S13 E7 DB|BD at Aspen: Proactivity is the Key to Survival With Edelman’s Dave Fleet AI, aspen business and society program, aspen institute, corporate culture, Delta, economic equity, government, harvard business school, hbs, innovation, leadership, Mastercard, Pfizer

Dave Fleet sees more corporate crises in a month than many executives see in their entire career. He is the Managing Director and the Head of Global Crisis at Edelman, meaning he helps companies prepare for, and manage through, crises. He is regularly fielding phone calls from people on the worst day of their careers.But his job is also more than that, Dave and his team are fighting disinformation, teaching media literacy and helping businesses proactively build trust with their employees and clients.

In this conversation with DB|BD host Ellen McGirt, Dave explains why, in a world that is permanently in crisis, a company’s reputation is its best defense. He also explains why he stresses the importance of coalition building with his clients and why empathy has a commercial business interest. Dave also explains why in a world where trust is local and volatility is permanent, raising media literacy and fighting disinformation is essential. 

On this season of DB|BD, we are thinking about radical collaboration. Host Ellen McGirt sat down with visionary designers, leaders and thinkers at the 2026 Aspen Business & Society Summit to ask them about the radical act of collaborating with others in a time when it often feels impossible to find common ground.

TRANSCRIPT

Ellen McGirt: Listeners, picture this. You are the Head of Digital Crisis at one of the biggest public relations firms in the world. And you stepped into this role in April 2021… you know, just a casual time in world history…

And imagine you’ve been doing this for the past five years… into a second Trump administration, the growth of chatbots, global conflict and climate disruption, and the evolution of the Internet into being more like the, well, Internet.

I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty stressed.

This wasn’t some hypothetical thought exercise. This is the description of someone’s ACTUAL job. His name is Dave Fleet and he is the Managing Director and the Head of Global Crisis at Edelman…

He describes his role helping companies prepare for, and manage through, reputation-threatening moments. This means he is regularly fielding phone calls from people on the worst day of their careers.

But it’s also more than that…to hear Dave tell it, he and his team are fighting disinformation and teaching media literacy. They are also trying to help businesses repair the trust that is lost in the wake of a crisis…

It’s a remarkable job for a pretty remarkable guy. While he describes his job as “not low stress”, Dave is a pretty calm guy. He credits that to exercising and reading. But to do this job… and survive it… I guess you would have to have a pretty level head.

So here is my conversation with Edelman’s Dave Fleet. He has stories and tips that will both alarm you and reassure you… whether you’re in crisis or not.

Ellen McGirt: Dave Fleet, you’re the managing director and head of global digital crisis at Edelman. We were just joking before we started, and it’s absolutely true, Dave. I’ve been a business journalist a long time, and I’ve got a lot of friends at Edelman. You have the scariest job description of anybody I’ve ever interviewed, ever.

Dave Fleet: You know, the great thing about my job is that I get to help people during the toughest parts of their careers. So for all the scariness in it, it’s very gratifying.

Ellen McGirt: Well, I appreciate that. So why don’t we start with your work in your own words. How do you describe what you do? And who do you do it for?

Dave Fleet: So I have a number of pillars to my role, but I think the easiest way to describe it is that I help companies prepare for and manage through reputation-threatening moments, whether they stem from something that the company has done, or something that someone has done to the company, or something that is happening in society that impacts the company in some material, business-changing way.

And that plays out in a number of ways. I look after a lot of our work around global geopolitical issues, when major events happen and they ripple onto organizations. I look after our work in counter-disinformation, which is a very disturbing area right now, just with the state of our information ecosystem. And then I help companies with large, complex, business-threatening challenges.

Ellen McGirt: How big is your team?

Dave Fleet: My team’s basically integrated through Edelman’s global network. Our crisis communications team is north of 100 people, and they’re spread around the different parts of our network. And so then we bring together the right subject matter experts along with our crisis experts for whatever the situation happens to be.

Ellen McGirt: So really, this isn’t just spin. You’re bringing solutions and really big ideas to people at their worst.

Dave Fleet: Yeah, and like I said, we often get the phone call from someone for whom it’s the worst day of their career. They’ve spent 20, 30 years doing something, and then something happens, and often it is through no fault of their own. And then we have the opportunity to come in and hopefully help make that situation a little bit better.

Ellen McGirt: So thinking about it as an opportunity to understand the world the way you see it: you really see more corporate crises in a month than most executives will see in their entire careers. Obviously, you can’t share any particular details, but in the last few years in particular, what has changed the most? What are some of the biggest threats that you are seeing pop up routinely?

Dave Fleet: It’s almost hard to pin down at the moment. I think one of the biggest changes we’ve seen in the last few years is that the risks and threats are no longer just episodic. It used to be that you would face one or two big crises in a career. Nowadays, events are just buffeting businesses constantly. Sometimes they’re of their own causing, or a mistake that’s made.

But often nowadays, you’re dealing with the ripple effects of geopolitical moments. They may seem to be happening a long way away, but when you look at the turbulence that we’re seeing in the world right now, that actually does have a ripple effect onto various aspects of organizations, especially global organizations.

You asked who I do this for. It’s often for large global companies. And so a conflict in the Middle East might feel like it’s thousands of miles away, but you might have partners, employees, stakeholders in that region. You might have a supply chain that runs through that region. It might be a key market for you. And one of the complexities that we’re seeing organizations really grapple with is, as global companies, you’re dealing with stakeholders that are, A, increasingly insular. Our Trust Barometer research talks about seventy percent of people having an insular mindset. They trust people who are close to them in values and beliefs, not just geography.

But you’re also dealing with people with vastly different perspectives on what the right path is in different parts of the world. If you think about a company that is operating multinationally, you’ve got a presence in the US, you’ve got a presence in Europe, maybe you’ve got a presence in the Middle East, you’ve got a presence in Asia. Each of those, and even down to a much more granular level than that, is gonna have a very different take on what the situation is. So how do you navigate through a complex situation like that without alienating your stakeholders in one place or the other?

Ellen McGirt: So I’m hearing that you and your team have become stakeholder management experts, that you really have a coalition-building component to what you do. Is that right?

Dave Fleet: To a great extent. I think one of the things that we’re seeing, in terms of this insularity that we’re facing, is how do you break that down? I think it’s kind of a false premise to think that you can get back to normal nowadays. It’s more about how do you ride the waves of turbulence with resilience.

But how do you rebuild trust or build trust with audiences that are coming at things from wildly different perspectives? Often that is a case of sitting down and not necessarily communicating to convince, but communicating to understand, to listen, and to actually empathize with where the other side is coming from, and then trying to find those grains of truth or those common grounds that sit in the middle.

Because even when you fundamentally disagree with people, and we see the polarization in the US nowadays, you can just sit back and say, “Well, that person is different to me. They must have different values to me. I can’t understand them, and I’m gonna feel angry at them.” Or you can go, “Okay, what is driving their worldview, and what’s driving my worldview? Maybe they’re coming from a place of feeling that the system’s broken and it’s left them behind,” or whatever the case may be. It’s only through empathy that you can actually get back to that place of starting to rebuild trust over time.

Ellen McGirt: I wanna get into disinformation in a second, because that’s its own bucket. So much of what disrupts good people, good initiatives, good companies is misinformation or a lack of understanding or stakeholder conflict, as you just described. I just spent quite a bit of time reporting in Louisiana. Voting rights is a really big thing in the United States right now, and so I was speaking to a lot of civic groups.

And they describe, in a smaller, more personal way perhaps, the same scenario that you just described, where very different people come together and try to figure out what’s happening, what they need to do, and where they’re at risk. And everybody that I talk to, and I heard you hint at it, describes a moment where something happens in the room, in the conversation, where not only are you able to articulate your own point of view, but you’re able to care in some way for somebody else and what they’re worried about and what their outcome could be.

I know you can’t tell me very much, but can you talk a little bit about how those moments unfold in a business setting, where people really do come to understand that we have to do this together? You called it empathy, which every now and then gets pilloried in the popular media because some very famous, powerful person said empathy is no good. But actually it is the secret, isn’t it?

Dave Fleet: I think especially in a business context, the ability to work collaboratively with other people, whether or not they come from the same place as you, is incredibly important. I can’t name names, but as one example, we worked with a company where they had a fundamental trust breakdown within the C-suite, and we were helping them on a certain issue.

And different members of their C-suite just had a fundamentally different view of what the problem was that we were trying to solve. And that difference in views had actually become problematic, because it led to infighting, it led to backstabbing within the C-suite, and it led to the company just not being able to mobilize itself against the problem.

And so rather than trying to just barrel ahead at that problem, the way that we approached it was we first tabled the issue with the CEO and said, “Look, we’ve got a problem. We need to address it.” And then we brought everyone together into a room and actually tried to take a step back from my perspective, your perspective, and come to a point of, let’s understand the full landscape. Let’s try and have a dispassionate conversation. Let’s share perspectives. Let’s openly ask questions.

And by the time we left the room, long story short, we were able to get them to a place where everyone held hands on, okay, we have a common alignment on the problem. And everyone held hands on the idea that we can disagree all we want within this room, but when we walk out of this room, we are gonna be one united front to the rest of the organization.

It was a painful day, and we kind of staggered out of that room at the end of it, but it was incredibly productive. And I credit the leadership of that company for being willing to take that step of bringing everyone together. You’re able to walk out of that room with a group that is now aligned on how we’re gonna address a problem that otherwise was starting to undermine the commercials. So when we talk about empathy, is it just a soft word that’s thrown around? Is it overused? No. In that place, it was having a commercial business impact that we had to address.

Ellen McGirt: You know, one of the things that’s come up quite a bit at this conference, and this is a wonderful conference, with people who are all on board with some really basic ideas about business and the world, is that they’re worried about younger professionals coming in who are less prepared. They’re throwing around words like judgment and taste, and saying they’re over-relying on tech and not talking as much. You’re describing such a sophisticated level of human interaction, and it’s happening near the C-suite.

But for an organization to be as resilient as it needs to be when terrible things happen, that resilience needs to live at every level of the organization. I mean, you really should be in charge of more things, Dave. You really are an impressive person. But if you were in charge of the development process of young professionals, how would you advise leaders to train and develop younger people so that they could be more resilient, empathetic, prepared leaders when things go wrong, or when things go right?

Dave Fleet: Wow, what a question. As a slight aside, aside from the resilience and judgment piece, the future of employment and the workplace for young people has been another one of the enduring themes coming out of this conference, which I think is fascinating.

How would I train them? I don’t know that I’m qualified to give a broad answer. I would say that from my vantage point, one of the things that I’m a big proponent of, and I think organizations have a role to play in this, not just broader society… You talked about disinformation earlier, and I spend a lot of time thinking about that space. One of the things that I think we’re missing in society at large, but where we can really start to make a difference with younger people, is helping to raise people’s literacy around this. There’s media literacy, but there’s also a kind of disinformation literacy.

How can you teach people not what’s right or wrong, because that’s gonna alienate people, but how to be good judges of what they’re consuming, and how to recognize the signs that something might be problematic, not in terms of the message it’s giving you, but the reaction it’s creating in you?

If you look at countries that have actually been on the front lines of the big-D disinformation wars, like nation-state disinformation, countries like Finland, which have been very resilient and on the front lines of this for decades, they have built that into education curriculums from the first time a kid walks into school to when they leave to go to university. It’s built in throughout.

It’s just drilled into them, so that they’ve got greater resilience not just to the big scary stuff that makes for great reading but feels like it’s a long way away and maybe not affecting me personally. It also gives you great resilience to, okay, someone on a social network is saying something, and I’m now trained to subconsciously, critically analyze whether that’s credible or not.

Ellen McGirt: That is so interesting. I hadn’t really considered any of that. We should talk about disinformation, because it feels like bad actors are out there engineering these things. It really does feel like there’s a force out there when you’re just a layperson. But you are actually in charge of something called a counter-disinformation unit, which sounds exactly like the next scary thing that you’re doing. Could you tell us what that is?

Dave Fleet: So we formed our counter-disinformation capability a few years ago, but I think we’d argue we were doing it unknowingly for a long time. The reason that we formalized it and started hiring specialists was that we were seeing more and more companies coming to us with problems that were grounded in, we say disinformation, but it’s really a label that encompasses a bunch of things. It ranges from a bunch of people who are finding themselves believing [things] that may or may not be true, and increasingly, those people were being brought together and formed into echo chambers by all these algorithms that are now driving the information that we see. So, kind of misinformation.

We were seeing some companies that were facing disinformation attacks, so deliberately weaponized falsehoods. And then there’s a middle ground where it’s harder to tell. There may be a grain of truth, but it’s been taken out of context and blown out of proportion.

And the number of companies that were coming to us with any one of those things was just growing and growing and growing. And we said, “You know what? There’s a problem here that we need to put more focus on.” And then we started to see the dynamics around this permeating all sorts of other issues that companies were facing.

So we brought that group together, and now it’s a specialized piece of our crisis practice that works with companies to help build resilience to that and to get ahead of it. There’s a lot of research in the space right now. It’s a fairly young space from an academic research standpoint. But a lot of the research is pointing at the fact that the best way to build resilience and to maintain trust in the face of what is basically an imploding information ecosystem right now, and we can talk about that, is to be proactive and to frame your side of the story in advance, because it’s much easier for me to convince you of something if you haven’t heard a different side to it first.

So to bring that into a slightly clearer example: if I introduce you to someone and say, “Hey, this is John. John’s a dog lover. He loves fostering puppies,” and you’re looking for someone to look after your dog, you can be like, “Great, John’s awesome.” But if you’ve heard about John in the past, and you’ve heard that John actually mistreats puppies on the weekend, and then I come to you and go, “Hey, this is John. He really likes puppies,” you’re not gonna trust that. You’re not gonna believe it.

So it’s about how do you actually reach people proactively with the truth, with trustworthy information, and inoculate them against misinformation or disinformation. So that’s a big piece of the work that we do. And then we also help companies who are unfortunate enough to find themselves on the receiving end of these kinds of issues.

Ellen McGirt: So good vitamins are the best defense. Make yourself, your brand, so clearly knowable that when a claim comes along that is not true or inaccurate in some way, people are less likely to believe it.

Dave Fleet: Right. We’re talking a lot about sustainability here, and that could be something as basic as making sure you’re strategically and thoughtfully communicating your principles when it comes to sustainability, making sure that actually lines up with your actions, and doing so proactively rather than waiting for an activist to come at you with something that may or may not be true. And so the stakeholders that you care about actually know your stance, and know enough to at least pause and check what they hear before they just assume that it’s true.

Ellen McGirt: That sounds like it takes an entirely different type of professional at the helm within these organizations, to make sure that kind of messaging and communication, high touch, high information, I’m not really sure what the right term is, is always part of everything that they do. You can’t just rush in and say, “Here’s who I actually am. I love dogs.”

Dave Fleet: Right. And I think the reason that it’s so important now, and I touched on it just previously, is that this information ecosystem, which is a fancy way of saying all the stuff that we are bombarded with all the time, the way that we consume news, the way that we find information, is increasingly broken right now.

In some of the research we’ve done over the last few years, somewhere around two-thirds of people just don’t know how to tell whether something that they are reading is credible or not. An increasing number of people believe that businesses are deliberately lying to them in service of profit.

And there’s an incredible stat that I believe it’s the same proportion of people who trust their own internet research as much as or over the advice of a doctor. So there’s a growing proportion of people who are actually willing to discount a doctor’s advice in favor of what they found online.

And we touched before we started recording on the decline that we’ve seen in trust in media over the last number of years. All of these different factors, algorithms, technology, societal impacts, politics, are colliding and really breaking this information ecosystem, which is really difficult for an organization to navigate, especially in a situation where you’re trying to fight falsehoods.

Ellen McGirt: So I know that you don’t have an answer, but I am going to ask for one. The other thing that I’ve learned talking to other folks from Edelman is the emergence of grievance.

Dave Fleet: Yes.

Ellen McGirt: Which is so striking and so poignant and so heartbreaking, but also so powerful. Grievance gives people energy. You look for information that supports your grievance in the world, and it gives you a righteous way of walking through the world. And it probably makes you more likely to believe things that are not true, and more likely to lash out and act out on things that are not true or not fully true. Given the nature of the brokenness, how do you recommend that we think about beginning to fix what’s broken?

Dave Fleet: I’ll give maybe two answers to that. One that addresses a bigger-picture solution, and one that’s more practical and applicable, something you can do. And to your point around grievance, one of the scary findings that we found was that about 40% of people are willing to take what we call hostile activism, or hostile acts, in support of their grievance. And one of the biggest pieces of that was deliberately spreading misinformation.

So at a broader level, one of the themes that we’ve talked about at this event has been the role of business in society, and I think business does have a role in trying to fix some of the problems and the fundamental breakdowns that we’ve seen over the last few years. What our research is showing is that it has to be done very purposefully and intentionally, but it has to be done within your permission space.

One of the challenges that we’ve had in this area is that we’ve seen a pendulum swinging around the level of involvement of business, stakeholder capitalism, business in society. And sometimes businesses have overstepped, to the point where it’s become more performative or hasn’t had a lot of substance to it, and that’s been a mistake. But I think there’s a very clear case in the research showing that you need to identify the places where you have license to operate, where it’s not just tied to a performative act, or even just to an idea that it’s the right thing to do, but where you’re actually able to tie it to, “This is the right thing for our business too.”

You look at some of the organizations that have been really effective in trying to address societal challenges. They’ve been able to tie it to the bottom line, because they’ve been able to tie it to the communities that they’re serving and the business impact of serving those communities. And that’s been the theme of the last few days: how do you make the business case around sustainability, for example. So that’s a bigger-picture solution that’s probably less gratifying, because it’s not as directly applicable.

Going back to the earlier conversation we were having around misinformation, one of the things I think is very applicable and easy to do is media literacy. The employer is one of the most trusted sources of information. Trust is local nowadays, and my employer is the epitome of local.

And so the role of business there could be to help raise media literacy. That might feel disconnected from business performance, but I would argue that in my world, when we’re dealing with crises, the number one thing that we have to do when a crisis hits is understand the facts. And if you can’t understand the facts because you don’t know how to interpret what you’re seeing, then you’re in real trouble from day one. So I actually think that building media literacy and disinformation literacy can be a fairly fundamental element of building resilience in this information landscape we’re dealing with.

Ellen McGirt: Is there something that leaders, or even ambitious individuals, can be learning from the Finland approach, where they’re thinking through their role in understanding the world, and in contributing to the chaos?

Dave Fleet: I think one of the core tenets of good programming like that is that it’s not judgmental on one side or the other. Too often we come to the table saying, “Hey, look, it’s not your side, it’s this, and I’ve gotta convince you that you’re wrong and that my worldview is right.” And for that reason, and a number of other reasons, if we’re honest, it often gets politicized.

But the idea is that this is not me trying to push my values on you. Instead, I’m just trying to help you navigate what you’re seeing. I’m not gonna tell you what to read. I’m not gonna tell you where to read it. I’m gonna give you the tools to be able to go, “This is credible,” or, “It’s not credible.”

And that’s hard, right? Because it requires a cognitive lift from the other person, to choose to make that extra step. But I think that’s something we can learn from that approach: how do we help people to help themselves, versus telling them what to think.

Ellen McGirt: We can wrap up soon. I could talk to you all day, Dave. I really appreciate it, and I wish you and your team members well, because in addition to providing a very specific service for your clients, it seems that you’re bringing a philosophical leadership perspective to the kinds of tough conversations that organizations need to have, which feels like courage to me.

So I was curious, in the spirit of philosopher-king advice, for executives at every level, or people just entering the workforce, where even the organization that they trust, their employer, feels at risk right now as leaders deploy AI inelegantly, or aren’t really clear on what the payoff is, or are going to be replacing people without being sure what the ROI is going to be. All of that is in the air. What will it continue to take, given the political chaos, the global chaos, war and disease, everything that’s coming, for people to keep bringing the kinds of personal commitments, you mentioned cognitive load here, to work every day that would help them become part of the resilience?

And I’m talking about this in the domain of capitalism, too, where on some level it’s really my mission to push you out of the way so I can get to the better job. We’re competing for smaller and smaller spots. So there’s something about the design of the corporation as we’ve always understood it that doesn’t always lend itself to this kind of collaboration. And yet…

Dave Fleet: I find the question in itself fascinating, because you just referred to this zero-sum mindset, which is actually an indicator, and a result, of insularity, right? This idea that if someone else gets ahead, then that must mean that someone else, maybe me, is not getting ahead because of it.

So the question itself is really interesting. I think there are maybe a couple of things in here. One is I think we need to get away from the idea that there is gonna be a return to normal. In one way or another, I think volatility is going to continue to be there. And I think resilience nowadays is not about how do we get from one side of it to the other side. It’s about how do we navigate through it while continuing to build trust with the people and the constituencies that matter to us.

The term permacrisis is used a lot nowadays. This is not an episodic thing that we are just navigating through. The current thing that’s happening right here, right now, is a point in time. But then there’ll be another one, and there’ll be another one, and they’re getting closer together. We have to be resilient in general, and be able to get about our lives versus just surviving through it.

So that’s one thought. The other thing I would lean in towards is looking for opportunities to collaborate. I don’t think we all individually have to have the answers to this. So for example, I’m an advisor to a group called Trust in Media, which is led by a lady named Ellen McCarthy, who’s wonderful.

She’s a former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence. She’s got an amazing background. And she’s dedicating herself and this organization to doing what it says on the label: trying to rebuild trust in media. But she’s doing that by bringing together organizations from all walks of life, from academia, business, and government, and trying to build partnerships and collaborations among those groups.

And when we’re talking about some of these problems nowadays that feel like they’re just happening to us, and we have no agency in them, trying to stand up alone to do something about it is hard. But I think there’s strength in numbers, and there’s strength in collaboration between organizations with different core strengths and different capabilities, and I think there’s incredible opportunity in that.

Ellen McGirt: So you haven’t updated your blog for a while, but I noticed that there was a reading list on there from a couple of years ago. What do you read, or what do you do in your life, that helps you understand the world better and also just feel better about the world?

Dave Fleet: My job is not low stress. I spend a lot of time exercising to try and decompress, and when I’m exercising, I listen to a lot of audiobooks. So I read, or consume, I should say, voraciously. That’s a big piece of it for me. I try to spend a good amount of time each day not just on the literature, but also consuming perspectives from different worldviews.

I think it’s really important that we don’t get too insular in our own information bubble and just read stuff that reaffirms our beliefs. So I try to find information sources that might be uncomfortable. I don’t think I have perfect answers to any of it, but especially in the communications line of work, curiosity about what’s happening in the world is so important, and it’s one of the things that I look for when I’m hiring.

I can teach you any number of things. I can’t teach curiosity. And that ability to stay on top of what’s happening right now, with the world being the way it is, and tomorrow being different from today, I think that’s incredibly important.

Ellen McGirt: Anything that I should have asked and didn’t, or anything I said that indicated that I didn’t understand something important about what you do or who you are? Anything that you need to course correct?

Dave Fleet: Course correct, absolutely not. One of the big things that’s jumped out to me, and I’ve said it before here, is that we’re operating in an information ecosystem that is fundamentally collapsing at the moment, and we’re in danger of heading towards a zero-trust mindset.

And I think that would be disastrous in many ways for us to get there. And as Edelman, we’re obviously very much invested in understanding trust, but also in helping organizations to build it. The dynamics that are driving that aren’t changing. So I think what we’ve got to look for is where’s the agency that we can take?

As people who have control of our own sphere of influence, at whatever scale that is, organizational or just individual, I think we’ve got to look for the ways that we can start to make a difference, focus on the things that we can control, influence what we can influence, and then sometimes, part of resilience at a personal level is letting the rest of it go.

Ellen McGirt: That must include the examples of very powerful people for whom truth and accountability don’t seem to be a factor in how they operate, whether that’s a world leader or a business leader. There are very wealthy, powerful people who just do and say things, and nothing bad ever happens. There’s no accountability. What I’m hearing you say is that we have to not focus on emulating that, but focus on the work that we need to do.

Dave Fleet: Yeah. Focus on the work that we can do as individuals, and within our organizations, especially in our jobs, to build and maintain trust with the people who actually matter to us.

Ellen McGirt: Thank you so very much for being here. Enjoy Aspen.

Dave Fleet: Thank you.