Is the Chief Design Officer dead? (No.) – The Great Creative Awakening: On Business leadership in the AI era

In the next 10-15 years, companies will look and function very differently than today. The Creative Leader emerges as the most crucial role in these companies of the future, let’s explore why and how.

A big thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts and comments on my 2024 book list. I love hearing people’s stories, the books they’ve resonated with, or the ones they added to their wish list.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that I do spent quite a bit of time pondering the responsibility of design as a discipline, and in turn the role creative leaders play in shaping a more humane future; not just in the technology industry but more broadly in all industries and businesses. Because what good is a company for than to create a net positive value for the world?

That said, this week’s newsletter touches on a topic that might sound superficial at first considering we’re talking about the title of a corporate role. However, underlying the question I posed in the headline, is a much deeper, much more interesting topic about how we need to rethink and redesign organizations as a whole in an AI-everything world –?and the crucial role creative leaders will play.

Let’s dive in!

The Great Creative Awakening: Business leadership in the A.I. everything era

You know that moment when you realize everything you thought you knew about your profession might be completely upended? That’s where we are with design leadership right now. But instead of having an existential crisis (we’ve had enough of those), let’s embark on a more intriguing journey – one that might just reshape how we think about creative leadership in the corporate world.

The end of business as usual

Remember when “design thinking” was the hot new thing in boardrooms? When executives would earnestly nod along to presentations about empathy mapping and rapid prototyping? Those conversations feel almost quaint now. With AI systems cranking out logos, layouts, and entire user interfaces faster than you can say “minimum viable product” we’re facing a far more fundamental question: What happens when the tools of creation become democratized beyond our wildest dreams?

Here’s where it gets interesting: While AI is busy mastering the mechanics of design – the pixels, the patterns, the infinite variations – it’s simultaneously illuminating something profound about human ingenuity. It turns out that our most valuable contributions were never really about tactical execution (although I fundamentally believe in the magic of things crafted by human hands). They were about something far more essential: our uniquely human capacity to envision futures that don’t exist yet and weave meaning into the fabric of human experience.

Mechanical humans in organizational machines

Here’s the delicious irony in all this: For the past century and a half, we’ve been obsessed with making humans work more like machines. Our organizational charts, our performance metrics, our management systems – they’re all designed around the Industrial Revolution’s ideal of consistency, predictability and standardization. We’ve created elaborate corporate machines that treat human variance as a bug rather than a feature.

And just when we’d nearly perfected this system of human mechanization, along comes AI to completely flip the script. Suddenly, we have actual machines to handle the mechanical stuff, and we desperately need humans to be more... human. It’s like spending decades teaching fish to ride bicycles, only to discover that what we really need is their extraordinary ability to swim and breathe underwater.

The rise of the creative leader

This is where the evolved role of Creative Leadership becomes not just interesting, but essential. I’m not talking about a rebranded Chief Design Officer or a souped-up Creative Director. I’m envisioning something more akin to an organizational alchemist – someone who understands how to transform the raw elements of human ingenuity, customer insights, and individual employee talents into organizational gold.

Think about it this way: If AI is handling the execution and optimization of ideas, then the real competitive advantage lies in creating environments where breakthrough thinking becomes not just possible, but inevitable. The Creative Leader becomes the architect of what I like to call “organizational ingenuity” – designing the conditions, systems, and experiences that unlock a company’s collective creative potential at scale.

A new creative operating system

What might this look like in practice? Imagine an organizational operating system built around amplifying human ingenuity rather than constraining it. This system would have several key components:

The creative metabolism

Just as our bodies have metabolic systems that transform food into energy, organizations need systems that transform raw ideas into innovation. The Creative Leader designs and nurtures these idea-transformation pathways, ensuring that creative energy flows freely across departmental boundaries and hierarchical levels.

The innovation ecosystem

Beyond traditional innovation pipelines, we need rich, safe, inspiring, dynamic environments where ideas can collide, combine, and evolve organically. This means designing spaces (both physical and digital) that spark our best ideas, encourage serendipitous connections, and cross-pollination of thoughts.

The meaning matrix

In a world of AI-powered efficiency, the ability to create meaningful human experiences becomes paramount. The Creative Leader orchestrates (more like in a jazz band than a classical orchestra) how customer value, employee fulfillment, and business success intersect to create experiences that resonate on a deeply human level.

New partnerships, new possibilities

This reimagined Creative Leadership role doesn’t exist in isolation. It forms powerful partnerships across the C-suite:

• With the CEO to shape the company’s creative vision in-line with its business strategy.
• With the CFO to develop new ways of measuring and valuing creative potential.
• With the CTO to build technology infrastructure that supports creative emergence.
• With the CHRO to design environments that nurture talent and unleash creative potential across all departments.
• With the CMO/CSO to tell emotional stories that drive sales and customer lifetime value.
• With the board to align experience strategy with business strategy, proactively manage risk and identify growth opportunities through strategic visionary experiments.

The future is human. It has to be.

As AI continues to collapse traditional talent stacks and accelerate the idea-to-execution timeline, something remarkable is happening. We’re being forced to confront a fundamental truth: In a world where artificial intelligence can optimize everything, our most valuable asset becomes our uniquely human capacity for imagination, empathy, and meaning-making.

This isn’t just about surviving the AI revolution. It’s about using this moment to fundamentally reimagine how organizations can serve as platforms for human flourishing. The Creative Leader’s mission becomes nothing less than designing the conditions for humans to feel fulfilled and thrive in an increasingly automated world.

New roles, new skills, better outcomes

The big question isn’t whether we need this kind of leadership (we do), but how it takes shape. Maybe it’s an evolved Chief Design Officer (CDO) role. Or the CDO role evolves to entail responsibilities that previously were part of a traditional CMO role to create consistent end-to-end customer experiences from story over sales to services. Perhaps we’ll see more designers becoming CEOs. Or, quite probable, creative leadership becomes as fundamental a skill as financial literacy for every executive.

Whether this role eventually lives under the title of Chief Design Officer, Chief Ingenuity Officer, or something we haven’t even imagined yet isn’t really the point. What matters is recognizing that as AI increasingly powers our automated systems, we need architects of ingenuity more than ever before.

The stakes? Nothing less than creating a future where businesses generate genuine, net-positive value for the world – not just through what they produce, but through how they enable human creativity to flourish. In this light, Creative Leadership isn’t just another corporate function but the key to unlocking the next chapter of human potential.

After all, in a world where AI can optimize everything, our ability to imagine, create, and connect becomes our most precious resource. The future belongs not to those who can build the best algorithms, but to those who can create the conditions for human creativity to soar.

What do you think about this vision of Creative Leadership? How do you see it playing out in your organization? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences as we navigate this fascinating transformation together.

Little big thoughts I’m ruminating

• Why do we so often treat technological advancements as “god-given” an inevitable rather than human-made and shapable? Is it a natural human reaction to something we can’t fully grasp (yet) in its consequences? Or is it a way to absolve ourselves from accountability and responsibility? Or maybe both?
• Can we envision a future that is more just for all while not following into the trap of naiveté that might have us ignore the negative sides of human nature?
• How do we expose more people to all the beauty that is in the world so that we might all feel more connected to what’s worth protecting – and in turn more connected to each other?

3 interesting links I came across

• Eurasia Group’s Top Global Risks 2025 (Report and Video)
• The Times: Generation Beta is here — what kind of world will it inherit?
• Hojin Kang: The images that warm me

You made it. Thank you!

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