Karthik Ramanna, Professor of Business & Public Policy at University of Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, sits down with Edelman’s Satyen Dayal to talk about his latest book, ‘The Age of Outrage’, and how business leaders can build trust amid an era of global societal grievance. “You build trust by actually being able to do what you say you’ll do,” Karthik says.
Listen to all episodes on your favorite podcast platform:
Transcript (Download)
Hi, everyone. I’m Satya Dial, Managing Director of Technology at Edelman. My guest today is Karthik Ramana, Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Oxford, Blavatnik School of Government. Fellow at St. John’s College and author of The Age of Outrage, a bold call for moral courage and institutional renewal in a time of deep division. Professor Ramana is an expert on business-government relations, sustainable capitalism, and corporate reporting and auditing, and studies how organizations and leaders build trust with stakeholders.
As the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer shows record levels of grievance, declining optimism, and collapsing confidence in leadership, we ask, what’s happened to the social contract and how do we get it back? Karthik, welcome to Trustmakers.
Thank you for having me. Your latest book, The Age of Outrage, was published last year and examines the outrage gripping organizations worldwide and how leaders can respond to it. Can you talk a little bit about what motivated you to study and write a book on this topic?
So I came to this topic in part because of my day job. You know, a few years ago I moved from Harvard Business School to the University of Oxford to become the first director of its Master of Public Policy program. Each year we would convene in this program somewhere between 120 to 150 emerging and existing public leaders from 60 to 70 different countries. These are individuals of remarkable ability. These are individuals who are deeply passionate about public service. But they also believed in very different things. They had very different aspirations and very different understandings of what constituted a good society.
And here I was in this role of convening and coordinating in one year experience for them. And I was left with a question of how do I leave them stronger for this experience? And so I decided to do the thing that many academics do when they don’t know the answer to a question. I decided to teach a course on it. So I taught a course called How to Lead in a Polarized World.
And I was very upfront with the students. I said, look, I have no idea, but you have little idea as well. So maybe we are all in this together. And so each week as we would teach this course, and we would teach it over the eight weeks of an Oxford term, each week I would invite to the course a colleague, an associate, a friend who was in some sort of general management role. My rule of thumb was that you had to be running something. So you could be a mayor, a governor, a police commissioner, a CEO, a COO, but you have to be running something.
And we would say to these protagonists, I want you to bring your hardest management challenge in the context of leading in this age of outrage. And also bring with us your favorite piece of reading. And so they did. And over the course of teaching this class for many years, you know, over the years it became close to a thousand students from 120 different countries. I said, well, actually, we built a body of knowledge across these lessons. And wouldn’t it be a shame to lose it all? So I decided to put it together in a book. And hence the book, The Age of Outrage, How to Lead in a Polarized World.
Fascinating. Yes. I mean, your book argues that we’re living through a crisis of institutional legitimacy fed by grievance, future disillusionment and social tribalism. This year’s Trust Barometer puts numbers to those forces. And I want to explore, if that’s okay with you, where they converge and where they might diverge.
Yeah. So in my estimation, there are three things that make this age particularly distinctive:
Fear of the future: You might think about this moment of technological transformation that we’re going through, particularly with artificial intelligence. AI promises to be as disruptive, if not more disruptive, than the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution, of course, fundamentally changed the nature of society from our agrarian roots to a post-industrial type of society that we’re in today. And AI promises to do that.
Climate change: Add on to AI fears around climate change and the disruption that will bring in.
Demographic shifts: The idea that much of the world is actually aging. By the year 2050, half of all the young people in the world will be in sub-Saharan Africa.
So people look to the future, even the next 20, 25 years, and say it’s going to look very different from anything I am used to or anything that I can understand and grapple with. And it’snot necessary that it will be a dark or a bad future, but it’s certainly an unfamiliar future. So that’s the first sort of structural factor here, the fear of the future. Now, if we were living in this age of fear of the future, but we had deep trust in institutions, if we had deep trust in those individuals and organizations that are charged with our governance, then maybe we’d be okay. But as your trust barometer has pointed out now for several years in a row, we’re living in an age of declining trust in those institutions. Many people feel like they’ve been handed a raw deal, that the elites in society, for instance, have sold people a false narrative on globalization and on immigration.
So you add on to the fear of the future, this low trust in institutions, this sense of the raw deal, and that compounds it. And then you’ve got this third factor there, which is what I call a rising sort of ideology of othering or a growing adherence to the ideologies of othering. So sort of a retreat from this enlightenment view that through the pursuit of human knowledge, we will advance human flourishing and sort of advance the situation of all mankind. So we’re retreating away from that kind of perception or worldview to one that is more tribal, where it’s an us versus them kind of mindset, where you see this in the context of various nationalist populist politicians putting their countries first.
These are three forces each in and of themselves:
The fear of the future.
The sense of the raw deal.
The ideologies of othering.
Each in and of themselves would be quite substantial to reckon with. But having all three of them manifest to the degree at which they are and all at once, that’s what makes this the age of outrage and a particularly difficult moment for us to navigate.
Yeah, as I say, certainly something that we saw coming through in this year’s 2025 Trust Barometer in our 25th year. And one of the stats that really struck me was how 61% globally hold moderate or high grievance towards business, government and the rich. And that this grievance correlates with distrust, pessimism and hostility towards business, AI and even one’s own CEO.
Are you right in the age of outrage? It doesn’t matter that you’re right if people don’t trust you to be right. That’s a hard truth, especially for leaders who’ve been trained to think that factual accuracy or moral clarity is enough. What do you think they still misunderstand about the difference between being right and being trusted?
Yeah, I think there are two things that are really salient here. The first is a recognition that this age in which we’re living, this age of outrage we’ve just described, is something much bigger than any one individual or any one organization can handle. And that might be actually a hard realization for many organizational leaders because part of the reason they are where they are, you’re CEO of a Fortune 500 company, is because you think you can solve all problems put before you. But suddenly you’re navigating your organization through an environment about which you can do very little. And so much of this is well beyond your control. So that’s sort of the first recognition or realization that people need to grapple with.
The second thing that people have to grapple with is no matter what they do, they will be perceived as part of the problem. Now this might be justly so because it might be that your organization is making things worse in ways that you don’t appreciate or understand. But it might just be a general sense of malaise and disenchantment with institutions, as you cited earlier. So this idea that you’ll be able to mollify or placate the sentiment of the people that are influenced by your decisions, whether these are your customers, your investors, or your own employees for that matter, that has become actually quite removed from your capacity or your capability.
So you put these two truths together, the idea that you’re not going to be able to solve the whole problem that’s in front of you, and that you are going to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as part of the problem. That, I think, invites a sense of humility amongst leaders. It invites a sense of perspective amongst leaders to say, well, what part of the problem then can I measurably deliver on?
So I think this perception that we could go into this and say, okay, here’s my plan and here’s how I’m going to deliver on this, that probably will make things worse because you’re operating in this very low trust environment. And you might have the best of intentions. You might sort of be genuinely committed to making things better, but realistically, your capacity to deliver things in this moment are constrained by everything else that’s going on in the world. So it isn’t just important to go back to what you said earlier, to have the right intentions. It’s importantto be experienced as having the right intentions. And that, again, means being experienced in a way that you’re actually credibly able to deliver on your promises in this world, in this age of outrage. In the book, there’s four questions that you encourage leaders to go ask themselves:
Am I directly responsible for this outrage?
Will my inaction worsen it?
Is acting to alleviate the outrage part of my implicit contract with stakeholders?
And do I want it to be?
What do you think happens when leaders actually sit with those questions? What do they reveal or maybe force leaders to confront that they’d rather avoid? So I think you want to walk through those questions progressively. And let’s take each one in turn.
So the first question is, am I responsible for the problem? Well, obviously, if the answer to that is yes, then you’re expected to solve it. If this is a problem of your making, you’re expected to solve it. And quite frankly, most organizations do that. Most companies get it. Most organizations understand that if there’s a problem that’s directly of your making, you own up to it.
The next question is, in my inaction, would I make this problem actually worse? Now, this is an interesting question because it harks back to what bioethicists call the rule of rescue. We are, as human beings, instinctively expected to respond differently when we see a drowning child than, say, for instance, we might see occupants in a slowly flooding house, right? So seeing a drowning child is what sort of immediately triggers this rule of rescue. And so what we want to do in a situation like that, say, OK, if I’m looking at an emergency situation, which is being made worse by my inaction, then it behooves me to do something about it. But if, on the other hand, this is something that is less driven by sort of this rescue principle or this emergency appeal principle, then obviously you want to go to some of the other questions.
And the third question is, have I, by chance, made an implicit commitment to act on this situation? So your own advertising has committed you to act differently in this situation. And oftentimes companies miss that third question where they say, oh, well, this wasn’t a problem of my direct making. It’s not an emergency type of situation. So, you know, maybe I don’t need to act. But implicitly in the minds of their stakeholders, they’ve already created this sense of urgency.
The final question is, do I want it to be? Do I want my response in this situation to actually be something that expands the way my customers appreciate and understand my value proposition? And this is an important question also, because oftentimes a crisis like this, the age of outrage presents sort of endless crises, provides you an opportunity to define your brand one way or the other. I mean, inaction defines your brand just as much as action defines your brand. And so you’ve got to ask yourself in this situation, if even though I’m not implicated in this and this is not some sort of emergency appeal situation, and I’ve made no implicit commitment, my inaction is going to inadvertently shake my brand. Am I okay with that? And the answer could legitimately be, yes, that’s fine. That’s who I am as a company. This is my brand. This is the kind of identity I want to have with my customers. Then that’s completely fine. But oftentimes when companies reflect on that, they say, oh, gosh, no. I want my customers to know that when a situation like this happens, I can be trusted or relied on to do something to make it better. So then I need to own up to that.
Now, of course, there’s the flip side of that, which is you can’t overpromise because if you overpromise, you’ll find in this moment, this age of outrage, you very quickly end up with sort of almost an endless stream of requests on you. So it needs to be very clear what are the boundaries of your commitments in that moment. And you say, okay, well, I don’t want complete inaction to be my brand. So I’m going to respond. But I also want to bound my response very tightly so that it’s clear that when the next crisis hits, I’m not implicitly called in to act as well. So it’s thinking about building a dynamic strategy for the age of outrage, which is part of the necessity at the moment.
I was curious to understand particularly whether the pandemic had an effect on any of these questions as well. From my experience, perhaps I saw a little bit of savior complex coming across from various leaders, from various organizations, and then since then some of the challenges that came with it. But I’m wondering from your perspective, what kind of impact crises like the pandemic may have on this wider sense of the savior complex, let’s say. I see the pandemic is kind of like social media. They’re both catalytic factors to this age of outrage that we’re in. But even if we didn’t have a pandemic or even if we didn’t have social media, we would still be in an age of outrage because some of these structural factors we’ve talked about, they go beyond the pandemic and social media per se. So it’s important to understand their catalyzing role in getting us to this moment. But it’s also important torecognize that there isn’t a causal role there, right? And that’s the distinction we’re drawing out. Coming back to some of the data we saw from the Trust Barometer this year, only 36% globally believe that the next generation will be better off, and we see economic insecurity and lack of training are the top kind of concerns for workers in everyday working environments.
In the book, you reference the four upayas and how offer a modern reading of these as classical tools for leadership. In a time when disillusionment with the future is so high and people’s fears feel both urgent and justified, which of those tools do you think leaders have forgotten how to use or misunderstood altogether?
So first, I’m so delighted that you called on the four upayas because that’s often a part of the book that goes sort of unnoticed. For those who might be unfamiliar with them, the upayas basically are drawn from these treaties on diplomacy written by Kautilya, who is a philosopher thought to have lived sometime around 300 to 100 B.C. in sort of effectively what is now parts of India or Pakistan. And this philosopher writes this rather cunning treaties on the art of what we would call statecraft or diplomacy and sort of like a precursor to Machiavelli’s The Prince, though some would argue far more Machiavellian than Machiavelli.
And in it, there are these four upayas. They are:
Sama (reason)
Dana (compensation)
Danda (mind games)
Beda (threats)
And literally, respectively, meaning reason, compensation, mind games, and threats. And these are four ways in which you can get things done. In our context, you know, obviously we see a lot of threats. We see a lot of mind games. We see a declining role for reason here. The part perhaps that we have seen organizations underinvested is this notion of building reciprocal power, what in the context of the upayas are called Dana, which is this idea that over long term, you can build trust with your adversaries, and you can find ways in which you can reward your adversaries implicitly and explicitly so that you create alignment with them. And perhaps that investment in that long-term trust building is what we’ve seen less of in this moment. We see more of the threats and more of the mind games. And, you know, we have seen some attempts at using reason. But again, that only works in the context of high trust. So the thing that we have perhaps lost track of is this notion of Dana or reciprocal relationship building.
Yeah, very much so. I think when we are in this environment or this time where trust is thin and fear is high, even well-intended persuasion can be mistaken for spin or worse, as we’ve seen, gaslighting. My question is, can leaders earn the right to use these tools without triggering even more distrust?
That’s a great question. And it goes back to what we were saying earlier about being humble in what it is you promise and then actually delivering it, right? How do you build trust? You build trust by actually being able to do what you say you’ll do. And that means being modest about what you will say you will do. Because if you are bold about what you say you will do, yes, of course, there’s a certain rhetorical value to that, maybe inspirational in the short run, et cetera. But we all know that it’s going to be very hard to deliver on that, especially in this age of outrage where there’s so much about the world you can’t control.
So saying, for instance, that you’ll be able to promise the moon to your voters or promise the moon to your stakeholders or end conflicts in one part of the world or the other, that might make for great rhetorical devices, but it actually can contribute to further distrust. Whereas on the other hand, if you say, well, look, there’s so much about this that is beyond my control, but there are a couple of things that I’ll be able to mitigate in the short run, actually deliver on mitigating that in the short run. And once you do that, then people will say, ah, this person actually does what he says or she says. So maybe I can trust them on the next round. And then you can make a slightly bigger, bolder promise. But it’s that incrementalism and that patience that’s the key to trust building. And something that perhaps leaders have lost sight of in this moment, perhaps because of an over-reliance on sort of courageous rhetoric to try capture people’s attention.
That’s where social media plays a role because in social media, you’re constantly trying to capture people’s attention by something even more sort of bombastic than the last thing that was said. When it plays through into the public environment, I think, you know, this point that you raise around othering and perhaps this tribalism increasing, we saw through the trust barometer that people with high grievance are twice as likely to see others’ gains as their loss, this zero-sum mindset, let’s say. And worrying still,we saw half of the Gen Z approve of hostile activism like online attacks or disinformation to create change. In the book, you argue that online media has enabled people to build identity without proximity to form allegiances and enemies without ever having to share space or experience. Add emotional contagion to that, especially amongst young, and the outrage becomes something more enduring. So if outrage becomes the scaffolding for identity, especially in online spaces where there’s no shared reality or proximity, how do we even begin to rebuild trust in the idea of common purpose?
First and foremost, we can’t discount the role of the social media platforms themselves in solving this problem. And I mean, the science is increasingly becoming clear that the use of social media amongst those under the age of 16 could be quite damaging, maybe even as damaging as giving someone who is under the age of 16 a packet of cigarettes, right? And just as we’ve come to realize, oh, that’s a terrible idea. It might be a terrible idea to allow those under 16 to be on social media. In fact, the brain remains highly plastic up to even the age of 25. So the use of social media, even through the age of 25, is something that people should do with great care. This is not to say that all social media therefore has to be eliminated, but that we have to find ways to manage around these risks that we’ve now come to appreciate.
Social media preys on human weaknesses, particularly preys on the addictiveness or the addictive properties of the human brain. And maybe that was not malicious. You know, I mean, I think the jury is still out on that. But regardless of whether it was malicious or not, that can be a matter that can be litigated elsewhere. The onus is on us to find a solution for that because we continue to allow our young people access to this highly addictive technology. And just as we would think it ridiculous today to provide young people packets of cigarettes, we should be having a serious conversation about the role of social media in society at large.
And to an extent, we see this in sort of the political wars around TikTok, but that has become more about economic nationalism than it has about the harmful effects of social media. I think that’s something that needs to be teased out. But, you know, just as much as there are structural solutions here to be addressed, there are, in the context of social media, there are individual approaches here too. If you don’t trust yourself to be able to handle alcohol or tobacco, then the best thing to do is not to necessarily ban it in society. I mean, for instance, the United States tried prohibition and that didn’t work so well either. But to be able to exercise the degree of personal responsibility and accountability.
So, for instance, I’m not on social media and people are sort of surprised by that and say, well, I mean, I do have an Instagram account, but I don’t manage it myself. And that’s about the limit of my social media. And people ask, well, how can you do this? I said, well, because I don’t trust myself. I’m actually a pretty intense guy. I might’ve written a book called The Age of Outrage, How to Lead in a Polarized World. But the dirty secret is I wrote the book mainly for myself, right? I mean, I’m just as prone to outrage as everybody else. I mean, quite frankly, the busier you are, the more likely you are to be prone to outrage. And managers and people higher up in organizational hierarchy are really busy people. So people like me are actually the last sort of people to be on social media because we are far more prone to be outraged, not because of some character flaw, but because we’re so busy, because we’re being pulled in so many different directions.
So my solution to this was to say, well, actually I don’t trust myself to be on Twitter. So I’m just going to, right? So there is a role of personal responsibility in this as well. So yes, there are some structural solutions we should be searching for from social media companies themselves, voluntarily, also potentially from regulation and legislative action, but also there is a role for personal accountability here.
And then the final thing I’ll say on this is, again, social media is catalytic to this age of outrage. It is not causal. So if we were able to somehow wave a magic wand and make all the social media in the world disappear, sadly, we would still be in this age of outrage. So that means that there are things we need to address as a society beyond social media that should be part of a serious conversation on solutions.
As you know, the news story in everyone’s mind right now is perhaps the passing of Pope Francis and the future leadership, especially when today we heard that the announcement of the conclave will begin as of the 7th of May. In the book, you touched on the Vatican and particularly around some challenges that it faced as it related to financial governance. Do you have any point of view regarding future leadership? The Italians have this wonderful word called papabile,which literally means papable. And, you know, so it’s like, which of the cardinals are papable is sort of the term. Or papable is the term. And then there’s also this saying in Italian, he who enters as papable leaves a cardinal. This is to say that you enter the conclave with the expectation that you will be elected pope and chances are you will not. So it’s hard, and I would sort of resist the urge to offer predictions on who should be the next pope or even what are the traits of the next pope. But what we can do is perhaps reflect on what is the context in which the next pope has to operate.
The resignation of Benedict XVI, which precipitated the election of Francis, which is the moment of governance crisis in the church that I write about in the book, that was a particularly distressing moment for the church internally. It was a moment where there was a sense that the church had mismanaged at a criminal level the child abuse scandal. There was a sense that the church had mismanaged at a criminal level its own finances. And there was a sense that many people within the Vatican itself could not be trusted to do the right thing, which is where we ended up with the Vatican scandal and the pope’s own personal butler leaking the pope’s personal documents and so forth. And it was in that context that we saw the first resignation of a pope in almost half a millennium.
And so that was sort of the focus of Francis’ papacy was really to re-center the church in the context of its own internal governance issues. And that’s the theme that I pick up on in the book and so forth. And I would say to a large degree, Francis has succeeded in that mission because today, and you saw this in the remarkable consistory of world leaders that gathered at Francis’ funeral, including leaders who disagreed with Francis politically, because over the course of his 12 years in the papacy, of course he didn’t address all of the governance challenges in the church, but what he was able to do is refocus the church on its pastoral roots and say, right, the church exists first and foremost for the betterment of the lives of the people, of humanity. And so that should be more than anything else the focus of the church.
And so at the time of his passing, at the time of great political and social and technological upheaval in society, you see this remarkable gathering together of world leaders from countries, both Catholic and non-Catholic. I mean, there were representatives from China and India and the Middle East were there in addition to representatives from Protestant nations, as well as, of course, from Catholic nations. They were all there recognizing the role that the pope can have in promoting a common voice or in promoting the need for bridge building and solidarity in this age of outrage, in this moment of deep division in society. And so that could be one of the roles. I don’t know if that will be a trait of the new pope, but that could be one of the roles that a new pope could play in this moment because, to the point of your barometer, there are these massive trust voids with institutions across the world.
Yeah, thank you. I think building on that, one final area, perhaps a question, and from one that’s quite dear to me, is this conversation right now about artificial intelligence. What we’ve seen through the latest barometer is that trust in AI drops at least 22 points amongst those with high grievance. But consistently, our data has shown how AI is servicing deeper fears about power, control, and judgment. And I might have some regard as a rose-tinted view on how, unlike the bubble-inducing algorithms of the past 20 years, AI holds the potential to spark more connections and cohesion between tribes, let’s say. In the age of outrage, is my optimism misplaced? Not because of the technology itself, but because of who people believe is behind the curtain?
So someone once said to me, anytime you hear the words, this time is different, run. Which I think is sort of how I would encapsulate my initial reaction to this. You know, look, the capacity to misuse AI as a tool, as a technological development, that’s innate to human nature. So there’s nothing intrinsic about AI that will reverse that capacity of human beings. So AI in the hands of the wrong people will be able to do tremendous damage to the world, just like nuclear weapons in the hands of the wrong people can do tremendous damage to the world. And we have come to recognize that about nuclear weapons, and we are only starting to recognize that about AI. Now, I don’t think your optimism is misplaced. I think that what we have shown in many instances is our capacityto recognize these risks collectively as humanity. We did that in the past with the hole in the ozone layer. We did it, of course, with nuclear weapons. Humanity. We did that in the past with the hole in the ozone layer. We did it, of course, with nuclear weapons. We did it with human cloning. And we can do it with AI. But it does require an affirmative commitment on the part of world leaders and the political institutions that support them to make those difficult decisions. And in the absence of that, there is nothing intrinsic about AI that will solve this problem for itself.
Karthik, thank you so much. I think if there’s anything I could sum from this, it’s that to lead through grievance, to rebuild optimism and deliver, let’s say, innovation responsibly, we’ve really got to think about how trust is built in the future by grounding it in the steps we choose to take today. Thank you so much for your time, Karthik. Really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me. Thank you for tuning into The Trustmakers, an Edelman podcast in partnership with Advertising Week, where we speak with leaders and other trust builders across institutions. See you next time. Thank you for watching.
