The real question about the Astros: how could this happen?

The PR community is joyfully piling onto the Houston Astros, who did indeed bungle their response to the cheating crisis in ways that could easily have been predicted and prevented.

I'm not going to do a post on all that. Frankly, I think 100% of the people on my LinkedIn already know better.

The more interesting question is: how could this happen?

This is what is unbelievable to me. The Astros have unlimited resources. Access to every social and traditional media. They had the benefit of crisis counsel. They knew they were in trouble. And yet, they did everything wrong.

How could this happen?

The first possibility--which I would dismiss--is that they got faulty advice from their crisis firm. It's possible. Maybe the owner hired some yes-man buddy...but I doubt any professional communicator put "our cheating didn't impact the game" on anyone's talking points.

So, we're looking at overruled counsel...a position we have all been in.

There are two suspects here...and they are the usual suspects. The first is an attorney. You have to have good legal counsel in a crisis, but lawyers sometimes don't understand the difference between a court of public opinion and a court of law.  In a real court, evidence has to be admitted. It is controlled by rules. Conceding facts--like impacting the game--is significant.

In public opinion, there are no rules. People know the cheating impacted the game and not admitting it is beyond pointless... it's harmful.

The long view is that fanning the original outrage into a wildfire actually increased the chances of legal action and "poisoned the well" of potential jurors.

That's one suspect, and there's a strong likelihood that short-sighted legal advice has its fingerprints in there somewhere.

The other suspect is the owner himself. Back in 2009, I was working with an automotive retail client whose entire industry had been bailed out by the taxpayer. I'm not saying it was the wrong thing to do, but let's understand that everyday Americans had their money--that they could have used for healthcare, childcare, retirement or a well-earned vacation--given to the bankrupt US auto industry.

I wanted the client--as part of a larger effort--to thank the public for their support of the industry in a troubled time. The client responded that doing so "would amount to groveling."

So I can imagine what meeting with Jim Crane was like. He was not at fault. He hired people to run the team. And impact the games? Who knew how those games would have turned out? Poor CEOs live in a bubble where they unilaterally define all perceptions, which is why they need outside PR (and legal) counsel in the first place.

If I had to guess, it would be the lawyer urging caution and the owner gleefully jumping on the train.

He's also not wrong. He did hire people to run the organization and we don't know how the games would have turned out...though that's a "too smart by half" argument. The data proves that cheating improved the chances of Houston winning.

When I attended the "Dealing with an Angry Public" training at Harvard, there was a very valuable rule about recovering from a mistake in which people were harmed. "The CEO has to be the most pissed off guy in the room."

And Jim Crane wasn't. In fact, he wasn't pissed off at all. Not pissed off for him, the fans, the game...any of the victims of the actions of his people.

How did this happen? This failure falls from the same weakness that created it: poor leadership.

For PR practitioners, we have to remember that we are reliant on good leaders to do our job. Poor leadership leaves us--and the lawyers, too--as voices in the wind.