Outrage is everywhere—on the left and the right—and many companies have found themselves in the crosshairs. Go Fund Me was pressured to cut off funding to protesting truckers in Ottawa. Disney’s CEO was dragged down for mishandling both sides of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Facebook and other tech companies have been accused of manipulating elections. People are angry with the world—in some cases, rightfully so—and now view companies as they do governments, as targets of their ire and potential forces for social change. Managing outrage has moved from being an occasional leadership challenge, like handling a PR crisis, to a necessary and critical leadership capability, like strategic thinking or financial acumen.
Karthik Ramanna is Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and a fellow at St. John’s College. In his new book The Age of Outrage, Professor Ramanna distils decades of work with world leaders, governments, and organisations such as IKEA, Nestle and the Vatican, to provide practical steps for leaders to make sense of the outrage, work with relevant stakeholders to progress through it, and emerge stronger for it. Ramanna’s pragmatic framework helps leaders “turn down the temperature,” analyse root causes, develop and implement responses that are mission-consistent, and build resilience.
In this interview, I speak to Professor Karthik Ramanna, one of the world’s foremost experts on governance and leadership in crisis. We discuss the reasons why our world feels so outraged- and how leaders can build resilient organisations which can make sense of outrage, turn down the temperature, progress through it and emerge stronger.
Q: Why are we in the age of outrage?
[Karthik Ramanna]: When I refer to outrage in the book, I refer to it as the “age of outrage,” and I think that distinction—the “age of”—is especially salient.
At its core, I believe there are three causal factors. The first is a fear of the future—more and more people feel like their children are going to live less well-off lives than themselves. They anticipate a tougher, harder life with many more uncertainties. This is driven by technological advances. AI in particular, but also technologies like quantum computing, promise to be transformative in the same way the Industrial Revolution was transformative. Then, there’s climate change and the impact it will bring, including rising sea levels and how that will affect coastal communities. Also, changes in things like monsoon winds could affect the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. There’s also a shift in demographics. By the year 2050, half of all the people under the age of 18 in the world are likely to be in Africa. So, the future of all human capital is going to be in Africa, and the world will look very different. What impact will that have on culture? What impact will that have on migration, social services, and so forth? These are all foundational factors behind the fear of the future.
The second causal factor is the sense of being handed a raw deal. If you’re just dealing with fear of the future and you have trust in your institutions to manage that, you might not experience the kind of outrage you are. But there’s this sense that our institutions have failed us, particularly in Western societies around things like globalization or immigration, but also around taxation of the rich. The very rich generally pay lower effective tax rates than middle-class and lower-income individuals. So, there’s a sense that the system is broken, the rules of the game are rigged.
The final causal factor is this growing sense of othering: an abandonment of the Enlightenment project, where we’re all in this together and somehow, through the pursuit of knowledge, we will advance human well-being. That has started to disintegrate into more tribalism and “us vs. them” mindsets.
To go back to your question: what makes this the age of outrage? It’s that all three of these causal forces manifest to such a degree of intensity as they do today. They have in the past always been present but have not had this degree of intensity and not all at once. That’s what makes this a particularly dangerous moment.
Q: How does outrage affect us, as individuals?
[Karthik Ramanna]: Understanding the science of aggression is material to managing in the age of outrage—not just for managing others but also, importantly, for yourself as a manager.
One of the best analogies I’ve heard in this scenario is that, just as you wouldn’t want a surgeon to go from one operating theater to the next without having washed their hands, you don’t want a manager to go from one context to the next without being in a position where they can actually do some good—or at least do no harm. That means understanding what precipitates aggression in yourself as well as what precipitates aggression in others.
At a high level, there are three factors that matter: there’s the ambient conditions; there’s the emotive response; and then the cognitive response.
The ambient conditions are as simple as things like: you’re more prone to outrage in a hot room, in a crowded room, in a humid room. So, one of the low-hanging fruits for managing in the age of outrage is if you find yourself or others that you need to work with in that situation, first move to a setting with better ambient conditions.
The second thing is the emotive or affective response. This is the stuff that immediately comes to mind when you are in a triggering event. For example, you might be rear-ended by a car, and that might elicit some sort of affective response, making you prone to aggression.
The third factor is the cognitive response. This is probably the most important because managers tend to see themselves as rational people and say, “If we cognitively think through a situation, we will come to the correct answer.” But the reality is that what we call a cognitive response is itself conditioned on what are known as scripts.
What you might think of as a cognitive response is really a product of the lived experiences you bring to the table. As a manager, you’re analyzing any situation through the lenses of your lived experiences or scripts, and so are the people that you’re managing. You might think of them as irrational, but in their analysis, it may be you who is irrational.
If you’re dealing with that kind of situation, it is foolhardy, if not just impossible, to change someone’s scripts in one sitting. The idea that you will sit down with someone who’s had 30 or 40 years of lived experience in a particular situation, and has been conditioned to analyze the world that way, and then somehow get them to change their mind in one sitting is implausible. Yes, you can do it, but it takes a lot of time and effort and trust.
Q: What is step one when leaders are faced with a crisis in the age of outrage?
[Karthik Ramanna]: The first step is really what we’ve been talking about: turning down the temperature. Understanding the science of aggression is just the basis from which we can start doing that. The idea is that if you’re dealing with people who are in an elevated state of aggression, you’re going to make no progress. If you yourself are in an elevated state, you need to be self-aware to turn that down. Therefore, being surrounded by trusted people is really useful, as they can call out your biases when they see them.
Social media is often seen as playing a catalytic role here, in the sense that it can exacerbate aggressive responses. Being able to mitigate the influence of social media, or even pause it, is quite useful in the context of turning down the temperature.
The second step is to really get a hold of what’s going on in that moment of outrage—what we call making sense of the moment. This requires really deep, active listening to the stakeholders who might be involved. As a manager, you have to build a network, or a trusted council of sorts, that helps you do that listening in this moment. Part of the reason you’re dealing with a crisis is that you haven’t heard something that’s really relevant to getting your job done, whether it’s from your internal stakeholders like your employees or your external stakeholders like your customers, investors, suppliers, etc. You haven’t done the listening that you needed to do.
So, what do you do in a crisis? Well, firstly, don’t be surprised by it. Managing in the age of outrage means not being surprised by the crises that are going to come your way. Saying, “I do need to be prepared for angry stakeholders, and so I need to put together a council of trusted advisors.” They might not, in fact, be friends—they might even be antagonists in your organization’s mission—but you need their advice nonetheless to do the active listening. If you don’t have them telling you what you need to hear to manage the crisis, it’s already too late.
One of the things that really successful managers do in this space is they start building these diverse advisory councils well before they need it. Because if you don’t have such a trusted council assembled at the point of crisis, it’s very hard to create it when people are angry with you.
Q: How should the tools of managing outrage- as leaders- factor into our risk and governance?
[Karthik Ramanna]: I think we’re still in a mindset where we treat these as isolated, one-off incidents—something we can get our crisis team to handle, our comms team to manage, or our PR team to spin. But managing in the age of outrage is not the same as managing outrage. Managing outrage is crisis management—you can turn it over to a part of the organization that’s pro at it and then get on with your day. It’s firefighting.
But if you’re managing that way in the age of outrage, basically you’re saying your organization will be in constant firefighting mode. That’s unsustainable. The organization will very quickly wither and die. It’ll lose all the internal trust it needs to survive and thrive, and it will lose all the external trust it needs too. That’s why it requires a whole new way of thinking, which is part of what we are advancing in this book. It’s saying that you have to approach this very differently—as a systemic or structural problem. It requires a new sub-discipline of management to be prepared for these sorts of things.
To your point, how many CEOs or heads of government agencies have taken the trouble today to say, “Who are my five most-thoughtful antagonists? How have I reached out to them, and what efforts do I have in place to create a listening community across those antagonists for when I really need it when the crisis hits?” Often, they have not, because they’re so busy with day-to-day work. And then when the crisis hits, they’re scrambling to find a way to reach their antagonists, but it’s a little too late.
Q: How do we scope the response to outrage, as leaders?
[Karthik Ramanna]: Your question takes us to the third step of the framework, which we call “scoping and bounding the responses.” This step is about building a strategy that works for your context in the moment. We basically give managers two forces to play with: one that would drive them towards overcorrecting a situation, and one that would drive them towards undercorrecting it. We say you want to be constantly balancing both sets of forces, in your specific context, so you land in the middle.
Then we provide them with a set of seven questions across these two forces that help them determine the right response in any given situation. The questions conceptually play into what we call the organization’s “capability asymmetries.” This usually refers to situations where the organization is directly responsible for an outrage crisis, has implicitly made a commitment to respond if such a crisis emerges, or where responding to such a crisis is part of its aspiration as an organization. We’re also looking for situations where if we don’t respond, even if this is not our problem, we are likely going to be blamed.
But on the flip side, you want to be acutely aware of overpromising. Because if you commit to something today, expectations are going to shift. That means when tomorrow’s crises come in, people are going to expect you to respond to those too—but you may not have the capability to do that. So, setting and communicating boundaries around what you can and cannot do at the time of the original commitment is really important. Boundaries can also be a function of how you expect things to shift, how you expect scenarios to occur across different geographies.
Q: How do the skills of diplomats and diplomacy factor into our response to crises?
[Karthik Ramanna]: Some would argue that we’ve lost some of the softer diplomatic skills in recent times—the ability to have back channels and so forth—which are invaluable in situations of outrage.
If you think about the program that I helped build and lead here at Oxford over the past few years, it was very much constructed with a view toward identifying prospective public leaders across the world and helping them forge deep trusted relationships so that they can deescalate the inevitable crises that will come our way.
But, of course, efforts like that can be perceived as elitist; they can be seen as non-transparent or unaccountable. So, we also need more democratic channels of feedback from constituencies who might otherwise be voiceless, who might not be able to send their representatives to hallowed places like Oxford.
Q: How do leaders approach outrage within their organisations?
[Karthik Ramanna]: A lot of this is art, not science.
It’s important, for instance, for a company like Disney not to have been seen as opportunistically silent when Florida was passing its “Don’t Say Gay” bill, because it had built a brand around being inclusive on gender and sexuality. If that inclusivity was not part of its brand, it could get away with staying silent. If you were a different kind of company—say, an oil company—then yes, you would not be expected to weigh in. But if you have made it part of your brand, you can’t be opportunistically silent in a situation like that.
Equally, there are situations where it isn’t part of your brand or commitment, and you have to have the confidence—and the trust with your stakeholder community—to say, “Look, if I make a commitment in this space, it will be a shallow commitment because there’s no way I can meet it. I will not be able to honestly deliver on a promise in this space, so it’s best that I don’t promise because this is just outside my capabilities.” Being honest with your stakeholders is why having that trust with them is so important. They’re willing to cut you slack on the things they know you can’t control if they know that you will genuinely and authentically act on the things where you do have the capability asymmetries.
And that is a dynamic conversation. Where you draw the line today is not where you will draw the line tomorrow. What constitutes good judgment is a social construct. Good judgment in the Victorian era is very different from good judgment today. So, in that sense, you have to be constantly listening and have the right people in the room thinking things through.
Q: What is the role of values in corporate and leadership settings?
[Karthik Ramanna]: To answer this question, let me lay out two observations. First, a company’s values are not its leader’s values, not even its founder’s values. A company’s values have their own origins, their own basis of support. I’ll get back to this point.
Second, every organization will have a set of values. It’s often not the one that’s on the wall on a brass plate, but it will have a set of values.
What are the implications of these observations? If you’re dealing with a highly divided community of stakeholders—let’s say your employees—then it’s important to create a temperate model of leadership that listens.
The Aristotelian model of leadership, where one would somehow corral all stakeholders together through rousing rhetoric of some noble myth, is less likely to work in a highly fractured, divisive context like the age of outrage. This moment requires temperance as a leadership quality. It requires knowing who the authentic stakeholders are who should be feeding into conversations about values. And it requires being able to delegate to them, on an as-needed basis, the ability to shape those values.
Because if you say, “I don’t have to listen to my employees on what they have to say on this given issue,” well, that means those employees are not as important to you as you’ve been saying in your marketing or recruitment speeches. It means you are just as easily able to fire your employees and start over. There are few organizations, particularly in this knowledge economy, that can really afford to do that.
So, if you feel like what they’re telling you is wrong, then either you’re the wrong leader for that organization or you have the wrong employees.