The Coherence Advantage: Why Good Organizations Drift — and How It Can Be Studied

The minimal architecture that reveals where alignment breaks. Institutions must act in real time while learning under delayed feedback. This paper introduces the Operating Spine as the minimal causal architecture for locating where intent, decision criteria, and outcomes begin to diverge. Rather than treating drift as a retrospective outcome, it shows how misalignment can be identified structurally—inside the decision system itself. Drift becomes observable at the point where intent is translated into criteria, and where those criteria begin to decouple from outcomes. About the Coherence ProgrammeThe Coherence Programme studies why institutions drift despite appearing aligned. It shows that decisions are made…