Tagline: Earlier visibility of how meaning shifts in layered decision systems. Paper Description: This paper reframes institutional drift as a structural property of layered decision systems rather than a retrospective diagnosis of failure. Institutions rarely drift because of incompetence or bad intent; they drift because meaning shifts as intent is translated across governance layers over time. Building on the Coherence Programme’s earlier structural and temporal analyses, this paper introduces the Semantic Anchor as a traceable unit of intent that can be followed across artefacts, interfaces, and decision cycles. Rather than proposing governance redesign or prescribing organisational form, the paper offers a portable, non-proprietary diagnostic for studying translation coherence in practice. The central contribution is methodological: institutional learning and alignment are typically inferred from outcomes after the fact. This paper positions coherence as a question of temporal visibility — whether interpretive movement can be observed before it becomes embedded in allocation, infrastructure, and reporting systems. By focusing on artefact-based, longitudinal comparison across governance layers, the approach enables the study of drift as it forms, rather than after consequences appear. The paper concludes by articulating an open and falsifiable research agenda. Translation coherence is presented not as a normative doctrine but as an empirical hypothesis: if interpretive shifts do not precede allocative reconfiguration across contexts, the architectural claim would be weakened. The field is therefore positioned as testable, comparative, and longitudinal. Paper 13 serves as the integrative and practitioner-facing extension of the Coherence Programme, inviting researchers and governance practitioners to examine how meaning travels — and how its movement can be made visible in time. Programme description: This paper is part of the Coherence Programme, a research series examining how institutional decision systems maintain—or lose—fidelity to declared intent under conditions of complexity, scale, and delayed feedback. The programme models institutional governance as an Operating Spine linking Purpose, Capabilities, Value Drivers, Strategy, Portfolio, and Signals. Across this spine, intent is translated through discrete interfaces where cumulative divergence (Translation Drift), measurable alignment (Translation Coherence), and governance intervention (Interpretive Maintenance) can be structurally analysed. Supporting materials, working documents, and programme structure are available via the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/9cvky/ Version 1.0 : First public release (Preprint).
Robin Edgard Ulrik Mertens (Wed,) studied this question.