The Case for Going Deeper, Not Further Out

The Case for Going Deeper, Not Further Out

In 2015, Apple elevated Jonathan Ive to Chief Design Officer. On paper it looked like a promotion — a title that acknowledged his stature, his legacy, his singular influence on how the company made things. In practice, as was widely reported at the time, the structural shift moved him away from the daily friction of shipping decisions. Whether that distance helped or hurt his actual influence on products is genuinely hard to say. But the episode raises a question worth sitting with: inside a large organisation, does proximity to the business produce better creative outcomes, or does it compromise them?

The fashionable answer, especially in creative circles, is distance. Keep the creative director slightly apart — a challenger, an outside voice, someone who can say the uncomfortable thing precisely because they don't have to defend a headcount in next quarter's review. The unfashionable answer is the one James Hurst's career keeps quietly making: go further in, not further out.

James moved from Head of Brand Design at Google to Global Creative Director at Pinterest to Creative Director at Tinder to VP and Global Executive Creative Director at HelloFresh. Each move is deeper into organisational structure, not further from it. That is not an accident of circumstance — it reads like a considered position about where creative judgment actually does its work.

Which makes the McKinsey finding from their 2023 State of Organizations report worth pausing on. The report identified creative and design leadership as one of the roles most frequently restructured during post-pandemic organisational redesigns, with companies increasingly splitting the function in two: a brand-facing creative lead on one side, an internal operations lead on the other. The implicit logic is that one person cannot hold both. That the role was, structurally speaking, already doing two incompatible jobs.

It is a reasonable structural response. But it also concedes something important — that the original role, the one person who could hold the creative vision and navigate the P&L review and defend the headcount and still walk into a campaign brief with genuine instinct, was doing something genuinely difficult. Not impossible, but difficult in a way that deserves more examination than a reorganisation chart usually affords it.

Ed Catmull's answer to this problem at Pixar was structural rather than personal. He institutionalised the Braintrust — a peer review process documented in his 2014 book Creativity, Inc., where directors could receive candid notes without any single executive holding veto power over creative decisions. The mechanism was designed to separate the act of creative judgment from the act of organisational authority. You could be honest in the room precisely because honesty in the room carried no consequences for your budget or your reporting line. The Braintrust is, in a sense, a formal admission that commercial structures and creative structures want to do different things to a decision — and that someone has to build the container that lets both happen without one destroying the other.

What James' career suggests is a different kind of answer: not a structural container, but a person who has genuinely learned to hold both pressures without resolving them too quickly. That is not the same as being a diplomat or a compromiser. Use Design To Design Change — his first book — makes a sustained argument against the safe, conventional choice. The premise is that lasting brands are built around purpose that shapes culture and behaviour, not around features or pricing that can be copied. That argument is much easier to make from outside a business. It is considerably harder to make when you are the person who has to operationalise it, defend it to a CFO, and keep it alive through a restructure.

The tension in the title question — does 'creative director' become a misleading label once you are inside the machine? — might be pointing at something real, but perhaps not what it first appears to. The misleading part may not be the word creative. It may be the word director, with its implication of someone who points at a destination from a safe remove. What the in-house version of the role actually requires is closer to what James' second book calls the discipline of switching — the ability to move between making things unfamiliar and making them legible, between disruption and structure, between the instinct that says this should be stranger and the judgment that says this needs to survive contact with the world. That is not a creative direction skill. It is something more like a creative metabolism.

The Ive episode is instructive here not because elevation was wrong, but because it suggests that the structural position of the creative leader — who they report to, what meetings they attend, what decisions they are proximate to — shapes the work in ways that no title fully captures. When Ive moved to Chief Design Officer in 2015, he reported directly to the CEO rather than to product leadership. The meetings changed. The decisions he was proximate to shifted from product shipping to company-wide strategy. Influence flows through proximity. When the proximity changes, the influence changes, regardless of what the org chart says.

For organisations that are trying to hold creative ambition and commercial rigour in the same room — which is most organisations worth working for — the underlying design problem is not finding someone with the right title. It is designing the conditions under which a person with genuine creative judgment can remain proximate to the decisions that matter, without the organisation's natural preference for certainty gradually converting that judgment into something safer and more manageable. The structure either protects the instinct or it slowly replaces it. That is the choice, and it is made long before anyone writes a job description.

James' Perspective

Key idea

Creative influence inside an organisation flows through structural proximity to decisions, not through title or formal authority.

Who this matters for

• Creative leaders
• CMOs
• Founders

Related ideas

• Brand as Operating System

Related projects

• Google
• Pinterest
• Tinder
• HelloFresh

Books

• Use Design to Design Change
• Weird the Normal / Normal the Weird