Vision-Pillar
Alignment
The percentage of active Pillars that are linked to an active Vision.
/ total active pillars)
× 100
What it signals
Pillars without a parent Vision are governance fragments — domain rules without a stated organisational purpose. A Pillar defines what the architecture must do within a domain. A Vision declares why the organisation is building the way it is. Without the link, a Pillar is a set of constraints floating free of strategic intent. An engineer cannot answer “why does this rule exist?” by reading the Pillar alone.
High VPA means every architectural domain rule traces back to a declared organisational intent. Each Pillar can be read alongside its Vision to understand both the constraint and the purpose that constraint serves. This traceability is the minimum condition for governance that an organisation can explain and defend, not just enforce.
VPA=100 is the target, not a ceiling to be satisfied once. It should be maintained as new Pillars are authored. Every Pillar created without a Vision link is a fragment from the moment of creation. The gap compounds if unlinked Pillars accumulate — each one an architectural domain that cannot explain its own purpose.
How rkito produces it
Each Pillar has an optional visionId field. VPA is the percentage of active Pillars where visionId is set and the linked Vision is active. Navigate to /steerings/pillars to see pillars without Vision links.
Who this metric is for
VPA ensures no pillar is an orphaned ruleset with no stated purpose. Every architectural domain rule you author should answer to an organisational intent. If it cannot, it should not exist as a Pillar — it may belong in a Policy, or it may not belong at all.
How this metric gets misused
VPA measures linkage, not quality. A Vision that exists just to satisfy VPA adds bureaucratic overhead without governance value. An org that creates a one-sentence Vision for every Pillar will have VPA=100 and no meaningful organisational intent declared anywhere in the Steering layer. The score is green; the governance is hollow.
Only create a Vision when there is genuine organisational intent to articulate. A Vision should describe what the organisation is trying to achieve and why, in enough depth that an architect can derive Pillar direction from it. If a Vision does not pass that test, it is a placeholder — and a placeholder Vision that satisfies VPA is worse than no Vision at all, because it produces false confidence.
What to do at each threshold
Step-by-step response playbook for each signal state.
Every active Pillar has a linked active Vision. No governance fragments exist.
No corrective action required. Confirm Vision content is substantive, not placeholder text — VPA measures linkage, not quality of what is linked.
Maintain VPA as new Pillars are authored. Each new Pillar should be linked to a Vision at the time of creation, not retroactively.
Some Pillars are unlinked. Each one is a governance fragment without a stated purpose.
Navigate to /steerings/pillars and identify Pillars without Vision links. Review each one: does it trace to genuine organisational intent?
Add Vision links where intent exists. Open a CHI to deprecate orphaned Pillars that cannot be traced to a real organisational direction.
More than one in five Pillars are ungrafted from organisational intent. A governance session is needed.
Run a governance session — assign each ungrafted Pillar to a domain owner. The owner is responsible for either linking the Pillar to an existing Vision or proposing a new Vision if genuine intent exists but has not been declared.
Pillars with no owner and no Vision are candidates for deprecation via CHI. A Pillar that nobody can explain and that traces to no declared intent should not be enforcing constraints on PRs.
SCS confirms the Steering foundation exists. VPA measures whether the Pillar layer within that foundation is properly anchored to declared organisational intent.
GD counts active Lenses. VPA ensures the Pillars those Lenses enforce against are not orphaned rulebooks — each domain has a stated reason to exist.
SF measures whether Steering artifacts are current. High VPA with low SF may mean Vision links exist but the Visions they point to are stale.
Are your Pillars anchored to intent?
rkito calculates VPA automatically from your Steering layer. Connect your repo and see which architectural domain rules have a stated organisational purpose behind them.