A dissociation

Agreement ≠ concordance

Compatible action does not require shared preferences, values, or goals.

It is easy to treat successful coordination as evidence that the participants must agree about what they want. Markets provide a simple counterexample.

What differs

Agreement

The parties evaluate, believe, intend, or prefer sufficiently similar things.

≠

What can still exist

Concordance

Their actions form compatible trajectories even though their preferences remain different or opposed.

A simple case

The buyer and seller want opposite things.

The buyer would prefer to pay less. The seller would prefer to receive more. A successful transaction does not eliminate this disagreement.

What changes is the relationship among their plans. At an acceptable price, the buyer's plan to obtain the good and the seller's plan to obtain the money can both proceed.

What this lets us infer

Coordination is not evidence of consensus.

When behavior fits together, ask what actually made it fit. Shared values are one possibility. Rules, prices, roles, constraints, and other forms of coupling are others.

Try this elsewhere

Find a coordinated system whose parts would still disagree if you asked them what outcome they preferred.