On working with what's there, rather than what you'd design from scratch.
I often describe myself as having a blind spot when it comes to delivery. My instinct, when I come into a team or an organisation, is never to tear things down and start again. It's to understand what's there, work with it, and find the path from where things are to where they need to be. Evolution, not revolution. But wherever I've worked, this is where empathy comes in. It's a deliberate choice, not a limitation.
Working with what you have rather than what you wish you had requires you to really understand the nature of the resources you're working with. That means the team, their strengths, where they might need support, and the structural conditions of the organisation around them. It also means understanding the context they're operating in. Most of the time, organisations aren't starting from scratch. The work is already in flight, priorities are already set, and the team is already under pressure. Making significant changes in that environment can be genuinely disruptive. So the question isn't what would I build if I were starting fresh. It's what does this team need, right now, to move better than they did yesterday.
The same is true of how I work with AI, and how I implement process. It's easy to treat AI as a tool you instruct and receive output from, but the best results I've had come from something closer to a dialogue. You put something in, you look at what comes back, you understand why it isn't quite what you were after, and you refine from there. I don't see this as a workaround for a limitation, it's just how the resources used by an organisation work best. It maps exactly onto how I work with people, and how I use process. The objective gets clearer through the conversation, through iteration, and through understanding what is happening. The AI, like the team, does better work when it understands the wider context it's operating in, and processes need enough flexibility to support improvement under all scenarios. Helping that ecosystem develop is part of the job.
None of this means that things don't sometimes need to change significantly. Empathy isn't a reason to avoid difficult decisions, it's often what makes them clearer. When you understand an organisation well enough, you can see the difference between a problem that needs time and support and one that needs a more fundamental intervention. That might mean a structural change, a different approach to how work flows, a technology decision, or occasionally a harder conversation about whether the right people are in the right roles. The difference is that those conclusions come from understanding rather than assumption. You're not imposing change because it's what you would have designed from scratch. You're still working with the resources you have, but modifying because the situation genuinely calls for it.
None of this comes without effort. Understanding an organisation well enough to work with it takes time, and it requires you to set aside the instinct to impose your own view of how things should be done. That's not always easy, especially under pressure. But it's the part of the work I find most interesting, and most of the time, it's where the real progress comes from.