Reference Drift in Organizations: Shared Reference as a Maintained State, and What Speed Does to It
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Organizational transformations routinely fail despite documented agreement. This paper proposes an explanation located not in commitment or communication skill but in the erosion of shared reference: the sufficiently common frame through which people across an organization interpret priorities, reality, meaning, trade-offs, and next sensible actions. The paper makes three claims. First, shared reference is best understood as a maintained operating state rather than an asset: it decays without recurring maintenance, and organizational acceleration removes precisely the occasions on which that maintenance used to occur as a by-product of slower work. Second, the resulting erosion — reference drift — proceeds through six nameable mechanisms: semantic inflation, interpretive sedimentation, cascade attenuation, novelty overload, social disconnection, and AI-amplified divergence. Third, because people systematically overestimate how well their frame is shared, assessment cannot rely on agreement items; it must compare revealed classification behavior with espoused aspiration. The paper positions these claims against common ground theory, sensemaking, strategic consensus research, and boundary objects; presents the framework at concept level; illustrates it with four documented reference failures; and closes with a research agenda that names the open validation questions.
Author: Svoboda, Christoph
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203899271
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