RECAUSALIZE

Replace 'these things go together' or 'this person is to blame' with a testable mechanism of what would change what.

Every rough patch with your teenager ends the same way: "the phone is the problem." Grades dip, moods darken, the phone gets blamed. But blame is not a mechanism. You've noticed the phone and the moods travel together; you haven't established what would change what, and confiscation experiments keep failing in ways the blame story can't explain.

RECAUSALIZE means replacing "these things go together" or "this person is at fault" with a testable mechanism. The cue: your map says what co-occurs but not what would change what. List rival mechanisms honestly: maybe the phone displaces sleep, maybe social stress drives both the scrolling and the moods, maybe schoolwork anxiety comes first. For each, identify where you could intervene and what each rival predicts differently. Then prefer the simplest mechanism that survives the evidence and yields a discriminating test, like moving the phone out of the bedroom for two weeks while changing nothing else: the sleep mechanism predicts improvement, the social-stress mechanism predicts none. It works when your map generates a test where the rivals disagree. Preserve your uncertainty throughout; the arrows in your diagram are hypotheses, not proof, and confident causal storytelling is the exact failure this move exists to prevent.