One of my favorite lessons to teach design system teams comes from former Intel CEO Andy Grove in his book High Output Management.

Grove quipped:

Let chaos reign. Then rein in chaos.

This is the process of working on design systems.

It’s simple, but the success is in embracing the entire thought.

Many design system teams think their job is more to rein in chaos than to let chaos reign. It’s not. It’s both, equally.

Letting chaos reign has a lot of value. In the chaos is where you can spot the patterns, the system trying to emerge on its own. Yes, 10 designers or 10 teams all created their own version of a card component. Yes, none of them are exactly identical. But most of them have rounded edges, and most of those rounded edges have an 8px radius. This is a system that wants to emerge, a commonality waiting for someone to call it official. And you were only able to spot it because of the chaos around it.

Many design system teams are so uncomfortable with the chaos that they not only try to rein it in but they try to prevent it from happening in the first place.

That is a mistake.

That’s a pre-optimization, an overestimation, an overcorrection.

You can try to constrict your designers and engineers into always and only using components from the design system so they don’t propagate more chaos. But this almost never works.

Instead, let them cook a delicious meal for everyone, and then clean up afterwards.