Reimagining organisational change leadership requires revisiting the seminal work of Kurt Lewin and James M Burns. Being the 20th century’s most influential organisational change and leadership scholars, both radically reimagined their respective fields. However, often misinterpreted, misunderstood and even misrepresented, their true recommendations were largely ignored. In this article, we discuss why this is so. Despite three decades of transformation and organisational change leadership discourse, leadership is still in crisis. Working towards an alternative to the current orthodoxy, we reimagine organisational change leadership as a utilitarian consequentialist process.