Exercise 5 — Reverse the agency frame

Find someone who is over-responsible — who explains a bad outcome by their own inadequacy when a structural explanation is sitting in plain view — and move agency outward. This is the direction almost nobody drills, and you will find it physically harder to say.

The move has a real lineage. Deming spent decades insisting that the great majority of defects belong to the system rather than to the worker who was standing there when the defect appeared, and Toyota built the andon cord on exactly that conviction: a line worker pulling it is reporting a system fault, not confessing one. That is Agency-outward, institutionalised as a piece of rope.

How to tell if it's any good: the mark of success is relief followed by specificity — they stop apologising and start describing the actual constraint, with names and dates. Two failure signatures, both common. If they get louder in defence of their own fault, you moved agency outward while they were still using self-blame as control, and the honest repair is to give it back: you're right, some of this was yours — which part. If they take it eagerly and become vague and comfortable, you have handed them an excuse rather than a frame, and you will see it because nothing changes by the following week. Agency-outward is correct when it restores accuracy, and corrosive when it merely relieves.