Look downward
Are the parts competent?
What can the individual components sense, regulate, pursue, or solve?
A lens
Compositional alignment
When do aligned or competent parts form an aligned larger system?
Alignment does not automatically survive composition. A collection of components can each behave reasonably in isolation while their interaction produces a very different higher-scale outcome.
Try seeing it
Change the scale of the question.
Suppose every component is behaving successfully according to its own local criteria. That still tells us surprisingly little about what the collection will do.
Sometimes local competencies become organized into a new competent whole, as cells do in an organism. Sometimes locally sensible behavior produces an unwanted collective result.
Look upward
What does the whole do?
Do the interactions among competent parts create a coherent higher-scale outcome?
Look between
What compiles the scales?
Which signals, constraints, dependencies, roles, or boundaries make local activity answerable to larger conditions?
A question to carry elsewhere