Someone asks why you said yes when you meant no. You have an answer ready. You were tired, she is family, it was easier. All of it is true. You have given the same answer before, and it has not changed what you do the next time. I've talked about all of it plenty. Going over the same thing again isn't going to shift it.
A why question gets a reason, and a reason is not the same thing as what happened.
01
What a why question gets
Asked why, a person tends to reach for something reasonable. The answer is usually a summary, made afterward, in calm conditions. It may be right. It is also the part you already had.
Why can also sound like an accusation. Being asked why you did that is close to being told you had no good reason. A person who hears it that way may start defending the moment and stop describing it.
02
What gets asked instead
The questions are about what happened, in order.
What set it off? What did you take it to mean, in the first second? What were you protecting? What did you do?
These may be harder to answer from habit, since they ask for one particular Tuesday and not for a view of yourself.
Meaning is still asked about. The second question is about meaning. It asks what the moment meant to you then, which is different from asking you to account for yourself now.
Subtraction does come to a why of a different kind. It follows the moment down: what it meant, and why it meant that. By then there is a scene to answer from.
03
One example
You snapped at a colleague who corrected a figure on your slide.
Asked why, you might say you were under pressure that week. That is true, and it ends the inquiry.
Asked what you took the correction to mean, there may be more. Two candidates, among others, are Right, where the fear is that if you are wrong about this, what else are you wrong about, and Ahead, where the fear is that if you stop managing, something goes wrong again.
A small correction in a meeting. Is the sting about being wrong, or about not having seen it coming? Being wrong is the Right answer. Not having seen it coming is the Ahead answer.
And it may have meant nothing of the kind. A bad week is sometimes the whole explanation.
04
What this is not
It is not a ban on reasons. A reason is one more explanation, and it gets checked against the scenes like any other.
Subtraction is the checking. Each explanation is held up against what happened, and the ones that don't account for it are removed. If none of them does, there is not enough to tell yet.
Why the starting point is one recent moment is on Why We Start With the Scene, Not the Story.