A human-centred design practice for leaders navigating ambiguity.
brkrs. is a boutique practice. We work with senior leaders in the public and private sectors on the problems that do not come with a clear answer, the ones tangled up with other people’s problems, moving too fast to solve alone.
We are not here to hand over a method and leave. We are here to help leaders think, to bring human judgement to bear on decisions that technology alone cannot make well, and to keep the people on the receiving end of those decisions firmly in view.
What we believe
The future is ambiguous. It always is. The work of leadership is not to walk into the room with certainty, but to explore, to prototype, to hold a question open long enough to learn something before committing to an answer.
Most organisations are not short on data. They are short on contact with what it means. The distance between the people who decide and the people who live with those decisions is where good intentions turn into poor outcomes. Closing that distance is much of what we do.
And when everyone is buying the same technology and chasing the same efficiencies, sameness is not an advantage. The value is in judgement, applied to your particular people, your particular history, your particular constraints. That is the one thing that cannot be bought in a box.They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the houses had disappeared, and the ship was out in a wide space of sea very fresh and clear though pale in the early light. They had left London sitting on its mud. A very thin line of shadow tapered on the horizon, scarcely thick enough to stand the burden of Paris, which nevertheless rested upon it. They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same exhilaration at their freedom ran through them all.
brkrs. is led by Iain Barker.
Iain has spent more than thirty years in human-centred design, across the United Kingdom and Australia. He co-founded Meld Studios, one of the country’s most respected design practices, where the work earned recognition that speaks to both its quality and its culture.
- Good Design Team of the Year, 2024
- Good Design Award of the Year, 2018
- Named by the Australian Financial Review among the best places to work in professional services across Australia and New Zealand, 2024
He went on to lead customer experience design at Transport for NSW, running a large multidisciplinary team through one of the most complex change environments in the country. He holds a company directorship qualification and has spent as much time with leaders and in the boardroom as the design studio.
That experience spans transport, health, education, media, banking and government, among others. The sectors differ. The underlying problem rarely does. A bank wrestling with a hard decision and a health service facing the same ambiguity have more in common than either expects, and thirty years of moving between them is where the judgement comes from.
That mix matters. The practice’s belief that judgement comes from experience is not a slogan. It is the thing that lets us sit with a leader as a peer, having done the work, carried the responsibility, and learned where the shortcuts lead.
We say we because the practice is more than one person. For work that calls for it, we assemble a small network of trusted, like-minded practitioners, chosen for the problem rather than kept on a payroll. You get senior people, and only senior people.
How we work
We engage early, long before the solution has formed. We start by understanding real needs rather than assumed ones. We think in systems rather than silos. We hold data lightly and stay useful company in the uncomfortable, unresolved middle of a hard problem, where the answer is still forming.
We are based on Gayamagal land on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, and we work wherever the problem is.