Explore the Atlas
The same system can look very different depending on what kind of alignment you ask about.
These cases are not examples of one correct category. They are places to practice looking.
01
Buyers and sellers may disagree about almost everything, including which side of a transaction they prefer. Yet their plans can still fit together.
Try looking at:
concordance · institutional alignment · incentive alignment · transformational alignment
The players share a high-level objective, but successful play depends on them doing very different things at different times.
Try looking at:
goal alignment · functional alignment · complementarity · cooperative alignment
03
Employees do not need to share the same values or personal goals for the organization to coordinate their activity or redirect it when circumstances change.
Try looking at:
behavioral alignment · alignability · hierarchy · incentives · institutional alignment
Cells with local competencies become parts of a larger system capable of maintaining and repairing organism-scale outcomes. But local success can also become failure at the larger scale.
Try looking at:
compositional alignment · functional alignment · regeneration · scale
05
Strangers can coordinate their movements extremely reliably while knowing almost nothing about one another and sharing no meaningful joint project.
Try looking at:
concordance · constraints · rules · coordinated coincidence
Components can vary or compensate for one another while a task-relevant outcome remains stable.
Try looking at:
functional alignment · complementarity · coupling · scale
A scientific community does not work by eliminating disagreement. Criticism, competing hypotheses, and different information can be part of the system's epistemic competence.
Try looking at:
epistemic alignment · procedural alignment · generative alignment · productive disagreement
A stable-looking state can depend on continual sensing, correction, and recovery from disturbance.
Try looking at:
achievement · maintenance · correction · feedback
Training changes not only behavior but what the learner notices, predicts, and can do.
Try looking at:
development · perception · behavior · plasticity
10
Shared goals and goodwill can coexist with disagreement about obligation, autonomy, reciprocity, and who gets to decide what.
Try looking at:
relational · developmental · goals · relationship rules
The same skilled person can become more or less competent when tools, layout, cues, and possibilities change around them.
Try looking at:
ecological · perceptual · developmental · environmental scaffolding
A durable political system may preserve not fixed answers but ways of producing, contesting, and revising collective decisions.
Try looking at:
generative · institutional · transformational · contestation
A habit of thought
Instead of asking whether a system is aligned, try asking: aligned in what respect, between which parts, by what mechanism, at what scale, and over what timespan?