A few years ago a contractor blew an important deadline for us. Formally it was clear: he promised, he didn't deliver, it was his fault. I was already drafting the email in my head, polite but firm. Then I asked myself a different question, and never sent it.
The question was: how was I the cause of this?
The answer took five minutes. I never asked for an interim result. I picked him because he was the cheapest, though I could see he didn't have the people. I noticed warning signs twice and said nothing because I didn't want to spoil the relationship. He missed the deadline, but we built the road to that miss together.
Since then I have a rule: any project longer than two weeks gets a checkpoint in the middle. I haven't repeated that mistake.
The question
In full it goes: how did I, through my action or inaction, allow this to happen?
Every word matters. "How", not "whether". Ask "am I to blame?" and the answer is nearly always "no", and the conversation ends. "How" assumes I had some share in the event and asks me to find it. "Allow", not "do". I'm not claiming I did it all. I'm asking where I had a lever and didn't pull it.
Its power is speed. While I'm looking for someone to blame, I'm waiting for someone else to change. Once I find my share, I can change it today: learn something, adopt a firm rule, or simply remember it so it doesn't happen again.
Why it works even when someone else did it
By plain logic I am not responsible for other people's actions. If a driver runs a red light and hits my car, the driver is at fault. A court, an insurer and common sense will agree.
But the question isn't about legal liability. It's about what I can control. I don't control other people's behaviour. I do control mine. So even with the driver there's something to find: I was driving tired, I didn't glance sideways on the green, I always leave at the last second and rush. Maybe none of it would have changed the outcome. But each is something I can change, so next time my odds are better.
In relationships it's even clearer. A colleague let me down because I never explained what mattered to me. A child lied because last time I shouted at the truth. A partner broke an agreement because there was no agreement, only my assumption that we had one. Someone else did it. But I helped create the conditions.
Inaction is also an action
I want to say something separately about the most convenient excuse: "I didn't do anything." We say it as if it proves innocence. Very often it is the answer to the question.
I did nothing when I saw the project slipping. I did nothing when one person on the team kept putting another down in meetings. I did nothing when an old friend went quiet and I assumed he'd call. I did nothing when something in my city or country was going wrong, because "nothing depends on me".
Inaction is invisible. It leaves no trace, you can't photograph it, and people are rarely blamed for it. That's exactly why it's dangerous. Doing nothing when you see and can act is a choice. Most often it rests on indifference: it was awkward, uninteresting, not my business. Indifference is barely noticeable at first, but its consequences become very real over time.
Christian tradition has a term for this: the sin of omission. The apostle James puts it bluntly: "Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin" (James 4:17). It's not about evil a person did, but about good they knew and didn't do. The Catholic Confiteor speaks of sins "in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do". Omission stands right next to deeds.
There's also the famous line usually attributed to Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." To be honest, it doesn't appear in Burke's writings and the attribution is doubtful. Burke wrote something close in 1770: when bad men combine, the good must associate, or they will fall one by one. The nearest wording comes from John Stuart Mill in an 1867 address: bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing. Whoever said it first, it's true.
So when I ask "how was I the cause of this", I check inaction separately. What did I see and keep quiet about? What did I put off? Where did I decide it wasn't my business? The honest answer here is usually more uncomfortable than any mistake in action, and more useful.
Parallels: the question is much older than me
I haven't invented anything. People have asked themselves this for thousands of years, in different words.
The beam in your own eye
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ... Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye" (Matthew 7:3–5). It doesn't forbid seeing other people's faults. It sets an order: yours first, then theirs. And only then do you "see clearly".
Examination of conscience, confession, the Examen
The examination of conscience before confession is essentially this question asked systematically. Ignatius of Loyola, in the Spiritual Exercises (1548), described the daily Examen: give thanks, ask for light, review the day hour by hour, see where I drifted from the good, and resolve what to change tomorrow. He recommended it twice a day, at midday and in the evening. Fifteen minutes, no drama, every day.
Teshuvah and cheshbon hanefesh
Judaism has teshuvah, return. Maimonides, in the Laws of Repentance (2:2), describes it: a person abandons the sin, removes it from their thoughts, regrets what they did, and resolves firmly never to do it again. Not just regret, but a decision about the future. Next to it stands cheshbon hanefesh, the "accounting of the soul", a regular honest reckoning of one's deeds. In 1808 Rabbi Menachem Mendel Lefin published a book by that name, proposing a daily record of how you kept chosen virtues.
Buddhism: I am the owner of my actions
Buddhist texts include a line meant for daily reflection: "I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions" (Anguttara Nikaya 5.57). And the Dhammapada (165): "By oneself is evil done; by oneself is one defiled... Purity and impurity depend on oneself." Karma here is not a punishment from outside but the result of one's own choices, which is why it leaves room for change.
The Stoics
Epictetus, Enchiridion 5: "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the opinions about things." Later in the same chapter: the uninstructed blame others for their misfortunes, the one who has begun to learn blames himself, and the one whose learning is complete blames neither others nor himself. That's close to my heart. The aim is not to move blame from others to myself, but to leave the logic of blame altogether.
Seneca, in On Anger (III.36), says that every evening, when the lamp was out and his wife had fallen silent, he examined his whole day, went over what he had done and said, and hid nothing from himself. He took the habit from the philosopher Sextius, who asked himself before sleep: what bad habit have I cured today? What fault have I resisted? In what respect am I better?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47: if you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Psychology and management
In 1966 the psychologist Julian Rotter described locus of control. People with an internal locus believe the outcomes of their lives depend mostly on their own actions; those with an external one put them down to fate, circumstance, other people. Our question is a practical way to move your locus inward, one event at a time.
Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL commander, in Extreme Ownership (2015, with Leif Babin), puts it harshly: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. A leader owns everything in their world, and there's no one to pass it to.
And since the 1970s the US Army has run the after-action review. Four questions: what was supposed to happen? what actually happened? why is there a difference? what will we do differently? Crucially, it is blameless. Its purpose is learning, not punishment.
How to practise it
This is how I do it. It takes five to fifteen minutes.
- The event. Write down in one or two sentences what happened. Facts, no judgements. "The report wasn't submitted on Friday", not "my colleague let everyone down again".
- The question. Ask yourself directly: how did I, through action or inaction, allow this to happen? And separately: what did I see and not do?
- The answer. Write everything that comes to mind, even small things. The first two answers are usually defensive; the real one comes third or fourth.
- The rule. Choose one concrete rule that closes the gap. Not "be more careful", but "check the interim result halfway through".
- A memory note. Keep the event, the answer and the rule somewhere you return to: a journal, notes, a list of rules. Review it once a month. In a year you'll have your own rulebook, written by experience.
What it isn't
It isn't self-blame. Guilt looks back and asks "how bad am I". This question looks forward and asks "what can I change". Guilt drains energy; this question gives it back.
It isn't an excuse for the other person. If someone acted badly, their responsibility doesn't disappear. I can find my share and still tell them honestly what they did wrong. One doesn't cancel the other.
It isn't about taking on everything. Sometimes the honest answer is "there was nothing I could do". That happens, but far less often than we think.
And it isn't punishment. I think of it as a coaching question: a kind conversation partner who doesn't judge, but helps you see where your power is.
Instead of a conclusion
I sincerely wish you would try this practice in your own life. Not as a duty or a way to beat yourself up, but as a quiet daily question that gradually makes you stronger and freer. May it help you understand yourself and the world around you a little better each time.
If you have a story of when a question like this changed something, or your own way of doing such a review, please share it. I'm genuinely interested.