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Tagline: How capable institutions drift without failure or misconduct. Paper Description: Strong governance does not guarantee sustained alignment. This paper identifies Translation Drift as the structural mechanism through which institutional intent gradually shifts as it moves across layered governance architectures. In complex institutional decision systems, interpretation evolves across translation interfaces under conditions of delayed feedback and distributed authority. Over time, these small shifts accumulate, producing divergence from declared purpose even in well-governed organisations. Drift is therefore reframed not as leadership failure but as an emergent property of decision architectures. Programme Description: The Coherence Programme examines how institutional decision systems maintain—or lose—fidelity to declared intent under conditions of complexity, scale, optimization pressure, and delayed feedback. The programme models governance as a translation architecture. Using the Operating Spine, it traces how purpose moves through Capabilities, Value Drivers, Strategy, Portfolio, and Signals, becoming progressively encoded into measurable criteria and allocative rules. At the interfaces between these layers, translation drift, coherence, and corrective intervention can be analyzed structurally. Across its papers, the programme establishes translation traceability as a foundational concern of modern governance. The research applies to public institutions, capital allocation systems, portfolio governance, and AI-mediated decision environments—where the durability of decision rules shapes institutional reliability over time. Programme citation: When referencing the research programme as a whole, please cite the entry paper: Mertens, R. E. U. (2026). The Coherence Programme: A Conceptual Overview and Entry Point to the Research Programme. This paper serves as the conceptual overview and entry point to the programme.Supporting materials and programme documentation are available via the Coherence Programme OSF repository. Programme website: https://thecoherenceprogramme.org Version 1.01 (Feb 2026)Minor theoretical positioning refinements, boundary clarification, formalisation schematic, and language precision updates. No change to core argument. This version supersedes V1.0 and introduces no change to the core theoretical claim.Version 1.02 update: This version adds an explicit cross-reference to the AI-Augmented Impact Frames architectural paper to clarify the conceptual positioning of this article within the broader research programme. No arguments, definitions, figures, or claims have been changed. The revision improves scholarly traceability and programme coherence only.Version 2.00: This release consolidates the manuscript within the full research programme structure. Cross-paper terminology has been harmonised, the unit-of-analysis statement has been standardised across the series, and reference architecture has been aligned. No changes have been made to the formal decision-learning architecture, measurement logic, boundary conditions, or theoretical claims.Version 2.01: consolidates the manuscript within the full research programme structure. Cross-paper terminology has been harmonised, titles and references have been aligned with the programme statement, and internal cross-references have been updated. No changes have been made to the formal decision-learning architecture, measurement logic, boundary conditions, or theoretical claims. Empirical studies, measurement instruments, and field applications are in preparation and will be released in subsequent linked records.Version 2.02: Programme Consolidation Update: This version consolidates the manuscript within the unified Coherence Programme structure.Titles, terminology, and internal cross-references have been harmonised across the series to stabilise the programme’s core constructs: Translation Drift (mechanism) Translation Coherence (metric) Interpretive Maintenance (governance function) Distributed Coherence (theoretical integration) No changes have been made to the formal architecture, boundary conditions, methodological logic, or theoretical claims.The update improves cross-paper traceability, indexing consistency, and conceptual coherence across the programme.Version 2.03: Terminology harmonisation and minor structural refinements to improve consistency across the Coherence Programme. No changes to the theoretical framework, constructs, or research design.
Robin Edgard Ulrik Mertens (Tue,) studied this question.