Go to School on This Instructive Case Study to Strengthen Crisis Preparedness
7/25/25 – – Many crisis lessons can be drawn from last week’s embarrassing incident at a Coldplay concert that exploded into the summer’s juiciest corporate scandal.
Let’s start with three obvious takeaways:
- Leaders who fail to respect the rules they enforce on those they manage will damage the culture and ultimately the performance of the enterprise.
- There can no longer be any expectation of privacy anywhere, anytime. Smart phone videos uploaded to internet platforms instantly spread the most troubling moments in all settings to millions of viewers around the world.
- Given the velocity of online communication, companies and organizations thrust into an unfaltering spotlight must be prepared to engage instantly, even as events are unclear and still unfolding.
In “The Crisis Preparedness Quotient,” we discuss all three lessons in detail. In this blog post, I’d like to focus on the third.
Corporate Responses Must Match the Velocity of Online Crises
PR gurus and crisis counselors are criticizing the slow response by Astronomer, the private tech company that employed the embracing couple – – CEO Andy Byron and HR head Kristin Cabot – – captured by the Coldplay concert’s “kiss cam” and displayed on a Jumbotron screen for the thousands of concertgoers in Gillette Stadium to see.
Both executives, who have resigned from the company, are married, but not to each other. That evening they were apparently violating their marriage vows and the Astronomer employee code of conduct.
Here’s what critics are focusing on: The concert was on Thursday evening, July 16, but Astronomer didn’t respond until Saturday, July 18, after the video had been viewed by millions all day Friday.
Sounds like an eternity in today’s digitally connected world. That analysis gets a bit murkier, however, when you take a closer look at the incomplete timeline most critics are following.
An Important Timeline Milestone is Missing
Here’s what we know:
A concertgoer who had no idea who she was seeing on the Jumbotron posted a video on TikTok. So, the embarrassing scene (Byron and Cabot both try to hide from the camera as Coldplay’s Chris Martin is heard suggesting they may be having an affair) appeared on TikTok that evening and was interesting enough to begin attracting viewership without any identification of the couple.
At some point on Friday, the day after the concert, someone seeing the TikTok post recognized Byron and Cabot and outed them, explaining their relationship and introducing the name of their company online. From that point on, the video gained momentum because of the added intrigue.
It was now a real-life instance of sex, lies and videotape!
Here’s what we don’t know:
Who was the outer? Was he or she an Astronomer employee? Was their motive malicious? And exactly when did this titillating new information get attached to the video? No analysis I’ve seen has identified that person or nailed down the time of this critical inflection point.
Why the Missing Information Matters
Until the people in the video were identified, Astronomer was not part of the online discussion. The company’s media monitoring services, unless they were equipped with uber-sophisticated facial recognition capabilities, could not have alerted management to the storm that was building online.
Unless the two executives turned themselves in right after the concert (unlikely, given their desperate efforts on the video to remain incognito), the crisis-response clock for Astronomer really began sometime on Friday, when they received the first, “Hey, have you seen what’s online about your CEO and HR head?” inquiry from an internal or external source.
But why did Astronomer management still wait until Saturday to put out its first statement? The absence of any official response created a vacuum. The company lost any level of narrative control. Someone posted a silly fake letter of apology supposedly authored by Byron and inquires must have been coming into the company from all directions.
What Were the Reasons for Astronomer’s Delay?
We can only guess what was happening during these critical hours inside the company. Here’s more of what we don’t know:
- Were Byron and Cabot forthcoming to their colleagues about the incident?
- Were there crisis-response policies and procedures in place to expedite decision making in the absence (or disqualification) of the CEO?
- Did Astronomer’s multiple venture capital investors require burdensome review and approval before any release of public information?
- Were there attorneys and/or investors advising management to stay silent regarding what they considered to be a private personnel matter?
- Did the company’s board insist on taking time to figure out what they should do and who would replace Byron as CEO, hoping to get every question answered in the first public statement?
Going to School on This Lesson-Rich Reputational Challenge
Maybe Astronomer will cooperate with a business or journalism school to develop a case study that answers these and other questions. But before that happens, these recommendations have universal merit:
- Companies, as part of their crisis prevention/preparedness in the digital world, must instill in all employees the “see something, say something” rule. They are your best media monitors. And employees have to know who to contact, night or day, if they see something online that could impact the company’s reputation.
- Crisis response protocols/processes must be in place to facilitate the prompt development, approval and release of at least a holding statement when caught in this kind of storm. Initial statements don’t have to be perfect. Their purpose is to demonstrate the company’s awareness, attention and authority (we’ve seen/heard the reports . . . we’re assessing the matter . . . and WE will be issuing further information when we know more).
- In the case of non-public companies like Astronomer with several venture capital investors, every investment entity should insist that the companies they fund (no matter how new or small) have in place, and have authority to execute, crisis response protocols that match the velocity of unforeseen viral incidents.
- Crisis response drills should focus on dealing with events that explode without the CEO being available for consultation.
Astronomer, which I believe has responded effectively since the initial turbulence, will probably come out of this reputational crisis unscathed. Their specialized data management services are not intended to appeal to mass consumer audiences.
Don’t focus too much on the criticism or wait for the comprehensive postmortem. Gather your leadership team ASAP and go to school on this instructive situation. Discuss what policies are in place to prevent a similar incident from happening to you. And walk through how you would respond to a similar challenge.
When it comes to crisis prevention and preparedness, empathy and learning are a lot healthier responses than criticism and schadenfreude.
UPDATE: 12/18/25 – – Kristin Cabot, the Astronomer HR executive caught in the eye of this storm, breaks her silence. She offers more detail about the incident and tells of her efforts to rebuild her broken life. Mandatory reading for anyone who thought that Gwyneth Paltrow’s satiric crisis response video, released by the company days after the incident, was cool, harmless fun.
Crisis Quotient Blog 