By Ania Karzek, Program Director - Target Operating Model (TOM), City of Holdfast Bay
At the last BPIN Forum of the year we heard about innovation, continuous improvement (CI) and design thinking. The challenges we are facing as organisations, teams, and individuals are not getting any easier. Almost everything we touch is difficult, wicked, complicated and/or complex. Incivility on our front lines (and social pages) is growing, and genuine dialogue is increasingly hard to come by.
So, it’s no surprise we’re constantly searching for new ideas, new models, new energy.
We’re hungry for improvement. We want better systems, better services, better ways of working. Better-ness (yes, it should be a word!) has become the currency of innovation, CI and design thinking.
But alongside all the frameworks and buzzwords, there’s something quieter and more fundamental that holds it all together: empathy.
Empathy isn’t a soft skill or a nice-to-have. It’s the groundwork for every process that aims to improve lives. In fact, in design thinking, empathy is the first, and most critical, step. Without it, innovation risks becoming performative or disconnected from the people it’s meant to serve.
In the context of local government, empathy means really seeing our communities and going beyond the data sets and satisfaction surveys to understand what people are actually experiencing — especially those whose voices are often left out. It’s about taking time to listen, with genuine curiosity and without defensiveness.
Empathy says, “I hear you. I see what that’s like. You’re not alone in feeling this way.”
And that kind of connection changes everything.
When we lead with empathy, we ask better questions. We uncover real problems, not just the ones that show up in reports or KPIs. We challenge assumptions — especially our own. We stop designing in echo chambers and start co-creating with people who live the reality we’re trying to improve.
This matters. Because the services local government provides are often the most immediate, tangible touchpoints in a person’s life: rubbish collection, libraries, planning, community safety, housing, footpaths, childcare, and aged care. These things aren’t abstract; they’re lived.
Empathy-driven design thinking helps us not only identify gaps and opportunities but also build services that are equitable, accessible, and human. It creates space for collaboration across departments and across the table with the community. And when people feel heard, trust grows. Engagement grows. Buy-in grows.
It’s not easy work. It asks us to slow down in a system that’s always speeding up. It means sitting with discomfort, complexity, and contradiction. But it’s also where the most transformative ideas are born — not from quick fixes, but from deep understanding.
As social researcher Brené Brown says in this beautiful short video on empathy, it’s about connecting with the emotion someone is experiencing, not trying to fix it, judge it, or compare it.
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