Design Thinking in Practice - Start with Empathy

In my introductory blog on Design Thinking, I mentioned its 5 stages. The first of these is “Empathise”.

You may ask “But why bring empathy into pensions?”. Checking your projected pension or receiving a correct payment each month - surely this is all just about operational efficiency? Whilst that’s often true, the reality is that most people only engage with their pension funds or employers about their pensions during life events. These might be work-related such as a change in role or employer, or personal circumstances such as going through a divorce or having a baby. These are moments where any decisions made can have real consequences and are often at times of heightened emotion.

So, efficiency is only one side of the equation. That’s why we need to go beyond the process and ask: what is the human experience behind each interaction?

If Design Thinking is less about operational efficiency and more about delivering effective services, then empathy is where it all begins. It’s the foundation of everything that follows, because unless we truly understand the people we’re designing for, even the best ideas risk missing the mark.

Whether you're managing funds, shaping member communications, or designing digital tools, empathy helps you see the system through someone else’s eyes: a scheme member approaching retirement, a councillor under pressure to deliver more with less, or an officer navigating legacy systems.

Empathy isn’t just about being nice

Because it deals with emotional responses and reactions, it’s easy to think of Design Thinking as quite a “fluffy” idea centred around sentimentality. But this is a common misunderstanding. It’s about objectively understanding people’s goals, pain points and motivations, so we can design services that meet real needs. In practice, it’s as analytical as much as it is emotional (if not more so).

Let’s take a practical example. Suppose member take-up of a digital self-service platform is lower than expected. The technical solution might work perfectly. But what if the member journey is unclear? What if key features are buried under jargon? Or if scheme members are worried about data security, but haven’t had that fear addressed?

Without empathy, those questions can be missed entirely. With it, they become the basis of better, more effective interventions.

Empathy mapping

Empathy mapping is a particularly simple yet powerful framework for understanding the end-users of our services.

It involves firstly being specific about who we are looking to understand. This “persona” is normally defined in terms of their demographics and lifestyle. For example…

“Sam, an 18-year-old school leaver, who has just started his first job with the council in Sport and Leisure, as a swimming development apprentice. Outside of work, much of his life revolves around sport. He goes to the gym 3 times a week and is an avid tennis player. He also enjoys going to watch the local football team with his dad on a Saturday. He is right at the beginning of his career journey and so have not considered his retirement plans in any great detail.”

You can see that even a simple description of this person can provide a much richer picture than our normal categories of “Active”, “Deferred” or “Pensioner”.

Once you have this persona specified, you can build a picture of how they might experience your service.

Each of these questions can be answered either based on research (in the case of “say/hear”) or by directly discussing with a person or group who broadly fall into that persona (the “think/feel” element).

Consciously working through a framework, and asking questions such as these, can provide extremely useful insights as we start to consider the needs of our users.

It involves active listening, observation, and asking thoughtful questions, not to validate what we think we know, but to reveal what we don’t.

There are several different versions of the framework, each of which has a slightly different focus. However, the overall purpose is not to stick to a particular framework, but to understand your audience from their point of view - not yours.

You can read more about empathy mapping from its originator here.

You don’t need a formal research budget or a big innovation team. Getting answers to some of these questions can be as simple as sitting in on member helpline calls to hear what’s confusing or frustrating, or asking open questions in workshops or surveys or even just around the kettle at break time - not just what people do, but why.

One of the most powerful shifts empathy mapping enables is moving from assumptions to insights. Using data to make decisions.

The public sector often operates within tight constraints and established structures. But even small changes, grounded in real user insight, can yield outsized results.

Creating space for empathy

Of course, consciously building user personas and mapping empathy takes a bit of time. But not as much as fixing a service no one wants, or a tool no one uses.

It without doubt requires a little investment but it doesn’t need to be excessive. It can often be absorbed - and is often best treated - within existing operational budgets for service improvement or market research activities by ensuring that the end-user perspective is the focus of that activity. This ultimately leads over time to more effective services.

So, as you face the next challenge—be it a funding model, a communication plan, or a tech upgrade—pause and ask: Who is this for? What matters to them? What are we assuming?

Because the more we listen upfront, the less we need to course correct later.

Next time, we’ll move to the second stage of Design Thinking: “Define”. We’ll explore how to turn raw insights into clear problem statements, and why the way you frame a problem is often the key to solving it well.

If you would like to discuss the topic of design thinking, please get in touch.