The Green Dashboard Trap: Why Institutions Lose Sight of Their Own Intent

Tagline: Why well-governed institutions gradually drift from their own intentions. Ppaper Description: This essay introduces the central phenomenon of the programme: how strategic intent becomes simplified as it moves through layered governance systems. It shows how institutions can drift not because of incompetence, but through incremental translation across dashboards, criteria frameworks, and reporting structures. The essay names the phenomenon later formalised as Translation Drift and frames coherence as a structural property of decision systems rather than a matter of individual judgment. It serves as the narrative entry point to the programme’s architectural, mechanistic, and measurement papers. 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 1.00: This is the first public release of the programme statement. It defines the conceptual scope, core constructs, and structural framework of the research programme. Empirical studies, measurement instruments, and field applications are currently in preparation and will be released in subsequent linked records. Version 1.01: Minor update: programme structure and linked records updated to include Part 5 (Field Protocol), Epilogue, and Capstone. Version 1.03: Programme Consolidation Update: This version consolidates the manuscript within the unified Coherence Programme structure.Titles, terminology, and internal cross-references have been harmonised across the series to stabilise the programme’s core constructs: Translation Drift (mechanism) Translation Coherence (metric) Interpretive Maintenance (governance function) Distributed Coherence (theoretical integration) No changes have been made to the formal architecture, boundary conditions, methodological logic, or theoretical claims.The update improves cross-paper traceability, indexing consistency, and conceptual coherence across the programme.