Prologue – The Green Dashboard Trap: How Institutions Lose Sight of Their Intent

Programme Context This preprint forms part of the research programme The Coherence Problem: How Institutions Learn, Drift, and Realign, which studies institutional decision systems as interpretive learning systems operating under conditions of complexity, scale, and delayed feedback. Across the programme, the papers examine how organisations determine what matters, how meaning becomes encoded in governance artefacts, how translation drift arises as intent moves across governance layers, and how institutions can observe, maintain, and deliberately realign interpretive coherence over time. Description (Part −1) This essay introduces the central phenomenon of the research programme: how strategic intent becomes simplified as it travels through organisational layers, producing predictable—yet often invisible—loss of fidelity. Through a narrative illustration, it shows how well-governed institutions can drift away from their own intentions one translation at a time. The essay introduces the programme’s core mechanism—translation drift—and explains why coherence must be treated as an empirically observable property of decision systems. It serves as a conceptual gateway to Parts 0–4, which formalise the architecture, mechanism, observability, and design implications of institutional decision-system coherence. Short description: A short essay illustrating why well-governed institutions gradually drift from their own intentions—and how this process can be studied systematically. Version Version 1.00: First public release of the programme pre-fix essay. This manuscript provides a narrative introduction to the research programme and does not present empirical datasets or formal measurement instruments. These are developed in the subsequent programme papers. Version 1.01: Title updated from Part −1 to Prologue to align naming conventions across the programme. No changes to content, arguments, or structure.