Defend or Fold?

Why Neither Works

when the Public is Angry

One of the few things we Americans seem to agree on is that we're angry...

• "Voters get revenge at the polls."
• "Citizens revolt against the plan being 'shoved down their throats!'"
• "Angry residents lashed City Council until 2am..."

That's the emotional climate public professionals work in, day in and day out.

When I'm baffled by someone's outsize emotions towards me, I turn to a cheatsheet stuck to our family's deep freezer: a seemingly plain piece of paper, held in place with little kid magnets. Rumpled, torn and sticky from a popsicle it absorbed more than a decade ago, it doesn't look like much, but it's brilliantly simple and always gets me unstuck. 

Being blamed as the source of another person's anger feels like reaching a fork in the road. Down one path, we fold: go quiet and acquiesce (if we don't outright accept the accusation). Down the other, we defend ourselves - our position, our reasoning.

Defend or fold. Whichever way we go, one party isn't going to feel good about it, and neither will be satisfied.

Notice what both paths have in common: both are ways of settling who's right. Folding concedes the point. Defending contests it. Either way, the anger has turned the conversation into a verdict, and the only question left is: who prevails?

That's how most of us learn to deal with anger, outrage, and contempt. It's an either/or response, and public professionals feel this conundrum more acutely than most. Planners, engineers, city staff, and public officials have been trained to bring the facts, backed up with models and science. Their credibility depends on being right.

When a room turns on them, the fork feels like the only map professionals have been given...

They can either defend the project the public is angry about, or stay silent rather than incite more outrage.

But defending or folding rarely resolves anything, because anger is never the whole story. It works like a low-fuel warning light. Something is running low, usually a sense of control, of safety, or of being heard, and often even the person feeling it can't say which. If we don't know what's actually low, we can't respond in a way that resolves it. Silence doesn't refill any of those. Neither does a counterargument or another slide of data.

The interaction plays out the same way in countless rooms...

The resident who came ready for a fight leaves feeling dismissed, and the professional who came to do a job leaves feeling attacked. And nobody feels heard.

But there's another way to respond to someone's anger, and it isn't a compromise between defending and folding. It's a different thing entirely. It steps out of the right-and-wrong question altogether and treats the anger as information about what the person needs.

That's what the paper on my freezer is for. It's simple, but not simplistic:

Don't listen to the accusation. Listen for the unmet need the emotion is pointing to.

That's the critical move. There's nothing on the paper about being right, and nothing about giving in. And it works the same way whether you're in a heated conversation with a family member during dinner, or in council chambers at midnight with eighty people and a microphone.

So here's my invitation. The next time you find yourself at that fork: don't defend, and don't fold. Ask yourself what the person might need.

You might find the question you've been trying so hard to answer, was never what they needed from you most.

Let us know if you're interested in developing your Emotional IQ with some specific skills for science-based professionals.