Karina Smith

People describe Karina as calm, thoughtful, and direct. She's comfortable with complexity, brings tensions to the surface, and structures conversations so progress can be made without losing trust. That combination is why clients bring her in when the work is sensitive, the problem isn't well defined, or alignment matters as much as the solution.

Karina works with leaders on organisational redesign: structures, processes, and decision-making that let their organisations actually function well. She gets called when things feel stuck, when priorities compete, when decisions are unclear and teams are pulling in different directions. Her role is to bring structure to messy problems and help leaders turn intent into practical changes that hold.

Her approach is collaborative and design-led. She works closely with leaders and teams to understand how work actually happens, not how it's meant to happen. Together, they test and refine changes to roles, ways of working, and decision rights until they work in practice.

What makes Karina different is her background. She holds an honours degree in Design from the University of Newcastle and postgraduate qualifications in Psychology from Macquarie and Monash. That combination means she goes deeper than structures and reporting lines. She understands why people behave the way they do under pressure, how decisions really get made, and how to build changes that stick because they work with human nature, not against it.

Over twenty years, she's led more than a hundred research and design programmes across government, large organisations, and social enterprises. Healthcare, technology, policy, financial services, education. Her work with Queensland Government on embedding human-centred design across their agencies won the Good Design Award of the Year in 2018, the first non-product to take the top prize.

Alongside her client work, Karina teaches and coaches leaders and teams to build practical strategic design capability. Her goal: help organisations strengthen the way they learn, decide, and adapt over time.