Most organizations that say they hate design systems actually hate a specific memory: the eighteen-month initiative that produced a beautiful library nobody used, governed by a committee nobody could find.
The middle way starts smaller. We build the thirty components that make up ninety percent of real pages, document them where editors already work, and ship them inside the product before we ship a single guideline page.
Governance is a pull request, not a meeting. Anyone can propose a component; a small rotating group reviews it weekly against accessibility, performance, and brand criteria that are written down and short enough to remember.
Adoption is measured honestly. We track which components appear on live pages, which are detached or overridden, and which requests keep coming back. A component nobody uses is deleted, which is the fastest way to earn trust from people who expected bureaucracy.
Twelve months later, the system is not a project anymore. It is just how pages get made — which is the only definition of success that matters.