The Queen Delusion: When Potential Isn’t Execution in Creative Leadership

The Performance of Potential vs. The Reality of Systems

There’s an art to playing the queen when your CV reads pawn. Many creators and cultural founders know the terrain—those who win admiration for their systems thinking, who engineer new possibilities for projects or organizations. But let’s address what too often sits beneath applause: the distance between perceived leadership and real power within institutional systems. Reputations build around people who think macro, who see the inefficiencies and patch threads together. You’ve likely heard: ‘You sound like a leader. Why aren’t you running this department?’ Even in the creative sector, a track record of being the support, not the strategist, can stick to you like a second skin. This is structural. The value of your labor is slotted not by what you say or believe, but by the labor history your CV records for the people with the authority to decide your trajectory.

Bias and the Path Dependency of Labor

Let’s make it direct: Utility is rarely rewarded with autonomy. If your history is service-based—support roles, operational work, no explicit leadership—systems rarely reposition you as a chess player. They move you as a piece. Leaders and directors, especially within economics or cultural industries, know the rules and shape the roster. Their status emerges not only from their mindset or creative solution based thinking but from documented authority: quantifiable outcomes, innovation in process, the ability to report, re-position, and hold risk in public. If you are not holding the number—client retention, project ROI, team overhaul, or process transformation—you’re on the board, but you’re not calling the play.

The Mindset Gap: Self-Belief versus Structural Evidence.

This tension generates a cognitive dissonance: the belief that displaying potential and ambitious mindset should convert to opportunity, versus the hard data of performed labor. The paradigm shift founders and artists hunger for—departing from doers to directors—rarely happens based on potential alone. If your archive shows service, the system will situate you as service. This is not a failure of creativity. It’s not even always personal. It’s a function of path dependency: Capital and institutions reward proof, not promise. Overcompensation doesn’t solve it. Neither does another awards night or viral comment. The delta between self-perception and your institutional record creates an existential risk—the slow anxiety of being stuck in support roles after decades of ambition.

Awareness as Infrastructure: Knowing Your Position Beyond Output

Few people at the top are incentivized to rehabilitate your role—they have their own positions to defend, and the labor force remains stratified by design. The only strategic lever becomes personal and cultural awareness: understanding how organizational rules reward visible leadership, scalable thinking, and risk. There’s a difference between getting things done and getting others to move, not for your project, but for the broader direction of the institution or economy. Founders do not rise by overextending themselves—they rise by restructuring the decision-making that positions others, by making their efficacy unavoidably legible to people whose jobs depend on placing the right queens on the field.

A Practical Tool: The Authority Ledger

For each project or initiative.

• What occurred because of your influence, not just your labor? What objective criteria—numbers, milestones, team shifts—trace back to decisions you made?
• Which processes did you shift from execution to direction?
• In what ways did you change how others perform their work, not merely complete your own?

Over time, look for gaps:

• Are you still logging accomplishments that are service-based, or are you merging towards strategic influence?

This tracking becomes your argument—future proof you bring to any negotiation for power, funding, or authorship.

Reflective question:

Which story about creative labor do you obediently repeat—whose interests does that story serve, and how would your practice shift if you stopped performing by its rules?