You cannot fix what you insist on explaining away.

Explanation and repair pull in opposite directions. As long as you are producing reasons for why something happened, your attention is on defending the account rather than changing the outcome, and a satisfying explanation can end the conversation before any fixing starts. The better you are with words, the more easily this happens.

When you notice yourself building a case, pause and ask what the actual repair would look like if no case were needed. Then do a piece of that instead. You can always explain later, but the explanation rarely feels necessary once the thing is fixed.