Karthik Ramanna, Author and professor of business and public policy at University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government
Karthik Ramanna is professor of business and public policy at University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, and author of The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World. In an interview with Forbes India, he explains why managing for this age of outrage needs to be a core capability for today’s leaders, and suggests a five-part framework to guide them. Edited excerpts:
Q. What brought you to writing this book?
I wrote this book because I was dealing with the question of leading in a polarised world myself in the context of my role as director of the Master of Public Policy Program at Oxford. Over the course of the years that I led the programme, we educated about 1,000 public leaders from nearly 150 different jurisdictions. They came from settings as diverse as China and the United States, Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan. While all of them were motivated by a spirit of public service, they had very different perspectives on what constituted good social outcomes or good practice in government. So, finding ways in which we could bridge those divisions was really important to me.
The divisions we experienced among these prospective public leaders was simply a reflection of the wider divisions in society. The age of outrage is a very real phenomenon we are confronting, not just across jurisdictions and countries, but within countries and within societies.
Q. What are the socio-economic drivers of outrage?
There are three factors that are pertinent. The first is a fear for the future. This is driven by technologies like AI [artificial intelligence] that can transform society on a scale like the Industrial Revolution did. Also, climate change, where we will be confronted with massive destruction of human habitat. And then the recognition that we will have to deal with mass migration as a result of profound demographic shifts like an aging population in most of the Western world.
The second factor is the belief of being handed a raw deal by those in power on issues like globalisation, immigration, and taxes on the rich. The third factor is what I call the “ideologies of othering”—an increasing political and social tendency to view the world with an “us versus them” mentality.
What is distinctive about this moment is that these three factors are present all at the same time and at the magnitude to which they are. And that results in what I call “the age of outrage”.
Q. How has social media contributed to the toxicity?
Social media is implicated not necessarily as a causal factor, but as a catalytic factor. It often leads to confirmation bias and emotional contagion, driving people further into outrage. In the absence of social media, we probably would have seen the prevalence of outrage being mitigated through what has historically been the moderating role of respectable mainstream media. When we invite senior leaders here at Oxford for programmes where we are trying to build bridges across deep divisions, one of the rules is to discourage social media because it tends to drive people away from a spirit of understanding and moderation.
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Q. Can you broadly outline the age of outrage framework?
The framework involves five steps. The first and most important is to turn down the temperature, which starts with an understanding of the neuroscience of aggression. This is not simply about helping managers turn down others’ temperature but often about them turning down their own temperature.
Step two is about listening to and understanding what is causing the proximate crisis. I call it “making sense of the moment”. Step three is about scoping and bounding your responses—after actively listening to stakeholders, understand what you can, as an organisation, deliver in the context without overcommitting yourself or setting expectations in a way that you are bound to fail. Step four is about analysing your power to get things done, the tactics of putting your strategy into play.
Step five is about resilience. The first four steps require an enormous amount of effort on the part of the manager as well as the organisation and its people. So, it’s important that the organisational architecture is built in a way that resilience is continually renewed.
Q. How can we build a resilient organisation?
The key is to understand that building resilience is a collective exercise, not an individual one. In a resilient organisation, many important and urgent decisions are delegated to people closer to ground realities, who are often better informed than decision-makers higher up in the chain. By doing so, the organisation can improve the quality of its decisions as well as diversify its thinking.
Q. What does the new discipline of leadership in the age of outrage entail?
Managing outrage is just crisis management. We have been doing it for a long time and there’s a whole body of knowledge in management theory and practice around that.
But when we talk about managing in the age of outrage, that is, being continually called to be in firefighting mode, it’s important to understand that you cannot commit your whole self to doing it all the time. If you do so, then you will quickly exhaust yourself. So, it’s important to build a new leadership habit that allows you to repurpose the whole organisation to be able to respond, and to respond in ways that turn the conditions of this age of outrage into opportunities.
Q. What’s capability asymmetry? How did it play out in the Maggi scandal in India?
Capability asymmetry is about understanding when you should act in the context of an outrage crisis. It involves walking through four questions: Am I directly responsible for the crisis? Will my inaction exacerbate it? Is acting to alleviate the crisis part of my implicit contract with the stakeholders? If not, do I want it to be? If the answer to any of them is ‘yes’, then you certainly should be acting and think about what your strategy has to be.
A part of why Nestle got into trouble was that it misread its position in the context of capability asymmetry. The team there perhaps felt it was unacceptable to be treated differently from the competition on the “no added MSG” claim. They failed to adequately recognise the context; they were a respected multinational presenting Maggi as a health product and hence more was expected of them than of generic domestic competitors.
The second bit was, when called out on the lead adulteration issue, their response—being dismissive of regulators—was taken as disdainfulness, which did not play out well.
Q. What are the different types of power that leaders can employ?
Leaders can assess the different kinds of power at their disposal and how they can best channel it to drive preferred outcomes. I have identified four types of power: Coercive, emotive, rational, and reciprocal. Coercive power is the ability to control other people’s actions through command; it is the manager’s most basic source of power, especially internal to an organisation.
Emotive power and rational power are derived from interactions of individuals even outside formal institutional arrangements. Parents and children have emotive power over each other, as do those who share a common, deeply held faith. Rational power is derived through reasoned explanation of one’s goals and methods or through the perception of one’s expertise and capabilities. Managers often use this when seeking to bring well-informed peers on board.
Reciprocal power derives from exchange-type settings. It can be purely transactional, as with a manager’s power over an independent contractor in exchange for cash, but it does not have to be so. It can also be relational in nature, built off trust from long-term mutually beneficial partnerships, and this is generally the most effective type of power for managing in the age of outrage.
Q. Three attributes needed to lead in a polarised world…
The most important attribute is that of temperance. Resist the urge to think that as a leader you need to have all the answers. Instead, nurture a sense of humility. You should feel that it’s fine to create the space for others in the organisation to give the answers, and you need to trust them to give the right answers by creating the right culture.
Also, no matter what you do, you are not going to be seen as someone whom everyone will automatically trust just because of your position of power. Again, this demands developing a sense of temperance; the willingness to create alternative sources of power in different situations and recognising that other people can be trusted more and be empowered with decision-making.