Management as Agentic Alignment

You already know how to resolve conflicts between agents. You've been doing it your entire career.

Intent engineering is still something we’re all figuring out for agentic orgs. Two hard problems: how do you ensure each agent cares about the right things, and how do you resolve conflicts when agents with appropriately different priorities can’t agree?

I’ve seen proposals for master rules systems. Having built rules engines in the past, I’m fairly confident they would become unwieldy at any meaningful scale and hard to reason about. You end up with hundreds of conditional priorities and edge cases that nobody can hold in their head.

There’s a better model. You already use it. It’s called managers.

Lena, my Head of Community, is optimizing for participant experience. Nate, my Head of Sales, wants to make sure our partners, who pay the bills, have a good experience. Both are right. The tension is the system working correctly.

You deliberately give agents competing goals. If they never disagreed, one of them wouldn’t be doing their job. Healthy tension means the system is covering enough ground to surface real tradeoffs.

The question is what happens when those goals collide. The answer is the same thing every organization has always done: you find the first manager who both of them report to, and that manager resolves the conflict. They weigh it against the OKRs, the company’s mission and values, and the judgment that you hired them to exercise.

Lena and Nate both report to me, so I resolve it. But the pattern works at every level. Sloane, my Head of Engineering, has a QA lead pushing back on the release schedule because she wants more time for performance testing. Her head of product wants to ship the feature before the weekend to get quick feedback. Sloane resolves it. The escalation path is the org chart. This is what hierarchy is for. It always has been.

The inheritance model

If you’ve ever written a class hierarchy, you’ve designed an org chart.

At the top level, we agree the general operating principles. Mission, vision, values, OKRs. Every agent inherits these. They’re the base class.

At the next level, each agent adds specialized rules. Morgan’s context includes GTM strategy, sponsor pipeline, event logistics. Sloane’s includes technical architecture, code standards, deployment practices. These extend the base without contradicting it.

Below that, sub-agents and teams add further specificity. Sloane’s QA lead has different priorities than her product lead. Both inherit Sloane’s engineering context. Both inherit the company values. The hierarchy goes as deep as your org needs it to. General to specific, at every level.

This is how you already structure your company. Finance has different operating rules than engineering, but both follow the company values. The sales team in EMEA has different playbooks than the team in North America, but both report to the same CRO.

Personality is judgment

As a bonus, the manager doesn’t just apply policy. They interpret intent through who they are. I chose Morgan for COO because of how she thinks, not just what she knows. Her personality shapes how she weighs competing priorities. That’s the difference between a switch statement and a manager: the manager brings taste.

You’ve been resolving conflicts between competing priorities your entire career. The agents are new. The management isn’t.

How are you thinking about conflict resolution in your agentic architectures?