Why do modern institutions increasingly optimize for compliance while losing relation to their foundational purpose? Institutions rarely collapse from a failure of intent; they drift because the infrastructures built to preserve intent gradually decouple from operational reality. The Reflective Institution develops the concept of Translation Drift: the structural process through which large-scale systems begin governing administrative representations rather than the complex realities they were created to coordinate. The paper examines how metrics, dashboards, targets, and digital evaluation architectures — the essential tools of large-scale coordination — can gradually become operationally authoritative in their own right. As this occurs, performance systems risk becoming increasingly self-referential: institutions begin optimizing the representation of coherence while losing visibility into the underlying conditions those systems were originally designed to preserve. About the Coherence ProgrammeThe Coherence Programme studies why institutions drift despite appearing aligned. It shows that decisions are made not on intent itself, but on how intent is translated into criteria, metrics, and allocation rules. Using the Operating Spine, the programme traces how purpose becomes action across governance layers, making drift and coherence directly observable within decision systems. The research applies to public institutions, capital allocation, and AI-mediated environments, where the durability of decision rules determines long-term institutional reliability.Programme citation: Mertens, R. E. U. (2026). The Coherence Programme: A Conceptual Overview and Entry Point to the Research Programme.Resources: Coherence Programme OSF repository and https://thecoherenceprogramme.orgVersion 1.00: First public release.Version 1.01: Added Zenodo Concept DOI
Robin Edgard Ulrik Mertens (Fri,) studied this question.