The Coherence Framework: Explaining Institutional Drift through Translation

Why institutions can succeed while drifting away from what they were built to do. Institutions often perform well while quietly diverging from their stated purpose. This is not a failure of execution, but a structural property of how decisions are made. The paper shows that institutions do not act on intent directly, but on representations—metrics, models, and criteria—produced as intent is translated into operational form. As these representations stabilise, they redefine what becomes visible and actionable, creating Translation Drift: a systematic divergence between intent and action that emerges even under strong governance and performance. The Coherence Framework makes this process traceable inside…