HBR Press Live: The Age of Outrage

Kartick studies the art and the science of building trust. Taught a course called “How to Lead in a Polarized World.”

Five part framework:

• Turn down the temperature
  Wait for aggression to subside or actively change your environment to calm down. If there are high emotions, no one will manage themselves well.
• Make sense of the moment
  Understand what is causal or catalytic. Use the catalysts to determine how to address the causes. A trusted group of diverse voices can help you. We tend to see the world through the lens of our own experiences, so, diversity on those voices is really important.
• Determine what you will do
  Do not overcommit, but be deliberate about leaning in or leaning out.
• Put your strategy in place
  Think deliberately about your power and look to add rather than subtract.
• Be resilient
  This is hard work, and may require you to act on behalf of a larger institution.

Case Study: Nestle

Operating in India for 100 years. They had an instant ramen noodle product called Maggie that was an iconic product. It was cheap, nutritious, and tasty.

The equivalent of the FDA in India indicated that there were high contents of lead in the product. Nestle was shocked.

Their initial response was disbelief. It came across as dismissive and disengaged from the substance of the claim. The regulators came back and probed further, calling them out for “No added MSG.” They went back and forth, blaming each other for making false claims, and escalating the issue.

Eventually, Nestle most a substantial market share in India. This should be a lesson about temperance. “Perhaps we were being too stiff in the way we responded.” Nestle should have realized that this was not a problem they were responsible for, kids were part of the intended audience and their non-response really turned parents off.

Case Study: IKEA

In Saudi Arabia since 1983, they decided to airbrush out images of women in the catalog, since women were not supposed to be seen, particularly in Western clothing.

The world changed around them, and Saudi Arabia slowly changed as well. IKEA started to become a very progressive brand, being the first to run commercials with same sex couples in the 90s.

Suddenly, there are calls for boycotts because they continued to remove women from the catalogs. They did not evolve their approach with their own internal values or the values around them.

They reintroduced the catalog with women in them, and there was no backlash. It was an overreaction in the 80s and needed to be reversed.

Case Study: Oxford University Hospital

First woman and woman of color and also the first non-University professor to be appointed to the role of Medical Director. The year before she was appointed, there were seven “never” events that occurred. There was something that needed to be fixed about the culture, and perhaps someone from outside the University needs to drive that change.

There was low trust in management, putting patient safety back at the core. In March 2020, she had been in the role for 13-14 months. Boris Johnson ruled that all elective medical procedures must continue, but there was very little testing or knowledge about the virus that early in the pandemic. Some doctors were quite upset.

Advisors told her to abandon the cultural transformation that she was in the middle of. But no, she says this is the perfect moment to help the culture work best. She moved to give all surgeons the power to make decisions as to whether or not perform elective surgeries. She leaned into the future version of the organization, and let the present time shape how the organization was going to get there.

Social science of outrage

• Fear of the future
  All the negative news about our present leading into the future, and the inability to envision a positive version of your self in that future.
• Mistrust in our Institutions
  Globalization and government and religious institutions have all failed us. We’ve worked hard but have been cheated, and the rich are getting richer.
• A growing sense of “other”
  We are no longer all in this together. Very tribal, us vs. them mindset.

All three of these powerful forces are occurring together at the same time, creating a culture of outrage.

Social Media is a catalyst, not a cause. If there were no social, the outrage would still exist. Social just amplifies it.