The open instrument
The Coherence Lens.
Four dimensions for reading whether a system adapts to people – or forces people to adapt to it. The Lens is open: freely citable, freely usable as a frame. What it means in your organisation is the work.
The four dimensions
What to look for, in two registers.
Each dimension reads the same question at the commercial edge and the civic edge of the stack.
Does the system expand or constrain what the human can decide and do?
Can the operator act on the AI's output without seeking authority that was never made explicit?
Does the citizen-facing system widen the range of real choices, or quietly narrow them?
Does the system return value proportionate to what it asks?
Does the AI return more than it costs to maintain, attend to, and correct?
Is the exchange between the public and the system fair in both directions?
Do outputs match what the institution actually does?
Does the product's behaviour match the operating model that ships it?
Does the system's behaviour match the public promise it was built on?
Can the receiver act on what it produces; does its confidence match its evidence?
Can the receiver tell what is solid enough to act on under pressure?
Can the citizen trust the system's confidence to track its actual reliability?
The shape of the read
A continuum, not a score.
The Lens reads each dimension along a qualitative continuum. The states describe where a dimension sits; the numeric scale, thresholds and computation stay off the page – by discipline.
What the states mean
Fragmented → Strained → Functioning → Resonant. Each state is a description of how a dimension is holding – not a grade, and never a number. The read names where to look and how it is holding; Divergent Kind names what it means.
Illustrative only · qualitative · no scoring logic exposed.
The Lens tells you what to look for. Divergent Kind tells you what it means.
Use the Lens
Run the free Snapshot, or have it read properly.
Divergent Kind facilitates conditions for agency and coherence. We do not diagnose, treat, or cure.