When local markets go around your central process, it's tempting to see it as a discipline problem. It's usually a signal that the process is too slow.
When a local market goes around the central process, the usual reaction is frustration. They should have waited. They should have followed the rules.
But here's another way to see it. Every workaround is a market telling you the process didn't work for them.
Local teams don't brief their own agency or tweak an asset themselves because they enjoy breaking rules. They do it because they have a launch date that won't move and an approval that hasn't come back.
Faced with a choice between waiting and missing their moment, or acting and hoping nobody minds, most people will act. That's not disloyalty. It's people trying to do their job.
Each workaround feels small. Together, they quietly undo the reason you centralised in the first place.
Work made outside the system is more likely to be off-brand or out of date. The centre loses sight of what's actually going out. And the more often it happens, the more normal it becomes. A model built for control ends up with less of it.
The pressure on local markets looks different depending on the release. With theatrical, each country often has its own date, so local teams are working to their own deadlines and feel every delay at the centre directly. With streaming, everything launches on the same day worldwide, so any local changes have to happen in parallel, not in a line behind everyone else.
Either way, a single queue struggles to serve them all.
The most useful thing you can do with a workaround is learn from it.
You can try to stop workarounds with stricter rules. In our experience, that just moves them somewhere harder to see. The better goal is a system that's quicker to use than to avoid. When that happens, the workarounds stop on their own.
"When we look at how work really moves in a global team, the workarounds are often the most honest part of the picture. They show you exactly where people felt stuck. If you design around those points instead of against them, control goes up, not down."