So. For those who have been following the news recently, one of the most prevalent stories of the past few weeks has been the accusations against Cambridge professor Jason Arday of plagiarism, and the public fight that followed, which brought in DEI, race, classism, and much else. Sadly, Professor Arday was recently found dead.

Behind the headlines there is a real person, a family, friends, and of course a tragedy.

I am not going to discuss the accusations, because I do not know the facts, and neither do you.

Any human death is a tragedy, and if you read that news and felt nothing, please seek professional help.

What this tragedy gives us is an opportunity to reflect on corporate scapegoating, a mechanism we deploy in miniature inside our own organisations.

Why and how does it happen, and what do we need to do when we observe it happening around us?

It comes from a 16th-century translation of the Hebrew Bible by William Tyndale, the English priest and scholar who produced the first printed English Bible and was executed for it. He tried to translate the word Azazel, which, in the context of the sacrifice of two goats on Yom Kippur, he rendered as "the goat that goes away."

For those of us who are not religious scholars, an interesting description of the deep scapegoating mechanism is on display in South Park's 2008 episode "Britney's New Look." In this episode, the whole country hounds a visibly ill parody of Britney Spears, the pop star who at that time was in the middle of a very public breakdown, through a suicide attempt and keeps filming.

At some point, when the boys try to stop the people, they find out that the slow destruction of Britney was never about her.

It was a tradition.

The crowd builds a person up in order to tear them down, because the sacrifice is what holds the crowd together.

Final shot: the next chosen one, being fitted for the pedestal.

South Park still produces some of the best management trainings...

In corporate life, the mechanism has a name we all pretend not to know: scapegoating. Bad month, bad quarter, bad year, bad project. Our corporate brain just starts searching, and it always finds someone.

If you are interested in the psychology, here is how it works, in four steps.

René Girard, French anthropologist, argued from Violence and the Sacred (1972) to The Scapegoat (1982) that groups discharge tension by converging on one victim, and that the destruction feels righteous to everyone involved.

Émile Durkheim, founder of sociology, in 1912: punishment exists to reaffirm the group's bonds, not to correct the offender.

Albert Bandura, Stanford psychologist, 1990s: moral disengagement. Diffusion of responsibility ("everyone agreed"), euphemism ("we are just being accountable"), justification ("they had it coming").

All of these are the means by which we justify our participation in smearing a person who has just been designated a scapegoat, even if we believe he or she has nothing to do with the outcome.

In any talent review, you will hear all three justifications within five minutes of the scapegoat being identified.

Molly Crockett, the neuroscientist who studies morality and social media, 2017: moral outrage on networks spreads like a contagion because it is cheap, rewarded, and disproportionate.

One raised eyebrow on Monday is "everyone knows" by Thursday and "it was always obvious" the Monday after.

Harold Garfinkel, American sociologist, 1956, "degradation ceremonies": the ritual only works if the person's entire self is shown to have been fraudulent all along.

That is why the takedown never stops at the mistake and always goes back through the CV.

Suddenly the 2021 project "had issues too."

Suddenly people "always had a feeling."

He also listed who is eligible: the elevated, the different, the ones who "got above themselves."

Which is why the sacrifice is rarely the insider who has been quietly useless for a decade and usually the star, the outsider, or the person just promoted over someone's head.

The useless insider is safe.

He is one of us.

Norman Feather, Australian psychologist, 1980s and 1990s: tall poppy syndrome.

We enjoy the fall of the successful, especially when the success can be called undeserved.

Chris Rojek, sociologist, Celebrity (2001): in a secular society, the celebrated exist to be worshipped and then ritually destroyed.

Build-up and tear-down are one machine, and it needs feeding on a schedule.

We often call that schedule the annual review cycle.

So, in short, this is what is happening: a person is elevated, which makes them eligible for scapegoating.

One discrediting fact rewrites their biography.

Outrage spreads on its own incentive to baiting crowd, each member disengaged and disinhibited, enjoying the fall.

The sacrifice restores the group, until the next one. South Park explained how it works in their episode.

We do this constantly in our organisations, and we walk out feeling better. Feeling like a team.

Someone says, "tough conversation, but the right call."

Everyone nods.

So, the usual lesson.

Most of the reasons behind failures are systemic, and rarely just one person's fault.

We need to learn how to notice the scapegoating machine starting up, because once it is running, it has a moral momentum that is almost impossible to stop.

When a bad quarter suddenly produces a consensus villain and the room relaxes, ask what the relief is for. Real self-reflection is painful.

A sacrifice is comfortable.

Refuse the biography rewrite.

One failure is one failure.

Remember past achievements, and refuse to assume that your colleague was always horrible.

Break the telepathy.

Baiting crowds run on unspoken agreement.

"Are we sure we are not just looking for someone to blame?" costs nothing and usually breaks the spell.

Protect the person while it is cheap.

By the time HR is involved, everyone is reading from the liturgy.

What works is early, private, and boring: a senior voice with specifics.

None of this is heroic.

It is one sober person noticing that the room feels very good about itself for reasons that have nothing to do with the truth.

Now, at the end of the day, it might very well be that the person has to be let go.

But make sure that happens on its own terms and merit, not because the whole group suddenly decided to sacrifice someone for a systemic issue.

Talk soon,
Sultanbek