Detecting Strategic Drift Before Outcome Failure: A Longitudinal Governance Diagnostic

Tagline: A governance lens for detecting strategic drift before outcomes reveal it. Paper description: This paper demonstrates that strategic drift—the incremental decoupling of declared intent from operational practice—is structurally observable before outcome failure. Drawing on a longitudinal composite analysis of governance artefacts across a 24-month decision cycle, the study shows how divergence accumulates sequentially across interpretive, artefactual, and resource layers. Rather than inferring misalignment from performance collapse, the analysis traces how intent shifts in motion across translation interfaces within institutional decision systems. The paper contributes a methodological demonstration of longitudinal traceability and establishes interpretive signals as early-warning indicators of coherence loss prior to allocative stabilisation. 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).