On December 4–5, 2025, tens of thousands of travelers on IndiGo Airlines, India’s market leader, found themselves stranded.

Families missed weddings. Children slept on airport floors while their parents tried to get answers from harried gate agents who knew as little as they did. The nightmare unfolded not because of fog or an unforeseeable technical glitch. It was scheduling errors that cascaded through the system.

That was bad enough.

What IndiGo did next — or rather, what they didn’t do — made it worse. In moments like these, the operational failure is only half the story. The other half is how leaders respond when trust has already been strained.

In our previous issue, I wrote about how leaders speak when the future is uncertain — how anchoring to what holds can steady a room. But when harm is visible, when disruption is already felt, stability is not the first need.

Acknowledgment is. We’ve seen what that looks like before.

In April 2018, two Black men were arrested at a Starbucks in Philadelphia while waiting for a business meeting. Video circulated quickly. Public outrage followed.

Within days, Kevin Johnson the CEO of Starbucks appeared on Good Morning America.

The facts were known. The harm was visible. The question was not what had happened. The question was what the company would do with it.

What stood out in that interview was not eloquence. It was order.

He began with acknowledgment, not a policy or an explanation.
He apologized. He took responsibility. He named the incident plainly.

Only then did he speak about what would change — including closing thousands of stores for racial bias training.

The sequence mattered.

If he had begun with Starbucks’ history, its culture, or its operational standards, it would have sounded defensive. If he had emphasized continuity before ownership, it would have felt evasive.

Repair storytelling has its own logic.

First, name the harm. Then, claim responsibility. Only then, signal change.

The distinction is easy to miss. Indigo’s passengers stranded in December did not need to hear that aviation is complex. They needed clarity, ownership, and evidence that someone was accountable for what had disrupted their lives.

Customers watching the Starbucks video (below) did not need operational explanations. They needed moral responsibility.

Leaders often confuse these moments.

They use the language of stability when accountability is required.
Or they rush to explanation when acknowledgment is what’s being asked for.

But audiences know the difference.

Trust cannot be rebuilt on steadiness alone. It requires ownership.

Notice the next time something goes wrong on your watch.

Before you explain, ask:

Have I named the harm plainly?
Have I taken responsibility without qualification?
Am I offering repair — or merely reassurance?

When the future is uncertain, stories steady. As we saw in our previous newsletter.

When harm has occurred, stories must first acknowledge what broke.

Only then can they begin to rebuild. A lesson that Indigo learned the hard way.