Insitution Control Architecture: Authority Flow, Governance Drift, and System Coherence

Institutional Control Architecture (ICA) introduces a control-theoretic framing of institutional governance, modeling organizations as authority-modulated dynamical systems. Rather than interpreting governance breakdowns primarily as failures of policy, compliance, or oversight, this framework proposes that many institutional failures arise when local operational coherence drifts away from the global reference frame of institutional intent. Drawing on concepts from dynamical systems and control theory (Åström & Murray, 2008), the framework represents institutional behavior through a system state composed of five interacting properties: activation pressure, disturbance propagation, interpretive structure, structural capacity, and integration coherence. The interpretive structure dimension draws on the organizational sensemaking tradition (Weick, 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005), while extending it by representing interpretation as a state variable that can influence system stability and drift. A central contribution of the framework is the introduction of the GATR operator (Give–Allow–Take–Receive), which models institutional authority as a gating mechanism that modulates interactions between system properties. This representation allows governance dynamics to be expressed as authority-modulated state evolution and enables analysis of institutional drift using concepts from dynamical systems. The model distinguishes two orthogonal forms of systemic drift: epistemic drift, where the institutional frame becomes misaligned with external reality, and governance drift, where authority boundaries gradually loosen or fragment. By separating these dynamics, the framework provides a structured way to analyze hidden institutional risk, including situations where procedural compliance masks deeper systemic divergence.