A Complexity-Based Path to Transformation

Primary Intentions, Secondary Interference and the Predictive Mind

In leadership development and coaching, people often try to create lasting change through new beliefs, positive affirmations or mindset training. But lasting transformation does not happen because we repeat new sentences or reset the mind like we switch off and on a computer. It rather happens when the nervous system learns a new way of relating to reality.

At the Center for Applied Complexity and Complexity Partners, we work with two types of inner patterns that shape how people behave: primary intentions - the clear, authentic impulses that guide us - and secondary interferences - the responses that arise in reaction to those impulses, often as doubts, habits, or internalized voices. Understanding and working with these patterns helps people reconnect with their own clarity, navigate relationships with more ease, and bring greater coherence to how they lead and live.

Primary Intentions: Directing Attention towards a clear Intention

“Primaries” direct our attention towards clear intentions. They express a general or specific direction we want to experience in life. Examples are:

• I trust myself
• I am worthy of being paid fairly
• I say what is true for me
• I am allowed to take space

Primaries communicate who we want to become. Yet almost everyone has had the experience of believing something consciously while still acting against it. This is where secondary interferences, mostly in the form of unexamined beliefs enter.

Secondary Interference: Predictive Survival Beliefs

“Secondaries” are beliefs and embodied reactions that are held unconsciously, formed through emotional experience in the past. They are held in the body-mind system, in distributed cognition, embedded in the context you grow up in. Examples can be:

• If I speak honestly, I will be rejected
• If I succeed, others will resent me
• If I show vulnerability, I will be hurt
• If I ask for what I need, I will lose belonging

These secondary patterns shape identity and behavior much more than we are aware of. When primary intentions and conditioned, protected responses are in conflict, secondaries dominate because they are linked to safety and survival.

• If I succeed, others will resent me
• If I show vulnerability, I will be hurt
• If I ask for what I need, I will lose belonging

These secondary patterns shape identity and behavior much more than we are aware of. When primary intentions and conditioned, protected responses are in conflict, secondaries dominate because they are linked to safety and survival.

The Predictive Mind: Why ‘Secondaries’ Run Our Lives

Cognitive scientist Andy Clark explains in Surfing Uncertainty (2016) that the brain is a prediction engine. In The Experience Maschine (2023) he describes how through predictive processing it does not passively observe reality. It constantly predicts what will happen next based on prior experience, sensory signals, clues from the outside world or learned conditioning.  These predictions shape perception and sculpt our experience in the first place. Andy Clark calls such predictions priors. Priors are sensemaking shortcuts that filter reality even before perception and experience.

Secondary Interferences are exactly that: predictions about a felt sense of safety . It is important that predictions are in general intelligent functions of our overall organism to minimise danger in a given context and time. Trauma for example can also be defined as an intelligent survival function of our nervous system to not feel life threatening overwhelm (Hübel, 2023). Unfortunately, if not integrated  trauma produces priors (prediction) that influence our perception and experience long after the actual traumatic experience. One drastic example is a soldier that spends time in a war area. He will learn to listen carefully to any kind of noise around, his attention to loud or sudden movements of crowds is critical for survival. Back home those prior that saved him in the battlefield are hard wired and conflict with a peaceful reality, the pop of a balloon will feel as being at the front in Ukraine. In a similar fashion nat as existential are Robert Kegan's ‘immunities to change’, hidden assumptions that block us to do something that seems to threaten our safety. Regardless if it is trauma or immunities to change, our priors, the predictive processing of our cognition always shapes what we perceive and experience.Therefore, such protective priors tell us what is possible, what is dangerous and what we are allowed to experience. As long as these predictive beliefs remain unexamined, they silently steer our choices even if the environment has changed and is safe.

The Method: Loosen the Grip of Secondary Interferences

Most coaching approaches focus on strengthening primary intentions, visions, purpose or goals. But this does not work if protected priors are still active in body, mind and consciousness. Instead of trying to suppress or bypass those secondary interference, we bring them into awareness and dissipate their energy by exaggerating them deliberately, we do not exaggerate the primaries. We exaggerate the secondaries. Giving attention to secondary interference realigns the prediction through new sensory signals, leading to a new precision weighting according to Clark.

For example, if someone is entangled in the prior “belief structure” of:

I want to show up. If I show up I will get hurt. That pain is so fundamentally threatening that I don’t want to ever experience that (again). Getting my voice heard is actually not so important. I will stay where I am. Leave me alone.

What is bold is what leads to the prediction error even if the situation is not really threatening.This is what Kegan calls immunity to change. To change the prediction error we invite leaders to act it out playfully and dramatically so the precision weighting shifts towards a more actualized reality. They might:

• Shrink physically
• Speak so quietly they can barely be heard
• Apologize for existing

Through exaggeration, something profound happens. The belief becomes visible as a behavioral pattern rather than as a truth. The nervous system discovers that nothing bad happens when the pattern is expressed consciously. This loosens the predictive grip of the prior “truth”, now recognised as a secondary interference.

Embodying the Primaries

Once the grip of a secondary belief softens, the system becomes available for new belief and behavior. This is the time to bring in primaries. ‘Primaries’ must be embodied. This happens in relationships, where others give direct feedback. When someone speaks a primary belief, such as:

• My voice matters
• I am allowed to take space
• My needs are valid

they are invited to feel it in their body and speak it as truth. Others may respond:

• I believe you, I can feel it
• Say it again, something is not yet aligned
• That is it, now your body agrees

Andy Clark and David Chalmers write in The Extended Mind (1998) that thinking is not confined to the brain. It extends into the body, environment and relational field. The 4Es in cognitive science describe how cognition, our mind is Embodied not just in the brain, Embedded in particular context and history, Enacted in real life and Extended into the real word beyond our minds and bodies. This is why transformation must include embodiment and relational feedback, otherwise the immunity of change does not allow new pathways to form in the first place. To shift therefore requires us to become aware of the embodied interference, and understand how they are embedded within our personal or cultural context and history. Rather than a simple tool or process this requires a more complexity informed approach.

A Complexity Perspective

Enacting dissipates the energy held in prior interference by overstating those secondaries (enactment) is therefore a such a safe-to fail-experiment. Overstating is telling the autopilot it can switch off and relax. This allows the system to reorganize itself and discover new freedom without collapse or overwhelm. Overstating and enacting enlarges the prediction errors which helps the system to change those priors beliefs. Dave Snowden reminds us that in complex systems change does not follow linear cause and effect. It emerges through small safe-to-fail-experiments: previous interactions are broken down, new ones are formed, they don't create a new reality but a new dispositional state, this is the substrate for emergence of new behaviour.

Predictive Freedom and the Future of Leadership

The purpose of this work is not to “install” stronger thoughts, or to manipulate people, NLP-style. It is to free human potential and widen their choice field. Working on secondary interferences is therefore shifting constraints to change the substrate of our perception and experience. Transformation begins when we honor them without being confined by their shape and content. Change begins with revealing what the self-system currently believes as unexamined truth. When those prior beliefs are safely reexamined with awareness, they lose power. This is how we train the predictive mind to trust a new emergent future.

Leadership today requires exactly this kind of internal adaptability. In times of complexity we do not need persuasion, good will, better coaching or  “tougher mindsets”. We need nervous systems that can update their predictions of reality given the context in the here and now. From this capacity, clarity emerges. Creativity returns. Courage becomes natural.

References

Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. J. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.

Clark, A. (2016). Surfing uncertainty: Prediction, action, and the embodied mind. Oxford University Press.

Clark, A. (2023). The experience machine: How our minds predict and shape reality. Penguin Books.

Hübl, T., & Jordan Avritt, J. (2020). Healing collective trauma: A process for integrating our intergenerational and cultural wounds. Sounds True.

Hübl, T. (2023a). Attuned: Practicing interdependence to heal our trauma—and our world. Sounds True.

Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. Harvard Business Press.

Rosa, H. (2016). Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Suhrkamp.

Snowden, D. (2010). The Cynefin framework. Cognitive Edge.