Founder & Principal
Richard
Lipp
Founder & Principal · Operating Model Architect
Divergent Kind is a coherence architecture practice for AI-era organisations. It is led by Richard Lipp – an operating model architect with fifteen-plus years of practice across product, experience, and consciousness-centred design.
The Career
Earlier roles span Apple, Jetstar, the NAB Innovation Lab, Qantas, and Virgin Australia – where he built the airline's first internal product and experience team from the ground up.
The Catalyst
After fifteen years inside design and product leadership at scale, a late diagnosis of neurodivergence at forty became the catalyst for a different question: why do organisations, products, and AI systems so often fail to produce coherent outcomes for the people they are meant to serve? Richard turned the same systems-design lens onto that question, and built the architecture that became Divergent Kind.
What He Built
The work draws on lived experience as a neurodivergent designer, leadership across enterprise and innovation contexts, and practice-based research into how cognitive difference operates as systemic intelligence rather than deficit. From this Richard developed the ethical operating system and the applied discipline beneath the Divergent Kind Coherence OS™.
Today
Today Richard works at the intersection of operating-model design, coherence architecture, and AI-enabled execution – designing the layer that lets complex organisations convert signal into durable, low-friction action. He operates at board and executive level, and brings Coherence OS as the practice's proprietary architecture.
Difference is not what you accommodate after the design. Difference is what the design starts from.
What we stand for
Four rules the work runs on.
Coherence through Difference · Difference by Design
Cognitive difference is the substrate the design is built from – not the exception it accommodates after the fact.
Coherence is made structural in how the system is built, not asserted in a document no one reads.
The layer is instrumented and read over time – not surveyed once a year and filed.
We facilitate conditions for agency. We disown uses that extract from or distort the people inside the system.
Where to start · the Coherence Audit
Three to four weeks. You leave with:
Most AI initiatives stall for organisational reasons, not technical ones. In three to four weeks, for a fixed fee, we show you where yours is most likely to stall – and the three to five moves that most improve its chance of holding.
You do not buy a dashboard. You leave with the read, the map, the decision gate, and the moves.
A friction map of your operation – where decisions degrade, where the frontline absorbs what the system should, where AI output stalls.
Coherence debt – what incoherence is costing you, sized as a range from real events. An order-of-magnitude estimate, not an audit figure.
The 3–5 changes that recover the most, prioritised and owned – architecture, not a workshop.
Board-ready, with an honest decision gate: proceed, pause, or stop. We don’t build before the read says it will hold.
Go Deeper
Read the thinking.
Divergent Kind facilitates conditions for agency and coherence.