The Translation Trap: A Governance System for Strategic Drift and Institutional Alignment

A green dashboard does not mean you are funding the right thingsOrganizations can be high-performing and systematically wrong. When strategic intent is translated into metrics, the metric often replaces the intent. From that point on, the decision system stops optimizing for its purpose and starts optimizing for its representation. This is the Translation Trap. Once money moves, this drift becomes structural. Resources build capabilities. Capabilities reinforce incentives. The organization doesn't just drift; it "learns" to succeed on a definition of success it never intended. This paper introduces a practical diagnostic and governance method to make this visible at the point of allocation. It can be applied…