Look for
Learning
Are capabilities, habits, models, or strategies changing through experience?
One way alignment happens
Development, socialization, and plasticity
How does repeated alignment change the future behavior of the parts by changing the parts themselves?
Slow plasticity can alter skills, habits, expectations, values, identities, perceptions, and relationships so that later coordination begins from a different set of components.
Try seeing it
Today's interaction changes tomorrow's starting conditions.
Practice can make a difficult action automatic. Repeated feedback can change what differences become perceptually salient. Social interaction can establish roles and expectations that later guide behavior without explicit instruction.
Development therefore creates path dependence: what the system has been through changes what it can easily become next.
Look for
Internalization
Are externally maintained rules or expectations becoming part of how the component organizes its own behavior?
Look for
Changed possibility spaces
Does development make new actions, perceptions, relationships, or goals possible while making others harder to recover?
A characteristic failure
Successful steering can train the wrong system.
An intervention can produce excellent immediate behavior while cultivating dependence, narrowing exploration, changing motives, or teaching an unintended interpretation of the situation.
Developmental alignment therefore cannot be evaluated from a snapshot.
A useful perturbation