Tagline: Studying how institutional decision systems maintain — or lose — fidelity to declared intent. Entry paper description: This document provides the conceptual overview and entry point to the Coherence Programme, a research agenda examining how institutional decision systems maintain—or gradually lose—fidelity to declared intent over time. The paper introduces the programme’s unit of analysis, conceptual scope, and cumulative structure, situating the individual papers within a unified analytical framework. Programme Description: The Coherence Programme examines how institutional decision systems maintain—or lose—fidelity to declared intent under conditions of complexity, scale, optimization pressure, and delayed feedback. The programme models governance as a translation architecture. Using the Operating Spine, the programme traces how purpose moves through Capabilities, Value Drivers, Strategy, Portfolio, and Signals, becoming progressively encoded into measurable criteria and allocative rules. At the interfaces between these layers, translation drift, coherence, and corrective intervention can be analyzed structurally. Across its papers, the programme establishes translation traceability as a foundational concern of modern governance. The research applies to public institutions, capital allocation systems, portfolio governance, and AI-mediated decision environments—where the durability of decision rules determines institutional reliability over time. Supporting materials, working documents, and programme structure are available via the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/9cvky/ Version 1.00: This is the first public release of the programme entry point and conceptual overview.
Robin Edgard Ulrik Mertens (Mon,) studied this question.