Drift produces no error message. Every team still delivers, every decision remains defensible within its own frame; the divergence shows only at the seams, where one unit’s “done” meets another’s. That is what makes it a hidden cost: by the time drift is visible in results, it has been built into hiring, budgets and products.
The named mechanisms matter because each drifts differently: words inflate until they mean less (“strategic”, “priority”), local interpretations sediment into local truths, each cascade level loses fidelity, too much novelty outruns the organization’s novelty budget, social distance removes correction — and AI-generated communication can multiply fluent, plausible, subtly different versions of the same message.
Where this comes from. This term is defined in the glossary of The Hidden Cost of Speed by Christoph Svoboda. About the book.
See it in your own answers. The Shared Reference Diagnostic — ten scenarios, about ten minutes, your own report, free.