Beyond the Boardroom: The Human Faultlines of Modern Workplaces

Like so many modern reckonings do, with a murmur on social media, it became full-blown social media fodder. The data company Astronomer, known for orchestrating complex pipelines, found itself navigating a very different kind of turbulence, a relationship between senior executives that stirred questions of ethics, leadership, and governance.

- RAKESH KUMAR CHITKARA

Like so many modern reckonings do, with a murmur on social media, it became full-blown social media fodder. The data company Astronomer, known for orchestrating complex pipelines, found itself navigating a very different kind of turbulence, a relationship between senior executives that stirred questions of ethics, leadership, and governance. But what truly made it resonate wasn't the specifics of the incident; it was the uneasy familiarity of the pattern. We've seen it before, and we will see it again. Because this isn't just a corporate incident. This is a workplace issue, and more than that, a human one.

Corporate headlines often distil human complexity into neat compliance violations or HR violations. But scratch beneath the surface, and we find a deeper story: how relations breed, grow and flow through professional settings, sometimes in entanglements that cross lines of hierarchy, perception, or trust.

The Astronomer episode is not about guilt or innocence alone — it is about the larger emotional architecture of today's workplaces, where lines are blurred, boundaries evolve, and human vulnerability walks into the office each morning with a badge and a laptop.

From a traditional lens, workplaces do what they must: investigate, act, move on. But is that enough? The language of governance is about rules...broken and strengthened again.

From McDonald's former CEO Steve Easterbrook to Infosys' internal probes, even to whispered concerns in Indian public sector enterprises, we see a recurring theme: governance failure isn't just about broken rules — it's about broken awareness.