Twenty years inside creative industries will teach you something about creativity, if you're paying attention. What it taught me was that I had been looking for it in the wrong rooms.

I am a creative professional. That is how I was trained, how I built a career, and for longer than I'd like to admit, how I understood my own value. I worked at global firms. I won awards. I sat across from CEOs and founders as the person they had brought in to supply the thing they believed they lacked.

What I kept noticing, year after year and organization after organization, was that the people who had hired me were doing something I didn't have a name for. They had built something from nothing, or inherited something broken and made it viable, or looked at a market everyone else had accepted as fixed and seen a different arrangement of the pieces. They had done all of that before I walked in the door. None of them would have called it creativity. The word didn't seem to belong to them. It belonged to people like me.

That assumption turned out to be the most expensive thing in the room.

I define creativity as the scrutiny of what can change and what can't. By that definition, you do not get to become a CEO or a founder without it. The capacity is already yours. What most leaders are missing isn't the creativity. It's the recognition of what they've been doing, and what becomes possible when that capacity is brought fully into the work of leading.

That is what these essays are attempting to unfold.

I'm Dave Ortega, Chief Creative Officer and Partner at McKee Wallwork, a brand consultancy based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We work with CEOs and leadership teams across the country who sense that their organization is capable of more than it is currently producing. These essays are an extension of that work. Written for leaders about what becomes possible when creativity is finally returned to the people it always belonged to.