Hello Reader,
I've often read that empathy is going to be this century's primary skill when it comes to success as a leader, yet we're over a quarter of the way through and I'm scratching my head. Really?
We thought we'd explore this topic in our next creative leadership online session: aptly titled Radical Empathy.
Is empathy so overused and underrated—so familiar even—that we no longer understand what it takes to feel it?
Yesterday I read a newspaper, yes, an actual newspaper, for the first time in a long time. The headlines spoke of corruption bleeding out of large consultancies. Once a source of career career pride, known as ‘the big four’ in Australia, they are now judged by an emerging track record of unethical behaviour going back years. Other headlines spoke of politicians calling for our rights to be narrowed and in some instances, taken away.
It went on and on. I put the paper down and realised that our world is being redesigned in front of our eyes. Worst of all, it's by people who know exactly what they’re doing. People who are creative in their approach to the redesign of the world we're living in, and there going about it any which way they choose.
We often talk about meaningful work. We go down the rabbit hole of meaningful work . Searching and searching how we might make the world a better place through our daily choices, our board room decisions and the way we shape and reshape our organisations. All of this work to find meaning, to redesign and reshape our organisations is creative, and within this, I keep looking for us: the creative class.
Those people who said they were the ones who were designing the world to make it better, more equitable, fair and prosperous. More resilient to uncertainty.
The writers, the photographers, the policy makers, the architects, the journalists, the filmmakers and authors, the visual and experiential designers, the directors, the 'people people', the Ops people and the people who shape how we understand and sense ideas, and how these ideas move around our world.
Reader, I keep looking for us. The people who were meant to have empathy so innate it flowed through all of our work. Through everything we do. The people who understood, more than most, that every choice we make about what something looks like, sounds like, feels like, how it works, what it says and who says it, is a choice that designs our world.
Where is the creative class?
Where are the designers?
In that moment, designer Tibor Kalman came to mind. Proof of the era I grew up in. Tibor Kalman was the designer who took the editorship of Colors magazine and turned what was a Benetton commercial vehicle into one of the most politically confrontational publications of the twentieth century. Publishing an issue on ‘race’ that showed world leaders with their skin colours reversed, and an issue on AIDS when governments were still ignoring the AIDS epidemic at the time. Tibor Kalman understood that creativity was both a weapon and a leadership platform using it to full effect and shaping the views of a generation.
And then I think about today. 2026.
The highest cost of living in a generation. Mass redundancies. Wars compounding and authoritarianism rising. Displacement on a scale that is difficult to put a number to. A resurgent right wing that is not hiding its intentions.
The conditions to redesign have never been more urgent.
So I ask again. Where are the designers? Who is meeting the moment?
Author Ursula K. Le Guin stood at the National Book Awards in 2014 and said "hard times are coming when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, who can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality."
She was talking about all of us.
Today, Misan Harriman photographs grief, power and Black dignity. His images from protests, his portraits of love, and loss, are an insistence on who deserves to belong. Misan is not waiting for the next brief — he's simply meeting the moment. Zanele Muholi, the South African visual activist has spent two decades photographing Black queer life. Their work insists on the humanity of people that entire governments are currently trying to legislate out of existence. Visual Activist is a term Zanele has chosen with intent to meet the moment.
Something worth keeping in mind.
Toni Morrison once wrote about a conversation she had the day after president Bush's re-election in 2004, when she told a fellow writer she was paralysed. Couldn't work. Couldn't write. Her friend interrupted her and said, "this is precisely the time when you go to work — not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job."
I look at these people who have met the moment and ask myself if the creative class has confused proximity to power with having some kind of influence over it. We sit in the rooms. We make the decisions, we write the thing for the right clients. We tell ourselves that 'working with', is the same as actually doing it ourselves.
It isn't. And we know it isn't.
I push the newspaper aside and pick up a pen — usually the first thing I do when a weekly essay idea comes to mind — and I write another question we should be asking ourselves in my journal.
What am I waiting for?
We are all designers Reader. Every choice we make, what we amplify, what we push against, the words we use, the communities we build and the stories we tell — these are all design decisions that shape the world around us.
Every single one of them.