Over time, this became easier to see.
When people made decisions and clearly said, "This is our choice," things changed. The results were not always good. Sometimes they failed. Sometimes they caused problems no one expected.
But they did not hide from it.
They did not blame fate, or pressure, or "how things have always been." They looked at what happened and said, "We decided this. Now we deal with it."
That made a difference.
Systems that owned their choices learned faster. They adjusted without pretending they had been perfect. They corrected mistakes without rewriting history. They kept records of what went wrong and why.
Ownership created memory.
And memory prevented repetition.
In systems that avoided ownership, the pattern was different. When something worked, they claimed it as proof of their brilliance. When something failed, they called it an exception. Or bad luck. Or someone else's fault.
Those systems looked stable for a while.
But inside, they were fragile.
