Why Design Systems Drift: It's Not a Design Failure, It's a Governance Failure

Most design systems don't collapse all at once — they drift. A team makes a reasonable-seeming exception. An engineer hardcodes a value instead of checking the reference table. A contracting engineer, not knowing a component already exists, builds their own version from scratch. None of these decisions look significant on their own, and none of them feel consequential in the moment. But they...