Encourage healthy friction
Healthy friction among agents is one of the key reasons for higher resilience in a CAS. While at the agent level the objectives might appear contrary, at the system level it is important to align the agent-level objectives to the broader objective of the enterprise. Marketing may want to increase spend on advertising, but finance may be keen to control costs. Both are valid objectives at the respective agent levels and may appear contrary, but a balance needs to be achieved between them to meet the business' objective of increasing sales. It may be possible that the agents will work out a better way to increase sales with minimal additional spend on advertising. The key is that the agents have autonomy to resolve the conflict in a manner that best meets the broader objectives and they are enabled to do this with integrative thinking skills.
According to Roger Martin, a former dean at Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada:
"Integrative thinkers aren't satisfied with simply making an unpleasant trade-off. Instead, they master the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, they generate a creative solution of the tensions in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models but is superior to each." [xvii]
Healthy friction and an integrative thinking approach will enable employees to come up with out-of-the-box solutions to deal effectively with the unique challenges presented by the dynamic environment. The creative solutions that emerge, through employee interaction, can provide a significant boost to agility.