The Age of Outrage

Chapter 3

Making Sense of the Moment

Once you’ve started the process of turning down the temperature by creating a platform, the first step of our managerial framework is to make sense of the moment of crisis. Doing so requires that you have some idea of what’s driving the outrage. Are all three drivers—fear of the future, past injustice, and othering—at play? One more than others? This chapter gives you the tools for drawing out people’s “scripts” and listening and learning from them in order to identify the drivers in play. And, while you can’t do much in the heat of a crisis to directly address the drivers—let alone remediate or eliminate them—you can publicly acknowledge them and work them into your organization’s response.

Let’s take a ...