Short excerpt (spoken by SPEAKER A) from Dan Mall’s YouTube talk "Recognizing design system alignment" (2023-01-09). The speaker advises teams to notice and canonize existing alignment—illustrated by different teams using the same green color under different names ("green", "Apple", "Shamrock")—rather than attempting to create alignment from scratch.
Recognize what is already common when you get people to work together, even just doing an audit and going like, well, we're all using the same green. We just call it different things. They call it green, they call it Apple, they call it Shamrock, but it's all the same green. And that alignment needs to be facilitated. Then it doesn't need to be created. And you think you have to create it from scratch. It's hard. But if you can recognize that there's already alignment there, just that needs to be canonized, maybe that's an easier step for lots of teams.
