Accidental Adversaries

Two departments share the same objective.

Both want the company to perform better.

Both make decisions that appear perfectly rational from their own perspective.

And yet, six months later:

Sales blames Operations.

Operations blames Sales.

Controls increase. Trust deteriorates. Both teams become less effective.

The obvious explanation is usually:

“They don’t collaborate.”

Systems thinking asks a more interesting question:

Could the way the system is structured be causing them to work against each other?

Accidental Adversaries is a systems archetype that describes how two parties that initially benefit from cooperation can gradually take actions that undermine each other’s success.

The concept was identified by Jennifer Kemeny through her work on organizational alliances and became part of the systems-thinking tradition associated with Peter Senge and The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook.

Neither party necessarily behaves irrationally.

In fact, both may be acting rationally within their own objectives.

The structure typically looks like this:

Mutual cooperation
↓
Both parties succeed
↓
One party experiences a performance gap
↓
It takes corrective action
↓
The action unintentionally hurts the other party
↓
The other party responds defensively
↓
That response hurts the first party
↓
A reinforcing cycle of mutual damage develops

The relationship that once created value becomes a source of friction.

This is the key systems-thinking insight:

The system can create adversarial behavior even when neither party intends to be adversarial.

The crucial distinction is between:

“What decision improves my unit’s performance?”

and

“What decision improves the performance of the system we are both part of?”

This becomes particularly important when organizations operate within an ecosystem of customers, suppliers, partners and competitors. While Value Net & Coopetition framework showed that these relationships can simultaneously involve cooperation and competition; Accidental Adversaries examines what happens when those interdependencies generate unintended conflict.

When two teams, partners or companies seem to be working at cross-purposes, ask four questions.

What were both parties originally trying to achieve together?

What targets, incentives or pressures are shaping their decisions?

Map the unintended consequences.

Don’t stop at:

A → B

Trace the entire loop:

A’s action → B’s response → A’s response → system outcome

That is where the real problem often becomes visible.

One of the classic business cases behind the Accidental Adversaries archetype is the relationship between Procter & Gamble and Walmart.

The two companies had an obvious mutual interest:

Sell more consumer products efficiently and profitably.

Yet their local business pressures produced behaviors that gradually worked against each other.

When P&G’s profits came under pressure, it increased promotions to stimulate sales.

From P&G’s perspective:

More promotions → more sales → better manufacturer performance.

Walmart had a different response.

When products were heavily discounted, Walmart could stock up during the promotion and then sell the inventory later at regular prices, improving its margins.

But this created problems for P&G.

Walmart’s large promotional purchases produced:

• volatile order patterns

• additional production and distribution costs

• periods when Walmart didn’t need to reorder

• greater pressure on P&G’s profitability

P&G responded with more promotional activity.

Walmart responded by stocking up further.

The two companies were effectively optimizing their own economics in ways that damaged the economics of the overall relationship. This P&G–Walmart relationship is one of the classic examples used to illustrate the Accidental Adversaries archetype.

There is another systems concept hiding inside this story.

The Bullwhip Effect, explains how relatively small changes in consumer demand can become increasingly amplified as they move upstream through a supply chain. P&G’s experience with Walmart became an important real-world context for addressing this problem through greater information sharing and supply-chain integration.

The loop looked roughly like this:

P&G increases promotions

↓

Walmart stocks up

↓

Walmart improves its economics

↓

P&G experiences greater volume volatility and promotional costs

↓

P&G increases pressure to improve results

↓

More promotions

↓

Walmart stocks up further

↓

Repeat

What began as a mutually beneficial manufacturer–retailer relationship gradually generated mutually reinforcing defensive behavior.

When two capable teams repeatedly frustrate each other, don’t immediately look for someone to blame.

Ask:

“What is the system rewarding each of them for doing?”

Because sometimes the organization isn’t suffering from a lack of collaboration.

It’s creating incentives for collaboration to fail.