Complexity and Coaching: an Openly Disingenuous Question for Dave Snowden
Pelagius, who in the 5th century heretically denied original sin as well as Christian grace. Image from Catholic.com
On May 31, Dave Snowden published "A Trialectic for Organisational Practice and Coaching," mapping three positions that describe how practitioners relate to the people and systems they work with. I commented on the post that his tripartite categorization was descriptive and epistemologically incongruous. He replied curtly: "But in practice..."
Those of us closely following his work and public discussions cannot accept such a reply from an intellectual giant. In this piece, I call Snowden to apply to coaching exactly the kind of categorical rigor he has spent a career demanding for complexity practice.
That inconsistency is why this piece exists. Let's look at what Dave's framework actually offers.
The three positions
The first position: the deficit model (Augustine, 354–430)
The system or person lacks something necessary for change, and the practitioner's role is to supply it. The deficit is the condition of the practitioner's authority. Without it, there is no role for the intermediary.
This is the structural logic of mainstream change management. A large consultancy arrives with a methodology: a transformation framework, a culture assessment, a capability maturity model. The organization is benchmarked against a standard it has not yet reached. The gap is named, quantified, and presented back as the case for engagement. The consultancy then supplies what is missing: the Cartesian moralism of "why-change-is-good-for-you" pitch to disgruntled, often unheard employees, the process redesign, the upskilling program, the implementation roadmap. The organization is treated as constitutively behind, and the engagement is structured around closing a distance that the practitioner defines and measures.
Coaching, as defined by the International Coaching Federation and as practiced at any serious ethical standard, excludes this position by definition. More on that in a moment.
The second position: innate capacity (Pelagius, 350–425)
What is needed is already present. The practitioner's job is not to supply what is absent but to create the conditions under which what is already there can become operative. Way shaping rather than supplying. The practitioner works with the grain of the system, examines constraints rather than overriding them, and trusts that the answer is closer to the client than to themselves.
This is the foundational stance of the ICF itself: the core competencies. For example, Competency 2, Embodies a Coaching Mindset, requires the coach to believe in clients' potential and refrain from limiting clients based on perceptions of their current situation. Competency 3, Establishes and Maintains Agreements, requires the coach to partner with the client from within the client's own frame of reference, explicitly distinguishing the coaching role from consulting, mentoring, and advising. The entire ICF competency architecture rests on the Pelagian premise: the capacity is present, and the practitioner's job is to stop suppressing it.
The third position: the formative encounter (Maximus the Confessor, 580–662)
What emerges from the engagement could not have been attributed to either party beforehand. The practitioner is not releasing a capacity that was already present, and not supplying one that was absent. What becomes possible through the encounter belongs to the coupling itself. Neither party possessed it in advance. Both are changed by the process of its emergence.
This is the relational ground that depth-informed approaches have always claimed. Jung theorized it with clinical precision in The Psychology of the Transference (1946), describing how an activated unconscious content brought by the patient constellates the corresponding unconscious material in the practitioner through an inductive effect that neither party controls. The result is that practitioner and patient find themselves in a relationship founded on mutual unconsciousness, in which, as Jung put it, "there are very many things indeed of which academic knowledge never dreamed" (Collected Works 16, pp. 176, 178).
The mutual activation of complexes across the dyad is generative precisely because it transcends the limitations of either ego's defensive cognitive patterns. What the encounter produces belongs to neither party and could not have been predicted by either. This is not a poetic claim. It is a clinical observation documented across four decades of practice.
As we see, these positions imply different worldviews, different definitions of success: control over a fixed object, reorganization of a systemic subject, and activation of a complex semantic system respectively, and a different ethical relationship between the practitioner and the people they work with.
Going all the way with the epistemological genealogy
Snowden anchors his trialectic in fifth-century Catholic theology, specifically Augustine, Pelagius, and Maximus the Confessor. He calls it philosophy, which is a partial characterization: these are theologians working within an explicitly theological frame, and the questions they are answering are soteriological, about the nature of salvation and the role of human will in transformation.
I understand where critics of this choice come from. As someone who has made Cynefin into a practical pillar through the Claristrat Method while preserving its full epistemological nuance, I and my graduates can attest that making it all much simpler is not only achievable but necessary to derive its full promise in helping transform human perception and organizations. But I am also someone who shares Snowden's delight in erudition, and understands that the next level of effectiveness comes from understanding the richness and complexity of intellectual history. This level of thinking is, in my view, necessary for those creating frameworks and operating beyond pure application.
And for that reason, if we are going to follow the epistemological genealogy, we need to follow it in its entirety.
Coaching's intellectual genealogy runs through the fifth-century tradition of Catholic soul salvation. These roots are reflected in Jung's four stages of psychotherapeutic treatment: Confession, Elucidation, Education, and Transformation. Jung named them deliberately. The earliest theorists of dialectical development in the therapeutic relationship were working in explicit dialogue with the same theological inheritance Snowden now invokes.
Snowden's third position, the formative encounter, has arguably found its way to coaching through Jung himself. The relational foundation that the formative encounter position requires passed through Jung into the humanistic psychology that contemporary coaching drew from. To dismiss Jung while standing on that ground requires some accounting.
The intellectual genealogy runs directly from the confessional tradition through Jung to the formative encounter Snowden chooses to anchor in Maximus the Confessor, rather than in the more recent thinker who mapped this territory rigorously across four decades of clinical practice and theoretical development. If the epistemological history is to be taken fully seriously, Jungian depth psychology cannot be dismissed from this discussion. It is not a tradition that can be set aside once the theological source has been acknowledged. To invoke Maximus while overlooking Jung's contribution is to acknowledge the root, eat the fruit, and refuse the branch it grew from into dialectical practice.
In an exciting conversation we had in April, and consistent with positions he has stated publicly, Snowden told me he had recently written on why Jungian theory needed full qualification before being used in leadership theory (given its ontological take). He also shared that he holds strong reservations about the inherent flaws and consequent social harm of adult development frameworks, rooted in apparently reductive stage sequences. In my view, those traditions guide more than they distract. And the trialectic itself is the reason why.
We do not need to agree with Maximus the Confessor in order to understand he was onto something epistemologically productive. The same applies to Jung and to Kegan. As a Jewish individual and mother, I am someone with more reason than most to hold reservations about Jung's personal and intellectual legacy, including his complicated relation with antisemitism and misogyny. But intellectual work requires a sober approach to even legitimate grievance.
Snowden's critique of Jung's cultural provincialism is valid and worth taking seriously, as his March post on the monomyth argues precisely. But the archetypal forces Jung identified as universal are better understood as epigenetic, instinctual functions, organized around the structural features of human life: attachment, separation, sexuality, mortality, the encounter with the other. From that perspective, the universalist claim is not an error. It is a recognition that certain organizing forces precede civilizational culture even when this culture determines their expression. What is contingent is the narrative clothing. What is universal is the underlying pressure. The manosphere and Campbell took the cultural clothing for the underlying structure. Dismissing the force because its conceptual expression has been distastefully appropriated is an epistemological error.
The clinical observation that complexes activate mutually across a dyad, and that what the encounter produces transcends the ego's prior cognitive defenses, does not require the more contested universalist claims to stand. It requires only that we take seriously what four decades of documented clinical practice consistently produced. A nineteenth-century European thinker whose cultural assumptions were contingent can still have mapped something real. I'll use another metaphor: dismissing the map because the cartographer had blind spots is not epistemological rigor. It is a different kind of reduction.
The same applies to Kegan. Adult development categories do not need to be read as ontological bands, rigid chronological stages, or culturally universal sequences to be productive. Used as a navigation map, as a set of overlapping lenses that give you a blurred but workable picture of how meaning-making architecture shifts under developmental pressure, the contribution is immense. Abandoning it entirely because it has been misread by others is the epistemological equivalent of abandoning complexity theory because consultants have travestied it into decorated systems thinking.
Foundational claims require consistency. If the standard is that a framework must be abandoned when its assumptions are contingent and its users have misapplied it, Snowden's own apparatus is not safe from that standard. I trust his audience sees this. I do. We see you behind the Sage-Ruler garb.
Now, the inconsistency.
Snowden's intellectual signature is categorical precision. His entire body of work on complexity rests on the claim that most of what practitioners call complexity practice is travestied systems thinking: same epistemological assumptions, different vocabulary. He draws that line with considerable force, and he is right to draw it. Calling something complexity work does not make it so. The ontological commitments that distinguish complex from complicated are not decorative. They change everything about how you act. When I pointed out that the first position in his trialectic is structurally incompatible with ethical coaching, his response was: "But in practice..."
That response would not survive thirty seconds in a conversation about complexity practice. If a consultant dresses systems thinking in complexity vocabulary and defends it by pointing to what practitioners actually do, Snowden does not extend the same latitude. He names the category error and holds the line.
The trialectic does not lose one of its three terms when applied to coaching. What it reveals is that one of the three terms describes a different practice entirely, one that may claim the coaching category while operating outside its defining commitments. That is not a softer version of coaching. That is not coaching. The ICF 2025 Core Competencies are explicit. Let's review the exact mentions, for added precision:
Competency 2 requires the coach to believe in the client's potential and to maintain the client as the expert in their own life. Behavior 2.03 states that the coach "acknowledges that clients are responsible for their own choices."
Competency 8, Facilitates Client Growth, is built entirely on the premise that the client's own awareness, insight, and learning are the source of change. Behavior 8.03 requires the coach to "acknowledge and support client autonomy in the design of goals, actions and methods of accountability."
A practitioner who arrives with a diagnosis of what the client lacks and a methodology for supplying it is not operating at the edge of these requirements. They are structurally violating them. In other words, they should be losing their license if operating from this stance.
Which raises a question worth sitting with: if a practitioner claims the category of coaching while operating in a mode that the field's own ethical and competency framework explicitly excludes, are we still describing coaching? A physician who consistently violates informed consent and non-maleficence has not found a looser version of medicine. They have left the category while retaining the name. The Hippocratic commitment is not decoration. It is constitutive. The same applies here.
By Snowden's own epistemological standard, "but in practice" is not a response to a category argument. It is a clear evasion of one.
Snowden is nonetheless right, as usual, about something important.
In the same comment thread, Snowden notes that the Augustinian pull does not disappear because it has been axiomatically excluded. That it operates below the level of conscious intention, especially under pressure, fatigue, and commercial incentive. That what is needed is to make the Pelagian and Maximian positions structurally available rather than dependent on individual virtue.
This is exactly right. And it is the problem that a methodology must answer, not an ethics code, not a research program, not a better-committed practitioner. And these are the inherent limits of the ICF's ethics- and competency-based model.
The answer is not a stronger oath. What makes the deficit assumption operationally unavailable is a methodology whose structure is incongruent with it. When the practice requires the coach to work the relationship between the leader and the system they are inside, to hold the somatic field, to read what is operating below the client's conscious representation of their situation, the Augustinian posture does not need to be suppressed by will. It becomes structurally incompatible with what the method asks the coach to do. The method forecloses it.
This is a design question, not a compliance virtue question.
And yet, there is a second problem the trialectic does not yet name.
Any coaching methodology that operates purely at the cognitive level cannot access the relational field that genuine formative encounter requires.
The human nervous system's threat-detection architecture operates below language, below reflection, and below conscious intention. When a senior leader enters a coaching conversation carrying the weight of a complex organizational situation, the somatic dimension of that weight is present in the room whether the methodology has a way to work with it or not. A methodology that engages only at the level of cognitive representation is working with a fraction of what is actually present.
More specifically: projection, the mechanism through which unprocessed interior material gets attributed to the external system, does not operate at the cognitive level. It operates at the level of autonomic activation, pattern recognition below awareness, and the body's pre-reflective reading of relational safety. A coach who cannot read and work with that dimension cannot distinguish between what the client is genuinely perceiving in their system and what they are projecting onto it. That distinction is the difference between coaching that reaches the complexity and coaching that reinforces the client's existing map of it.
This is where Snowden's own framework becomes the argument. He insists that complex systems cannot be fully represented, that emergence cannot be predicted from prior properties, that the probe-response relationship in the complex domain is genuinely co-constitutive. A coaching methodology that works only at the level of cognitive representation is, by that logic, inadequate to the complexity it claims to address. It is treating the complex as if it were merely complicated. It is working with the map when the territory is what needs engaging.
The formative encounter, in the Maximian sense, requires that the practitioner be present to what cannot yet be represented. That is not a cognitive capacity. It is a somatic one. It requires a nervous system regulated enough, and a methodology sophisticated enough, to hold the unrepresentable dimensions of the client's situation without collapsing them into premature sense-making.
What the structural answer requires.
The methodology that makes the Maximian position structurally available, rather than aspirationally invoked, has to work at the level where the Augustinian pull actually operates. Below language. Below intention. In the body, in the relational field, in the symbolic dimension of human experience that cognitive frameworks, however rigorous, cannot fully reach.
This requires an integration that no single lineage can produce alone. Complexity theory for reading the system the leader is inside. Adult development for understanding the meaning-making architecture the leader is working from. Depth psychology for the interior dynamics that shape what the leader can and cannot perceive. The neuroscience of autonomic regulation for the somatic foundation without which none of the rest holds under pressure.
None of these four is sufficient alone. Complexity theory without depth psychology, dare I say analytical psychology, produces a practitioner who intends to observe complex emergence without grasping the attractors. Depth psychology without complexity theory produces a practitioner who reads the interior but cannot read the field. Adult development without somatic grounding produces insight that does not survive the next board meeting. And somatic work without the other three produces regulation without direction.
The integration is what forecloses the deficit assumption structurally. Not because the coach has committed to avoiding it, but because the method has no architectural space for it. There is no role for the deficit model in a practice that is working the relationship between the leader and the system they are inside. The emergence is what the work is attending to.
A public question, asked earnestly.
Snowden notes that making these positions structurally available requires more than individual commitment, and that there are conversations with ICF that relate to this. I look forward to seeing what that work produces, and I mean that without irony.
But I would ask, publicly and with genuine curiosity: by what epistemological standard does the trialectic hold the line on complexity practice while extending categorical latitude to a coaching position that the field's own framework explicitly excludes? And by what standard are Jung and Kegan dismissed wholesale while Maximus the Confessor, Augustine, and Pelagius are invited in as foundational anchors, their contingent cultural assumptions apparently no obstacle to their epistemological utility?
The inconsistency is not incidental. It is the question that determines whether the trialectic becomes a diagnostic for what serious coaching practice requires, or remains a framework for describing what most coaching practice gets wrong while leaving its own category boundaries conveniently undefined. The scaling question he raises is real and deserves its own serious treatment. But scaling a methodology that has not yet been correctly theorized produces the wrong thing at greater volume.
PS: The conversation continued. Here's the latest piece in the series.
Fabiana Pereira Hotz, PCC, is the founder of Claristrat Institute and the Claristrat Method.
The Method draws on Snowden's Cynefin framework for understanding emergence in complex systems, Jung's analytical psychology for the semantic-energetic attractors that organize interior life, Kegan's adult development theory for how those attractors emerge into recognizable orders of mind in social contexts, and neuroscience for the biological underpinning of complexity dynamics and the psychosomatic conditions required for mindset change.
The Institute develops the Complex Systems Coaching™ certification for senior executives and the Complex Systems Leadership Development™ methodology for senior leaders and their teams.
