Outrage makes money online. It costs money in the boardroom.

Some of the world's largest companies make their money by keeping us separate. Meta. X/Twitter. TikTok. Their combined market value exceeds a trillion dollars, and their business model runs on a simple equation: conflict drives engagement, engagement drives ads, ads drive revenue.

The social impact is staggering. We're more polarised, less trusting, and increasingly unable to talk across difference.

But the cost isn't just emotional or political—it's structural. Societies that can't coordinate across difference can't solve collective problems. Climate adaptation stalls. Infrastructure crumbles. Public health responses fracture. The ability to make decisions together—the fundamental work of democracy and markets—degrades.

And it's not an accident. It's a business model optimised over two decades and trillions of dollars of investment. These platforms have learned exactly which psychological buttons to push, which fears to amplify, which identities to harden. They've built recommendation engines that can predict what will make you angry before you know it yourself.

The tragedy is that humans aren't naturally this divided. We're actually wired to cooperate, to make decisions together, to integrate different perspectives. But we're also wired to respond to threat. And conflict entrepreneurs have become expert at triggering that response—then monetising it.

But there's another cost that gets less attention: what happens when this logic crosses into organisations.

What's a conflict entrepreneur?

There's a new kind of operator in public life: the conflict entrepreneur. They don't build bridges or products. They build audiences—by selling division. It's a clean business model: provoke a reaction, harvest attention, convert it into status and revenue. Conflict → clicks → cash.

Journalist Amanda Ripley named them in her book High Conflict. Online, they're the engine of the attention economy. Inside organisations, they're poison. They fragment attention, harden silos, and reward performance theatre over actual progress.

Conflict entrepreneurs don't sell ideas. They sell identities.

This is the key difference between debate and division-for-profit.

In a genuine disagreement, people argue over what's true or what works. The goal is resolution, even if it's uncomfortable. You're trying to get closer to something real.

Conflict entrepreneurship operates differently. It's not about the idea—it's about who you are if you hold it. The product isn't a position. It's membership. And membership comes with:

• Clear enemies. Simplified targets that justify the group's existence.

• Purity tests. Ever-narrowing definitions of "we" that keep the boundaries sharp.

• Performance requirements. You prove loyalty through public displays, not private reasoning.

  
  

Online, this makes perfect economic sense. Identity-based content is stickier than idea-based content. People will scroll past a graph. They'll share an accusation.

In organisations, it's corrosive. Because the work requires people to change their minds, test assumptions, and integrate conflicting information. Conflict entrepreneurship makes all three socially expensive.

Three dynamics conflict entrepreneurs exploit—and how they show up at work

The same mechanics that power outrage online are now showing up in how teams operate:

1. Silo reinforcement

Online algorithms don't just keep us comfortable—they train us to seek out the opposing side. To find the enemy. To define ourselves against them. The algorithm rewards engagement, and nothing engages like conflict.

At work, this doesn't create isolation. It creates opposition. Teams learn to need an adversary to clarify their identity. Marketing vs. Product. Engineering vs. Sales. Finance vs. "people who don't understand the numbers."

The division isn't a side effect of specialisation. It's the point. Teams optimise for being right against someone else instead of solving for organisational outcomes. The other team isn't just wrong—they're the obstacle. And obstacles justify our existence.

2. Bias reinforcement loops

Agreement gives us dopamine. Conflict gives us cortisol. Over time, we learn to interpret new information not as data to integrate, but as threat to resist. Decisions narrow. Challenge sounds like attack. The room splits into "gets it" and "doesn't get it."

This isn't a personality flaw. It's pattern recognition shaped by platforms designed to reward certainty and punish ambiguity.

3. Cognitive offloading through outrage

Outrage is efficient. When the villain is obvious, there's no need to sit with complexity or test assumptions. You outsource the hard cognitive work—the exploring, the weighing, the integrating—to emotion.

Debates get louder. Choices get thinner. And the people with the most certainty dominate the room, not because they're right, but because certainty is expensive to challenge in real time.

Quick tells you're dealing with conflict entrepreneurship (not decision-making)

Watch for these patterns:

• Heat without stakes. Lots of emotion, but no actual decision on the table.

• Screenshot-ready language. People crafting statements for optics, not outcomes.

• Ever-narrowing definitions of "we." Language that excludes before it explains.

• Calls to "take a stand," never to test a claim. Certainty performance, zero curiosity.

• Recurring villains. The same team, person, or department blamed every cycle.

  
  

If there's performance but no explicit decision being made, you're not in a decision forum. You're in an identity market. And identity markets don't produce better answers. They produce louder members.

Why this is expensive

Conflict entrepreneurship extracts three organisational costs:

Decision lag. When people optimise for group approval over outcome quality, decisions stall. Not because the data is unclear, but because taking a position requires checking: will my side support this?

Cognitive drift and talent waste. Conflict entrepreneurship accelerates something dangerous: people gravitating toward others who think like them. It's natural—we prefer people whose reasoning matches ours. But in a conflict environment, that preference hardens into a filter. Teams become cognitively homogeneous.

The cost is measurable: higher decision error, lower innovation. Not because people are less smart, but because they're thinking in the same patterns, reinforcing the same blind spots, missing the same alternatives. Cognitive diversity drops. And with it, the organisation's ability to see what it's missing.

Compounding brittleness. Organisations that reward certainty and punish nuance get worse at adapting. Each decision strengthens the identity boundaries. Each identity boundary makes the next integration harder. The rigidity accumulates.

You end up with teams that can't learn from each other because learning would require admitting the other side had a point. And that admission is now identity-threatening

How visibility stops conflict entrepreneurs

Here's what's interesting: when people can see what voices are needed for a decision and whether those voices are actually in the room, behaviour often self-corrects.

Not the visible performance of decision-making—the theatre of "we consulted everyone." Something more specific: understanding which cognitive perspectives the decision requires, and mapping who's present against that requirement.

Show people the gap—we need someone who thinks in systems, we need someone who pressure-tests assumptions, we need someone who sees second-order effects, and right now we have three people who all optimise for speed—and groups adjust. Not because they're told to, but because the absence becomes undeniable.

Most people don't want to be part of a predictable echo. They want to be part of good work. But they need to see the pattern before they can step out of it.

Conflict entrepreneurs thrive in opacity. The moment you make visible what the decision needs and who's missing, their model breaks down. Because once people can see they're performing rather than deciding, most choose differently.

The cost of importing outrage economics into your organisation

Outrage might pay online, but in organisations, clarity compounds.

Conflict entrepreneurship isn't about bad people. It's about incentive structures designed for engagement bleeding into environments that require integration.

The internet taught us to profit from division. The question for leaders is: what are we allowing across the threshold?

This connects to how humans are wired to make decisions together, and what happens when that wiring meets misaligned incentives. More on cognitive drift and collective decision-making in our other posts.