Part 1 – How Decision Systems Learn What Matters: A Constrained Architecture for Purpose-Aligned Governance

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. The programme integrates four complementary components:(1) architecture — the formal structure of decision-system learning,(2) mechanism — translation drift as a structural source of misalignment,(3) measurement — methods for observing translation coherence, and(4) design — governance as interpretive maintenance in AI-mediated environments. Together, the papers examine how organisations determine what matters, how meaning becomes…