When things go wrong, it's easy to feel that circumstances are happening to us. That makes us the victim. But we can just as easily find ourselves cast as the hero — solving problems that aren't ours to solve — or the villain, turning the blame on ourselves.

The drama triangle is a pattern most of us cycle through without noticing. Victim, villain, hero. The roles shift, but the dynamic stays the same — and it keeps us from seeing the situation clearly enough to do anything useful about it.

In this Leader Lab, we practice recognizing when we're in it. Not to judge ourselves for being there, but to see it — because you can't step out of a pattern you can't detect.

The first move is always the same: look at the context, not just the content. The story we're telling about what happened is rarely the whole story.