An outcome can look coordinated without anyone having organised it. If a lot of people face the same incentives, they can make similar decisions independently. The result may be harmful, but finding someone who planned it isn't always the way to understand it.
That doesn't mean coordination is imaginary. Cartels exist. Lobbyists seek rules that benefit their clients. People organise campaigns and sometimes conceal what they are doing. Where there is evidence of that, we should examine it.
The mistake is to treat the pattern itself as sufficient evidence of a plan.
What does the system reward?
A business may adopt a fashionable position because it expects customers or employees to approve. Other businesses can make the same calculation without receiving an instruction from anyone. If the costs change, several may reconsider at once.
That doesn't prove nobody involved believed what they said. Motives can be mixed. It gives us a testable explanation to investigate before assuming a central organiser.
Hayek's account of dispersed knowledge and Schelling's models of segregation both concern outcomes that emerge from individual decisions. They don't establish that every collective pattern is unintended. They show why intention can't simply be read from the result.
An outcome doesn't establish a motive
This mistake appears across politics. A disparity may be evidence of unfair treatment, but the disparity alone doesn't tell us exactly how it arose. A sudden agreement among institutions may be suspicious without proving that they secretly conspired.
Ask what decisions produced the outcome, what information people had and what they stood to gain or lose. Look for actual evidence of coordination where coordination is alleged. Several explanations may operate together.
That approach can feel less satisfying than identifying a villain. It can also suggest a remedy. If a rule repeatedly rewards behaviour we dislike, replacing one person may leave the behaviour unchanged. Altering the rule may matter much more.
There are people who deserve blame. We are more likely to identify them accurately, and fix the problem, if we first understand how the problem was produced.