Agency diffusion
The sentence describes harm, but nobody did it.
When a message says 'mistakes were made' or 'actions were taken' or 'it was determined,' the actor disappears. The harm is described but no one is responsible. The passive voice isn't just a style choice — it's a structural erasure of accountability.
Truth-adjacency
Truth-adjacent — the pattern's significance depends on whether the claim is true
Department
Office of Total Compliance (OTC)
Engine Signals
The engine detects these phrases and patterns:
mistakes were madeactions were takenit was determinedit has been decidedwas/were + past participlepolicy/protocol was not followed How to recognize it
The verb has no subject. “Mistakes were made” — by whom? The sentence describes an event but removes the person who caused it. If you can rewrite the sentence in active voice and the actor’s identity changes the meaning, the passive was doing political work.
What to ask
- Who specifically made the decision or caused the outcome described in passive terms?
- What actor disappears when the sentence is rewritten in active voice?
What it looks like when you’re wrong about it
You call out “agency diffusion” but the actor is genuinely unknown. “The window was broken sometime last night” is not diffusion — it’s an honest account of limited knowledge. The pattern requires the actor to be known and deliberately obscured.
Misuse Guardrails
How this pattern gets misused
Someone calls any passive voice 'agency diffusion' — including legitimate uses where the actor is unknown or irrelevant. The vocabulary becomes a tool for demanding that every sentence name a specific person, which is not always possible or honest.
What it looks like when you're wrong about it
Passive voice is not inherently agency diffusion. It's diffusion when the actor is known and is being obscured. 'The building was built in 1980' is not agency diffusion; 'mistakes were made' by a known decision-maker is.
Related Patterns
The name is designed to spread. The hook is designed to stick. If you recognized something, share the name.