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

This paper examines how institutional reliance on dashboards and performance indicators can lead to a systematic loss of alignment with declared intent. It introduces the concept of the “green dashboard trap,” in which decision systems signal success through internally consistent metrics while drifting from their original purpose. The paper shows how translation dynamics across governance layers transform intent into indicators that gradually become ends in themselves. As a result, institutions may appear well-governed while silently accumulating misalignment. The paper reframes governance failure not as a lack of control but as a structural consequence of how meaning is operationalized. It contributes to the Coherence Programme by identifying a recurrent failure mode in modern data-driven governance systems.