What Jung Brings to Complexity: Reading Leaders Beyond What They Profess
The claim
Complexity theory changed how we read organizations. It gave leadership a working vocabulary for uncertainty: for conditions where no answer exists in advance, where cause shows itself only in hindsight, where intervention changes the terrain it acts on. Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework sits among the most useful instruments in that tradition, and at the Claristrat Institute, we leverage this intellectual contribution as a pillar in our applied adult development method, teaching it and always crediting it by name as trained academics and ethical professionals do.
And yet, we are keenly aware that the intellectual center of complexity theory, in its recent forays into coaching and leadership development, carry an incapacitating blind spot which risks curtailing the very development it means to foster.
The blind spot is a theory of mind that defines its object away, and with it a leader's responsibility for their own acts.
Naturalising sense-making, the school of thought Snowden leads, deserves a proper introduction, because most of the coaching world has never met it. The school bases its understanding of the human mind on the natural sciences, with procedural support from anthropology for input gathering and meaning-making; in Snowden's own definition, "naturalising means to root what you do in the natural sciences, not in the social sciences." It makes three fundamental claims about the mind, and each may appear counterintuitive to the coaching and leadership development field. None of the three is Snowden's invention; each draws on an established research tradition, henceforth named based on how Snowden usually attributes them.
Naturalising sense-making's first claim is that thinking does not happen only inside a person's brain. It is spread across one's body, one's tools, and the people around them. A pilot thinks with her instruments. A surgical team thinks as such. Remove the tools and the people, and the individual "mind" loses most of what made it capable. This is the "4E" tradition in cognitive science, cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted, built by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch on the enactive side, Andy Clark and David Chalmers on the extended-mind side, and Edwin Hutchins, whose studies of ship navigation crews founded distributed cognition.
The second claim is that much of our human deciding was done for us long ago, by evolution. In this school's account, we run on ancient cognitive shortcuts that persist because they kept our ancestors alive, and trying to train people out of exhibiting them is treated as beyond counterproductive, a fundamental mistake. In other words, you cannot coach a person out of being a human animal. The research base here is the heuristics tradition: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky mapped the shortcuts as biases, and Gerd Gigerenzer, whose reading Snowden's school sits closer to, reframed them as ecological rationality, shortcuts that are not defects but adaptations, smart in the environments they evolved for.
Third, and most radically, there is the claim that the tidy, self-contained mind is an illusion. Common social discourse is keen to represent each person carrying a coherent set of mental models and filtering the world through them, which conditions action. Snowden seemingly rejects the picture outright: in his account there are no crisp mental models inside, only entangled assemblies, tangles of association shaped by history and context. This is why Snowden also treats the word "mindset" as close to another category error: in his telling, mindset language puts all the blame on the individual and assumes the individual's mind is making all the decisions, when the deciding is really done by the whole tangle, the person, the group, the tools, the situation. In other words, the inter-systemic affordance. The intellectual scaffolding here comes from complexity science itself, Alicia Juarrero's work on constraints and dynamics in action, alongside the anthropological line running back to Max Boisot on knowledge in social systems, both of whom Snowden credits as central influences.
Notice, however, what the architecture drawn by these three pillars structurally excludes: an account of the individual interior's organized dynamics. Beyond a tangled, decentralized "cognition", there is no account of how that interior material is itself organized: no units, no dynamics, no structure, only the tangle. It is a psychology with depth of evolution and breadth of distribution, and an undifferentiated interior. The individual is dissolved into the outer system before anyone asked how the internal system is organized.
Now, here's why this matters for coaching. First, the perceptual half: a framework built this way is constitutively unable to detect an individual captured by their own unexamined material. Not for lack of a theory of mind, but because the one it chose shrugs off the need to define its basic functional mechanisms besides "this is what the individual was wired to do and what the context afforded it to them as an option". This explains away the possibility of finer understanding, while avoiding engagement with serious theories of mind that go beyond in generating more actionable insights.
The second implication is ethical and more consequential: a psychology which doesn't acknowledge the dynamics of the individual system cannot adequately conceptualize individual responsibility.
If decisions are distributed and blame on the individual mind is the error, then accountability dissolves into system design, and no one can ever be answerable for the pattern they personally run.
Coaching cannot operate on either premise. Its practice does not require the ontological fiction of an isolated mind-container, but for its ethical code to be feasible, it requires the ego as the center of consciousness and responsibility for the individual's actions. The center of ego-consciousness is, after all, the individual unit through which the collective consciousness (society itself) operates: the node of personhood that perceives and creates its relationship with the collective, materializing our shared concepts of law, fairness, and accountability. To enter leadership development with a psychology that abdicates this locus of self-perception is professionally and ethically negligent. Duty of care, required in all human and organizational development professions, means recognizing that while a leader is not sovereign over what their psychological system constellates under pressure, their center of consciousness remains the terminal of behavioral choice. In other words, when an action crosses into the collective space, this conscious center must answer for the outcome. Unless, of course, they claim madness. Courts do accept this claim.
What the coaching field takes the mind to be
Mainstream coaching and leadership development also carry a working model of the mind, which goes mostly unexamined by the field. It is the cognitive and behavioral one: the mind as an articulate, goal-forming agent that can state its situation, examine its options, and commit to action. Nearly the entire apparatus of the field is built on this model. State the goal, examine the current reality, generate options, hold the client to delivery. The assessments interview the articulate layer. The journals record it. The action plans contract with it.
The model is not necessarily wrong. It is simply focused on a specific layer: the conscious, verbal, self-reporting surface. This is exactly why it is mostly ineffective for executive coaching: that is exactly the layer where the senior clients' problems do not live. Senior leaders are highly capable in the conscious register. They can produce a clear account of what is happening, often a brilliant one. The material that actually moves them sits below articulation: the organizing patterns they operate from and cannot describe, because they are looking out of them, not at them. A method that works only with what the client can already say is limited to rearranging what the leader already knows. Amiable coaching at best.
And this is why change and leadership pipeline development fail the way they often do. The tidy action step that dissolves by Thursday. The insight that lands in the session and never reaches the calendar. The leadership program that produces fluent new vocabulary and identical behavior under pressure. The redesigned operating model that the old dynamic reabsorbs within two quarters. These are not failures of commitment or of program design. They are the predictable output of working on a mind that the working model says is all surface, when the surface was never where the pattern was running.
So, when complexity theory and the coaching world come together, both leaning strongly on cognitive-focused traditions, the collaboration comes to rest, without a deliberate discussion, on a model that leaves out the part of the mind that determines whether development happens. And notice the strange symmetry this creates. The two psychologies fail from opposite directions: naturalising sense-making dissolves the interior outward, into tools, groups, and evolved constraints, until no one is home to develop; the cognitive-behavioral mainstream flattens the interior upward, into whatever the client can already articulate, until the home has nothing anchoring it to the earth. One account has a system and no person. The other has a prefrontal cortex and the body it commands. Between them sits the actual object of executive development, the organized, dynamic, mostly unaccounted patterns of a capable adult under pressure, claimed by neither model, served by neither practice.
The territory between them belongs to depth psychology, and here a choice among its founders has to be made deliberately, because they are not interchangeable. Freud mapped an interior, but as a closed mechanism of drives in conflict, read through pathology: the person arrives as a patient, and the work is repair. A deficit model cannot serve a practice whose first commitment is the client's wholeness and capability. Adler, who broke with Freud on exactly this point, is in many ways coaching's unacknowledged grandfather, goal-directed, socially embedded, encouraging, but his psychology has almost no interior machinery: no structured unconscious, no account of how inner patterns organize themselves and capture perception. He fixed the stance and left the depths unmapped.
Jung did both: his psyche is a system in the full sense: semi-autonomous patterns organizing themselves around emotional cores, a conscious center that coordinates far less than it believes, development that cannot be installed but only allowed.
And his frame is non-pathologizing at its root: complexes are universal equipment, the unconscious is creative as much as conflicted, and the direction of the work is growth toward wholeness rather than repair of defect. One founder, alone among the three, offers an interior that is genuinely complex and a stance a coach can ethically hold.
He also built it on observation, which is where this article now turns.
The psyche as a complex system
In his word association experiments at the Burghölzli clinic, beginning in 1904, Jung measured reaction times, skin conductance, and breathing while subjects responded to stimulus words. Certain words produced measurable disturbance: delayed responses, failed recall, repetition, flattened association. And the disturbances clustered. Something in the person, not consciously chosen and often not consciously known, was organizing perception and response around specific themes. Jung called these organizations complexes. His central finding, arrived at with instruments and stopwatches seventy-five years before today's leadership assessments existed, was that the mind has no single command center. The interior is itself a complex system, with its own dynamics, its own attractors, its own weather.
Read with today's vocabulary, a complex is an attractor: a self-organizing pattern in the psyche's dynamics that, once activated, pulls perception, emotion, and behavior into its basin.
The executive who is expansive and precise in strategy sessions and becomes brittle and small the moment one particular board member speaks has not changed character.
A different attractor has captured the system, and the capture has a mechanism. Something in that board member, a cadence of dismissal, a way of withholding approval, a physical resemblance, resonates with material the executive's system has carried for decades: perhaps a father impossible to satisfy, a first boss whose contempt arrived without warning, an early humiliation in front of exactly this kind of audience. The stimulus does not need to be large, and the executive does not need to remember the original. The complex holds the memory in its own register, emotional and somatic before verbal, and when a present signal matches its pattern, it activates the way a struck tuning fork sets the matching string humming. Once active, it behaves like a magnetic field dropped into the room: perception bends toward threat, the body shifts before a word is spoken, breath shortens, posture closes, and the confident register that was available ninety seconds earlier is simply gone, short-circuited, because that register belonged to a different configuration of the system, and that configuration is no longer the one running. The executive has not lost their capability.
Their capability is momentarily inside an older circuit, and no amount of willpower reaches it from within the activated state, for willpower belongs to the configuration that was just displaced.
And Jung's map has a place for the commander which the tidy-mind picture gets wrong. The ego, in his precise usage, is real and functional: it is the center of consciousness, the complex that carries identity, continuity, and will, the part that plans the meeting and remembers your name. Because it is the only part of the psyche we experience as ourselves, we naturally take it for the whole, the owner of the house, issuing orders that the rest of us follows.
Everyday experience, examined clearly, says otherwise. Moods descend without invitation and lift without permission. A name refuses to surface in the moment it is needed and delivers itself an hour later, unbidden, while the ego was occupied elsewhere. The resolution made sincerely on Sunday dissolves by Wednesday against something that was never consulted. And under pressure, the thing one had firmly decided not to say gets said, in one's own voice, while the ego watches. None of this is exotic; all of it is universal, and all of it is impossible if the ego runs the psyche. Each is the signature of other centers of organization, active, purposeful, and outside awareness, doing what they do whether or not the conscious center approves.
The ego's true position is more modest and more precise: it is the center of consciousness, one complex among the complexes, distinguished by its access to awareness rather than by superior strength.
In calm conditions it is usually the strongest configuration in the room. In charged conditions it frequently is not, an activated complex can displace it from the controls entirely, which is why character reveals itself under pressure rather than in the interview. The strata coexist; context and load determine which configuration is active. A person is not homogeneously at one level of development, one style, one self. A person is a palimpsest, and what shows on the surface at any moment is the functional sum of what is currently active underneath.
This architecture also settles how change works, and here the two ideas held over from naturalising sense-making return home. Emergence and affordance, which that school wields so well at the level of organizations, were operating inside the person all along. A new configuration of the psyche cannot be installed or argued into being, because there is no single controller to install it through; it arises, when it arises, because the interior system's constraints have loosened enough to allow it. This is why insight alone changes so little and timing matters more than force, and Jung had the territory under measurement before the vocabulary existed.
And the architecture settles one thing more: what reading this system requires. The concepts travel between the two fields; the competence does not. Reading the field around a leader carries observer effects, complexity science knows this well, and has built methods to work with them: multiple narratives, multiple observers, triangulation against the system's many voices. Reading the field within a person allows no such remedy from within, because the instrument and the field are the same system. The complexes being read are also doing the reading. There is no second position inside oneself to triangulate from, which is why the distortion here does not merely perturb the data; it authors it. The second position has to come from outside, as another presence. Not a clean one; no observer of the psyche is free of their own weather. But an examined one, whose distortions are known to them and held in check by that knowing, and whose presence does something no instrument does: it forms a new system with the person being read, inside which configurations can emerge that neither could reach alone. That is not a metaphor for coaching. It is the structural definition of it, and it is why the formation of the coach, their own long examination, is the load-bearing element of the entire practice.
The consequences for leadership development
First, the self that speaks is not the system that acts. What we call "I" is real, but it is an emergent coordinating function, a narrative construct that binds the system's activity into a coherent protagonist after the fact. It is the system's press secretary, not its owner. This is why what leaders profess, in interviews, in journals, in assessments built on their own account of themselves, captures the narrative function's output, not the system's repertoire.
The professed self is a genuine data stream. It is not the only one, and under load it is not the most informative one.
Second, what the system cannot own, it exports. Jung's name for the disowned material is the shadow, and its signature behavior is projection: the interior attractor experienced as an exterior fact, the unbearable quality of oneself discovered, with total conviction, in others. Projection is not a metaphor. It is a detectable dynamic with a specific empirical signature: repetition. A grievance arising from genuinely different external causes looks different each time.
A projection runs the same script across changing circumstances, different people, different years, different disputes, same shape, because the organizing pattern travels with the system, not the situations.
That signature is what makes the claim falsifiable, and it is what separates a depth reading from an insult.
Third, brilliance offers no exemption. Complexes do not negotiate with intelligence; they operate below the level at which intelligence works. A mind of extraordinary analytical power can be captured as completely as any other, and when it is, the analytical power goes into the capture's service, building structures of impressive rigor on foundations the person cannot see.
The sharpest thinkers do not project less. They project better.
A public demonstration
A framework earns its keep by what it lets you see. Here is a test case, chosen because it is public, recent, and unusually legible. It also comes from the school this article opened with, at the moment of its clear entry into coaching's territory, which makes it doubly instructive.
The method applied below should be stated before it is used. It is a structural reading of a public document, the same discipline a formed coach brings to any senior leader's material. It does not ask whether the document's claims are true or its author sincere; it asks what the document's construction reveals about the system that produced it.
Structure against content: what does the piece do, as against what it says?
Register against affect: what tone is performed, and what feeling does the construction betray?
Stated framework against enacted behavior: does the author's declared epistemology govern the author's own document?
These questions can be asked of any text by any reader; nothing in them requires access to anyone's private mind, and no claim below rests on such access.
Two boundaries, stated plainly. First, this is not a diagnosis of a person; it is an analysis of a text and of a pattern, and it deliberately claims nothing about what its author is, only about what this text does. Second, the reading is falsifiable, and it says how: each finding below names the textual feature it rests on, so a reader who checks the source and finds the feature absent has refuted the finding. And the deeper claim, that the pattern is a projection rather than a proportionate response to real events, rests on a specific empirical signature named earlier: repetition of the same shape across changing counterparts and circumstances. If the episodes on record differ in shape as their circumstances differ, that claim fails. The reading invites exactly the scrutiny its object forecloses. So let's proceed.
On July 15, Snowden published "A Field Guide to Epistemic Parasites," a taxonomy of five ways he alleges others misappropriate intellectual credit, each paired with a predatory animal, written in the detached register of a naturalist cataloging species. Read at the level of content, it is a position on citation ethics. Read with Jung's instruments, at the level of discursive structure, three features stand out.
The taxonomy points only outward. Five categories of predation, and none the author tests against his own conduct. The register performs scientific detachment while the material underneath, grievance, injury, a felt violation, never appears in its own voice. What cannot be said as "this wounded me" arrives as species classification.
The categories admit no exit. Citing the author is evidence (the citation "is precisely what makes the depletion hard to see"). Not citing him is evidence. Responding publicly is evidence ("being challenged publicly... is itself the extraction"). And silence, the piece's own ending argues, is the only response that does not feed the extractive pattern, which converts silence into confirmation as well. Every path is accounted for: speak and confirm the diagnosis, or stay quiet and accept it. A classification in which every available behavior confirms guilt is not a diagnostic. It is a closed loop, unfalsifiable by design, and by the author's own epistemological standards, applied fiercely throughout his career to others, it would not survive a moment's scrutiny.
The exemption is discretionary, and it is worth slowing down on why that matters. The piece allows that "there is nothing wrong with taking an idea and doing something with it," which sounds like a standard, and would be one if it came with criteria: what distinguishes legitimate synthesis from parasitism, stated in advance, checkable by anyone. No such criteria appear. The verdict is delivered after the fact, case by case, by the author himself. Here is the test that exposes the difference: with a real standard, you can determine your own standing before you act, read the criteria, check your conduct, know where you stand. Under this taxonomy you cannot.
Whether your engagement with the work was contribution or theft is decided later, by the person whose favor you cannot secure in advance, according to considerations never published.
That is not how standards work. It is how patronage works, and a standard that exempts whomever its author elects to exempt is a preference wearing a standard's clothing.
There is a further inconsistency, and it is the deepest finding in the document, because it is where the logical reading and the psychological reading converge on the same fact. Recall the author's school of thought's foundational commitment: pinning outcomes on an individual mind is the error; deciding is done by the whole tangle, the person, the group, the tools, the situation. Apply that commitment to the "Field Guide" and the text self implodes. It is built entirely of individual blame. Five categories of personal predation, motives assigned with certainty, culpability total and undistributed.
No tangle appears anywhere, no situational constraint, no distributed responsibility, no entangled assembly, only sovereign individuals choosing to steal. The author's own psychology, applied to his own document, would dissolve every accusation in it.
Now the Jungian reading of that same fact, and it helps to start with what projection actually is, because the word gets used loosely. Everyone carries qualities they cannot bear to recognize in themselves, the greed, the envy, the hunger for control, the fear. Jung's finding was that this material does not sit quietly in storage. Denied a place inside the self-image, it gets relocated: we discover it in other people, vividly, with complete conviction, and with a special charge of outrage that calmer judgment lacks. The tell is the intensity. Everyone knows someone who rages at a fault in others that everyone else can see is chiefly his own. That is projection, and it is not rare or exotic. It is the psyche's default method for handling what it cannot own.
What normally interrupts it is a question: is this pattern mine? The question does not arise on its own; something in a person's self-understanding has to make room for it, a working assumption that one has an interior, that the interior contains material one cannot fully see, and that one's perceptions of others might therefore be contaminated by it. Every serious depth tradition builds that assumption in, which is why analysis, supervision, and formation exist: they are institutionalized versions of the question.
Now look at what naturalising sense-making makes of that question: it cannot be asked. A psychology with no organized interior has no place for disowned material to live, no shadow, no mechanism of projection, no reason the question would ever come up. And notice the further twist: the school's one insight pointing in this direction, that outcomes should not be pinned on a sovereign individual mind, would, if applied to the author's own document, have dissolved its accusations and forced the reflective question after all. Instead, that commitment is suspended at precisely the moment his own material is at stake. The theory that could not see the author's own interior, and his own theoretical principle that was abandoned when it pointed homeward, leave the exported material exactly where projection delivers it: outward, onto others, as certainty. The individual responsibility only exists, in Snowden's psychology exactly once: as the accused, the guilty, the power and fame thief.
A claim like this needs a test, and it has one. A grievance that is a proportionate response to real, external offenses should vary as the offenses vary: different provocations, different shapes. A projection runs the same script regardless of who stands in it, because the pattern travels with the person, not the circumstances. And the record here shows the same shape, extraction alleged, categories assigned, verdicts published, reassembling itself around this body of work across different counterparts, different years, different disputes. The pattern is publicly visible, consistently, daily on LinkedIn and elsewhere. In complexity terms, the pattern is an attractor, and its center is not any of the changing accused. That repetition of the affection and its intersubjective mechanism is what licenses the depth reading of a pattern of projection. It is also what Cynefin's field-level frameworks cannot register: It can classify the situation, but it has no instrument for detecting that the classifier has been captured.
One more observation completes the demonstration.
Cynefin is widely effective in preventing one specific error: treating a complex situation as a clear one. A rupture between thinkers, two accounts, unknowable intentions, a history neither party fully sees, is complex by the framework's own definition.
The "Field Guide," however, resolves all of it as clear: fixed species, settled verdicts, motives stated as fact. The framework did not fail its creator. It was simply forgotten, displaced by affect disguised as logic. It is a common event in leadership and in private life; everyone has watched it happen, and most of us have starred in it at least once. This is where Snowden's own vocabulary runs out. Call it a cognitive short-circuit, an entangled assembly misfiring, and you have described that something happened, with no account of what, why this theme, why this intensity, why this shape again. Only a psychology of the interior can name the something: an activated complex, displacing the public ego (which Jung called the persona), and the rigor that lives there, from the controls, running its script through a formidable intellect, in public. Again, the reader has already met every element of that sentence in their own life.
To be precise about what this reading is: it is an analysis of a pattern, not a verdict on a person. The Claristrat Method holds one working definition of wrong, and it is ecological: what drains the system that sustains it is unsustainable, and unsustainability is the entire charge. A defensive pattern that chills a field's open exchange spends the trust the field runs on. That is the sin, named and released, and the human being running the pattern remains what every human being is: a complex system doing what its current attractors afford.
Our relationship modeled
Claristrat's relationship to Cynefin is to the work. We cite Snowden by name in everything we publish, represent the framework accurately, extend it where our practice requires, and state publicly where we think its reach ends. The same standard governs every lineage in the method: we hold Jung's framework with fidelity and give his era-bound failures sober accounting; we treat Kegan's structure as foundational and accept that later work refined it. Fidelity to a body of thought and deference to its author are different commitments, and serious fields keep them separate. Ideas, once published, belong to the discourse. That is what publishing means, and it is the only condition under which knowledge grows.
The integration ahead
Complexity theory reads the field. Depth psychology reads the leader as a complex system in their own right. Leadership development built on the first alone produces brilliant mapmakers with unexamined interiors, leaders fluent in uncertainty about everything except what organizes their own perception. The demonstration above shows the cost at the center of the field's own thinking; every senior team shows it in the gap between what its leaders profess and what captures them under load.
Reading that gap requires instruments the professed self cannot supply: attention to repetition, to what is exported, to which configurations arrive under pressure, and it requires readers whose own instruments are examined, which is why formation and supervision are structural to serious coaching rather than ornamental. The interior map and the field map are halves of one discipline. The mind is a complex system, continuous with the rest of the natural world that complexity theory was built to read. Jung got there first, with stopwatches. This integration is consequential work.
Fabiana Pereira Hotz PCC, is the founder and CEO of the Claristrat Institute, where she developed the Claristrat Method, an executive coaching and leadership development methodology integrating complexity theory, depth psychology, adult development, and the neuroscience of autonomic regulation.
She is an ICF-credentialed executive and board coach with over twenty and five years of experience in research, education, and organizational transformation, including partner and market-lead roles at global consultancies. Her published work examines among other topics the psyche as a complex system and development as emergence through systemic affordance. Find more about her works and writing at claristrat.com.
