Something in you knows your organization is capable of more than it's currently producing. Not just more revenue, but more coherence. More impact. More of whatever it was you originally had in mind when you started the thing. That sense doesn't go away, even when everything around you conspires to make it seem naive. Especially then.
Most leaders I know don't lose that sense, they just stop hearing it. The regular pressures of business and life speak louder. The noise increases. The complexity multiplies. And somewhere in all of that, the voice that knows what your organization was meant to be gets harder and harder to make out.
What stands between your organization and what it's capable of becoming is not strategy, or talent, or market conditions—though all of those matter. It's something that has been quietly lost, something that belongs to you and has always belonged to you, and can be reclaimed.
Most people would not call it creativity. I understand why. The word has been so thoroughly captured by a certain kind of specialist that it no longer sounds like something a CEO should be concerned with. But what I mean by creativity is something different and something your organization cannot lead without.
I define creativity as the scrutiny of what can change and what can't.
That kind of creativity isn't a service you purchase. It's a capacity that belongs to every organization in its leadership, its strategy, its identity, and the operating assumptions that quietly determine everything it produces. Restoring it doesn't require hiring the right agency. It requires a leader willing to reclaim it.
I'm Dave Ortega, Chief Creative Officer at McKee Wallwork. My career has moved through graphic design, advertising, brand strategy, and organizational consulting not by plan, but by following the same instinct at each stage: go deeper than the obvious, wait for what's true to emerge, then find the most compelling way to reveal it. That instinct eventually led me upstream of marketing entirely to the identity and assumptions that determine everything an organization produces downstream.
I believe every organization was designed to be something specific. Not a generic version of success, but a particular expression of value that only it can offer, with real impact on the people it serves. Most organizations never fully become that thing. Not because the potential isn't there. Because the voice that knows it gets drowned out before anyone thinks to protect it.
These essays are an attempt to make that voice audible again. For leaders who sense that something essential has been taken from their organization and are ready to reclaim it. Not frameworks or tactics. An unfolding of ideas about creativity, business, and what becomes possible when leaders stop performing and start becoming.
Dave Ortega is Chief Creative Officer at McKee Wallwork.