predix software platform for the industrial Internet of Things, executed massive plans, and hired thousands of developers. Yet, within years, the project stalled. Why? GE focused on execution—on delivering a plan—without fully exploring its new context. Leaders didn’t pause to question whether building software at that scale aligned with GE’s strengths or market realities. The company’s legendary ability to “get things done” became its downfall.

The story illustrates what happens when action outpaces curiosity. Exploration requires patience, humility, and what Leckie calls “operationalized curiosity”—embedding inquiry into everyday interactions. It’s about leading with questions before mandates, and making it safe for others to challenge assumptions.

Five Questions to Practice Exploration

Leckie distills this capability into five deceptively simple questions to ask yourself and others: What do you think? (to draw out perspectives), What are you assuming is true? (to uncover blind spots), Whose voice is missing? (to break out of echo chambers), What’s your third-best idea? (to push creativity), and What didn’t you say that needs saying? (to surface hidden fears). When asked sincerely—“three times with your whole heart,” as Leckie puts it—these questions reveal new insights that execution alone can never uncover.

Curiosity as the Heartbeat of Transformation

Curiosity, Leckie insists, is the spiritual parent of all transformation. It fuels learning, innovation, and empathy. Yet most organizations unintentionally suppress curiosity—they reward speed, compliance, and certainty. Leaders who model curiosity create cultures where exploration precedes execution. By allowing team members to ask questions and test ideas, they prevent costly mistakes and foster engagement.

To make curiosity actionable, Leckie offers the Four As: Allow (give yourself permission to question), Ask (use the right questions), Assess (reflect on answers), and Again (repeat until patterns emerge). Exploration, when done regularly, becomes a habit—a way of learning that guides smarter execution. As with swimming in his opening metaphor, you don’t need to master everything before you start. You just need to pick one new behavior, practice it with intention, and keep “just swimming.”

In the second capability, Learning Before Knowing, Leckie invites you to trade certainty for humility. In a world where what we know quickly becomes irrelevant, learning—not knowledge—is the new advantage. Drawing from his conversation with the late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, Leckie recalls a profound insight: “It used to be that we developed the skills to get the job. Now we get the job, and we must develop the skills to do it.”

From Knowledge Workers to Learning Workers

Leckie traces the evolution of work: from laborers of the industrial era to knowledge workers of the 20th century, and now to learning workers in the digital age. Knowledge once ensured stability; today, it can be a trap if we cling to it too tightly. Technology now learns faster than we do. Artificial intelligence, automation, and real-time data analytics make mere expertise obsolete within years. As Ed Hess and Katherine Ludwig argue in Humility Is the New Smart, the half-life of knowledge is shrinking. What endures, Leckie contends, is the ability to unlearn, relearn, and remain curious.

Why We Struggle to Learn

Learning feels simple but isn’t. Biologically, our brains resist it. We prefer familiar neural pathways—the grooves of habitual thought—over building new ones. Psychologically, we mistake understanding for change. Socially, we’re rewarded for knowing, not for asking. Leckie shows how “confirmation bias” and “fundamental attribution error” blind us: we overemphasize our correctness and underplay situational complexity. In his words, “We rarely think about our own natural self-centeredness—it’s hard-wired.” Recognizing this truth is the first step toward learning before knowing.

Five Questions for Unlearning

To move from knowledge to learning, Leckie again turns to questions. He offers five to spark self-inquiry: Who challenges my beliefs? (find truth-tellers), How is my idea wrong? (embrace fallibility), What is my blind spot? (seek feedback), When was the last time I was wrong? (build humility), and Am I okay with not knowing? (cultivate calm amid ambiguity). These questions aren’t rhetorical; they are habits for lifelong curiosity.

Learning Out Loud

Leckie advocates “learning out loud”—talking through your reflections to make sense of them. He teaches readers to debrief experiences through six levels: noticing what happened, recognizing insights, seeing limits, asking for help, choosing actions, and looking inside for patterns. Each level deepens self-awareness. In practice, you can do this with a coach, colleague, or even yourself. The goal is progress, not perfection: becoming someone who learns continuously and visibly, so others feel safe to do the same.

In Changing Before Protecting, Leckie tackles one of humanity’s most primal instincts—self-protection. We are wired to keep things safe, familiar, and predictable. Yet real transformation demands the opposite: embracing discomfort, experimenting, and taking small, recoverable risks. “Change,” he writes, “is personal—and hard.”

Microsoft’s Example: Vulnerability at Scale

Leckie tells the story of Microsoft’s cultural renewal under Satya Nadella, focusing on executive Jean-Philippe Courtois. In 2019, at the company’s global Ready conference, Courtois agreed to be coached live onstage by Michael Bungay Stanier. In front of thousands of employees, he let down his guard as Bungay Stanier gently pushed past his safe answers with the words, “No, let’s try this again.” The message was clear: if the company wanted to transform, leaders had to model openness. Courtois’s willingness to be seen struggling became the organization’s strength—it made change human.

Why We Cling to Protection

Leckie explains that our instinct to protect comes from evolutionary biology: our brains fear uncertainty as if it were mortal danger. In organizations, that fear manifests as bureaucracy, blame avoidance, or “cover your base” decision-making. Yet clinging to the familiar—policies, hierarchies, short-term safety—often leads to long-term decline. Companies like Microsoft thrived only after choosing vulnerability over defensiveness.

Small Recoverable Tests

Change doesn’t require reckless leaps. Drawing on Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change, Leckie recommends “small recoverable tests”—low-risk experiments that challenge assumptions and allow safe failure. When he was a young civil servant, he tested his ideas for workflow improvement not by confronting senior leaders but by framing them as collaborative suggestions. That reframing allowed learning without jeopardy—a pattern he still follows today. The same applies to personal change: try something new, observe what happens, and adjust. Fear shrinks when you experiment in small doses.

Ultimately, Changing Before Protecting is about courage in motion. It’s about choosing growth over comfort—not through grand gestures, but through repeated acts of learning, honesty, and heart.

The fourth capability, Pathfinding Before Path Following, shifts focus from control to alignment. Old-style “command and control” leadership sets the path and demands compliance. Pathfinding leadership, by contrast, sets the destination—through shared purpose and values—and empowers people to discover their own routes there.

The Abitibi-Price Story: Guided by Values

Leckie shares a story from his experience with Abitibi-Price, a Canadian paper company once in decline. Under CEO Ron Oberlander, the company reinvented itself using a simple vision (“to be the finest manufacturer and marketer of papers for communication”) and clear values: flexibility, continuous learning, wise spending, and urgency. They didn’t micromanage; they trusted people to live those values. When cost cuts were needed, leadership didn’t issue rigid rules—they asked teams to cut intelligently. Employees responded with creativity, reducing costs by 15% without elaborate enforcement. The shared language of values made compliance unnecessary.

From Hierarchy to Empowerment

Pathfinding requires losing control to gain engagement. Drawing on David Rock’s SCARF model—Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness—Leckie explains that autonomy and fairness foster psychological safety. In organizations like Abitibi or Microsoft, control isn’t something leaders hold; it’s a gift they share. When people feel trusted, they take ownership. “Respect and permission,” Leckie writes, “create the environment safe enough to cause conflict that is required to perform at the highest level.”

Questions that Guide the Journey

Leckie encourages leaders to ask: Where are we really going? (clarify purpose), What is most important? (identify values), Is this who we are? (check alignment), Who would know best? (seek counsel), and Can we discuss our differences? (invite dissent). His “bonus question”—What am I hiding from you?—forces self-reflection. These questions create cultures of trust and learning, where direction is shared rather than dictated. Pathfinding begins when you replace the illusion of control with the power of purpose.

Innovating Before Replicating is Leckie’s call to rediscover courage and creativity in a world addicted to best practices. Replicating success feels safe; innovating feels risky. But repeating yesterday’s answers in tomorrow’s world leads to decay. “A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny,” Jeff Bezos once warned, “because shiny doesn’t last.” Leckie shows how innovation happens only when we challenge assumptions, embrace awkwardness, and play the long game.

Bob Moesta’s Countertop Epiphany

Leckie illustrates this idea through his friend Bob Moesta, co-creator of the Jobs-to-be-Done theory. In the 1990s, Moesta helped a startup making solid-surface countertops. The company had 64 colors, customized designs, and high costs—but sales stalled. By questioning assumptions (“Do customers really need all these options?”), Moesta simplified offerings to eight colors, visible seams, and modular pieces. Competitors said, “You can’t do that,” but customers bought in droves. In a few years, the company’s revenues grew twentyfold. Innovation wasn’t about adding more—it was about thinking differently.

The Cost of Replicating Success

Replication works—until it doesn’t. Leaders often chase trends, mimic competitors, or scale what once worked, ignoring the hidden costs: lost learning, stifled creativity, and disengaged teams. Leckie argues that the fear of failure is often the true obstacle. Organizations prefer short-term gains over long-term growth. But true innovators, like Bezos or Elon Musk, accept failure as tuition for learning.

Platform Thinking and the Power of Frames

Leckie introduces “platform thinking”—seeing beyond products to the ecosystems they enable. Using the “MyCarCrash” app thought experiment, he describes a world where sensors, insurance, emergency response, and scheduling platforms integrate seamlessly after an accident. None of these technologies alone innovates; it’s their interconnection that transforms experience. Likewise, innovation happens when you expand your frame of reference and connect what was once isolated.

Turning Awkward into Forward

Leckie ends the chapter with an unexpected insight: “If it isn’t awkward, it isn’t agile.” Citing Agile experts Robbe Richman and Dan Mezick, he argues that awkwardness—the discomfort of disagreement and uncertainty—is a sign of progress. Innovation requires productive conflict, laughter, and humility. Tools like the “moose on the table” (literally placing a stuffed moose to name the unspoken) remind teams that it’s okay to surface hard truths. Awkwardness is not failure; it’s the midpoint between old and new, where transformation actually happens.

Finally, Leckie brings transformation home with Humanizing Before Organizing. This capability reminds us that businesses are made of people, not systems. In the obsession with efficiency, metrics, and roles, many leaders dehumanize work. Leckie, drawing on Edgar and Peter Schein’s concept of “personization,” argues that effective organizations thrive on relationships, not hierarchies.

Beyond Scientific Management

Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” introduced discipline and productivity but also turned people into cogs. Many workplaces still reflect Taylor’s mindset—managers direct, employees execute. Leckie insists this approach no longer fits a world that requires flexibility and emotional intelligence. Leaders must unlearn their dependence on rigid structures and start seeing colleagues as complex, whole human beings.

From Roles to Relationships

The Scheins identify four levels of relationships, from coercion (Level -1) to emotionally intimate bonds (Level 3). Most workplaces operate at Level 1—transactional professionalism—where people “act their roles” and mask vulnerability. Leckie advocates moving toward Level 2, where colleagues know each other as full humans and trust replaces compliance. In such relationships, honesty flourishes and collaboration deepens. Level 3—“emotionally intimate total mutual commitment”—is rare but possible within teams that share high trust, like startup founders or close creative groups.

Goals Before Roles: Designing Work Together

Humanizing also means organizing around goals instead of rigid job titles. Drawing on organization design expert Sue Mohrman and the Galbraith Star Model, Leckie shows that altering structure alone doesn’t create change—you must redesign processes, incentives, and communication in tandem. True collaboration happens when people ask: “What are we trying to accomplish? What’s the best way to work together to do it?” When goals lead, roles adapt organically, keeping the organization alive and aligned.

Questions for Humanizing Work

To humanize work, Leckie proposes five questions: When are you at your best? (celebrate strengths), How will we know when things go sideways? (normalize imperfection), How could we work better next time? (commit to learning), What really matters to you? (understand values), and What do you want from me? (open dialogue). These questions, when asked sincerely, bridge differences and create Level 2 connections. As Leckie writes, “Relationships, not metrics, drive results. Systems may guide you, but people move you.”

After exploring the six capabilities, Leckie concludes by showing how to build and sustain your “heart of transformation.” Change, he reminds us, is not a one-time effort—it’s a practice. Like physical exercise, transformation requires consistent repetition, feedback, and community. The goal is not perfection but progress: developing the emotional and relational stamina to lead in a constantly shifting world.

Start Small—and Start Again

Leckie confesses that writing this very book was an act of transformation. Overwhelmed by the challenge, he realized that progress came only through beginning: “I couldn’t see the end, but I could start.” Likewise, he tells readers to pick one capability, one question, and practice it daily. Each act of curiosity or courage strengthens the “heart muscle” that makes change sustainable. Like learning to swim, you get better by doing—not by waiting to feel ready.

From Me to Us

Transformation begins with “Me,” but it thrives through “Us.” Leaders must create a core community—trusted peers who practice honesty, empathy, and reflection together. Change cannot be outsourced to a single “change agent”; it must be shared across a network of hearts. Leckie calls these allies your “pacemakers”—the people who help your transformation rhythm stay strong. Over time, individual practice amplifies into organizational change.

Thinking Time and Reflection

Leckie also emphasizes the importance of thinking time. Leaders, he warns, often lose the ability to think deeply amid constant demands. Drawing on a Harvard Business Review article, he contrasts “busy managers” with “purposeful managers” who protect their reflection time, build networks, and ask for help. True transformation, he argues, requires creating space for thought, not just execution—echoing his earlier mantra of exploring before acting.

Aggregate Then Analyze: Spotting Patterns

Finally, Leckie borrows from Todd Rose’s The End of Average to remind readers that growth comes from recognizing patterns, not chasing averages. By reflecting on what has worked for you (and what hasn’t), you build personalized methods of change. Transformation looks different for each person—but the process always begins with awareness, curiosity, and commitment. Don’t wait for the perfect model, Leckie concludes. “Your story is still being written.”