The Coherence Advantage: Why Good Organizations Drift — and How It Can Be Studied

This paper develops an analytical framework for studying how high-performing organizations drift over time despite maintaining strong governance and stable performance indicators. It examines how shifts in interpretation accumulate across decision-making processes, gradually altering how strategic intent is operationalized in practice. The paper formalizes the mechanisms through which drift emerges, focusing on how decision criteria, evaluation models, and performance metrics reshape meaning within institutional systems. It proposes a set of conceptual and methodological tools for observing these dynamics, including longitudinal analysis of decision processes and evaluation structures. By linking interpretive change to observable features of governance systems, the paper provides a practical approach for studying alignment and drift in real-world organizational settings. It contributes a research-oriented extension of the coherence framework, enabling systematic analysis of how organizations evolve over time without obvious failure signals. This paper is part of the Coherence Programme. Further materials and companion papers are available at: https://thecoherenceprogramme.org/