The Decision Gap — How Intent Becomes Criteria

We often assume that organisations act on what they say matters.

A strategy defines priorities.

A policy defines intent.

A programme defines goals.

And from there, decisions are supposed to follow.

But something else is happening.

Decisions are not made on intent itself.

They are made on what intent becomes—

once it is translated into decision criteria.

From intent to action

Take a simple example.

A policy emphasises resilience.

A strategy emphasises performance.

An organisation commits to learning or inclusion.

These concepts matter. They guide direction. They frame purpose.

But they are not directly actionable.

Before a decision can be taken, each concept must be translated into something else—something that can actually be used:

• categories

• criteria

• indicators

• thresholds

Something that can be compared, verified, and acted upon.

And in that translation, something changes.

When concepts become criteria

What starts as a concept becomes a representation.

• “Resilience” becomes categories such as green or digital.

• “Performance” becomes attributes such as availability or reliability.

• “Inclusion” becomes defined target groups and participation measures.

These transformations are not mistakes. They are necessary.

Without them, decisions cannot be made.

But they are not the same as the original intent.

Something is carried forward—

but something is also lost.

The decision gap

This is where the shift happens.

Organisations do not act on intent.

They act on translated representations of intent—embedded in decision criteria, indicators, and verification rules.

Once decisions are made on those representations, they begin to shape:

• outcomes

• learning

• future priorities

Over time, the system starts responding to what is measurable and verifiable—rather than to what was originally meant.

What should we observe?

This raises a simple question:

If we want to understand what organisations actually decide, what should we look at?

Not the stated concepts.

But how those concepts appear in decision-relevant form—

in the criteria, indicators, and signals that actually drive decisions.

Making translation visible

In a recent paper, I traced this process across three European Union programmes:

• Recovery and Resilience Facility

• Galileo

• Erasmus+

The goal was not to evaluate outcomes or effectiveness.

It was to see whether the translation—from concept to decision criteria—can be observed directly in ordinary governance artefacts:

• regulations

• programme structures

• reporting systems

Following a small set of concepts across these artefacts, a pattern becomes visible.

Concepts may be:

• explicitly retained or left implicit

• partially preserved or reduced

• translated into measurable proxies

• embedded in governance structures

• or absent at the level of decision signals

The movement is structured. It is traceable. And it differs across programmes.

Drift is structural, not accidental

What this suggests is that drift is not simply a matter of interpretation or execution.

It is a property of how meaning is reformulated as it becomes decision-relevant.

Why this matters

If we want to understand institutional behaviour, we need to look not only at what is declared—

but at how meaning is translated into the criteria on which decisions are actually made.

Read the full paper

If you want to see this in practice, the full paper provides a minimal, replicable method:

Translation Dynamics in Public Policy and Governance: A Replicable Method for Observing How Concepts Become Decision Criteria in European Programmes (RRF, Galileo, Erasmus+)