What Scott Peck, Carl Jung, and Loving Assertiveness reveal about why culture change so rarely works — and what to do about it.
You can feel it the moment you walk into a room.
Before a word is spoken, before the agenda is introduced, before anyone has said anything remotely revealing — you know. Something in the air tells you whether this is a place where people are genuinely present to one another, or whether they are performing a version of togetherness while keeping their actual experience carefully out of sight. You feel it in the quality of the silence before the meeting begins. In whether people’s eyes are alive or managed. In the texture of the laughter — whether it is free or whether it is social punctuation. Culture is not a document. It is not a set of values on a wall. It is a living field, and like all living fields, it communicates itself instantly to anyone paying attention.
Walk into an Apple Showroom or the lobby of a Ritz-Carlton, and the culture of innovation and service are palpable — they are broadcast by everything.
Most organizations have a culture they did not consciously choose. It accreted — from the behavior of early leaders, from which conversations were rewarded and which were quietly discouraged, from a hundred thousand small moments in which someone decided it was safer not to say the true thing, or passionately shared what really mattered instead. By the time anyone thinks to address it, the culture is already old, already defended, or already exemplified in behaviors and corporate iconography, already woven into the daily fabric of how people move through the building and through one another.
And yet we persist in believing we can change it from the outside in.
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Carl Jung observed that loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. Read that slowly in the context of organizational life. Most people in most organizations are, by Jung’s definition, lonely — not for lack of colleagues, not for lack of meetings or Slack messages or team offsites, but because the things that are genuinely alive in them have no sanctioned place to land. The real concern goes unspoken. The actual feeling is managed into something more presentable. The need beneath the behavior is never named, because naming it would require a kind of candor the culture has never made safe, much less welcome.
“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.” — Carl Jung
This is the hidden cost of the culture most organizations actually have. Not conflict, not dysfunction, not the dramatic failures that appear in case studies — but the quiet, chronic exile of the interior life from the professional life. We therefore bring so little of ourselves to work that what we do bring is far too easily overwhelmed or burned out. People doing good work, sometimes excellent work, while carrying privately the things that most need to be said, are worn down, belittled, pointlessly and at times harmfully depleted.
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M. Scott Peck, in his profound and underappreciated account of human community, described four stages that every group must pass through if it is to become something real.
The first he called pseudocommunity. It is where almost every organization lives, and where most culture programs begin and end. Pseudocommunity is pleasant. It is collegial. It is characterized by a tacit collective agreement to emphasize what we have in common and to paper over what we do not. Conflict is avoided not through resolution but through the shared, unspoken decision not to surface it. It feels like harmony. It is not. It is managed distance — and Jung’s loneliness is its private, interior face. Everyone pretends to support, like, and agree with each other.
When pseudocommunity breaks down — as it always eventually does — the group enters what Peck called chaos. The differences that were suppressed surface. People try to convert one another, to fix one another, to win. This is the moment most culture change efforts collapse. The organization either forces its way back into pseudocommunity — through a reorganization, a new initiative, a change of leadership — or it fragments. What it almost never does is find the way through. The most recurring options, instead of real evolution and growth, are to relapse into pseudocommunity or else to graft on some fresh bureaucracy or process to delay real engagement.
The way through is what Peck called emptiness. It is the most demanding passage, and the most rarely traveled. Emptiness requires the surrender of the need to fix, heal, convert, or control the other. It requires sitting with difference, with discomfort, with the weight of what has not yet been resolved, without reaching for the tools that have always provided escape. It is not passivity. It is a profound act of presence — the willingness to be with what is, rather than immediately moving to change it. It is here where we need to release those recurring canopy wants of wanting approval, wanting control, and wanting safety. We let go of the wanting and welcome the seeking, and share it collaboratively by honoring and bridging between genuine needs.
“True community is the place where Jung’s inadmissible views can finally be admitted, because the container is strong enough to hold them.”
Those who find their way through emptiness arrive at what Peck simply called true community. Not agreement. Not the absence of conflict. But the capacity to hold difference — real, sometimes painful difference — without it becoming a threat to the relationship or to the group. True community is the place where Jung’s inadmissible views can finally be admitted, because the container is strong enough to hold them. It is a gift. We achieve emptiness and yet receive community, which is on the other side of the tipping point. Here we can value differences while affirming connections, we can fight gracefully and celebrate wholeheartedly.
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The question is: what makes that passage possible? What equips a group of human beings to move through chaos without fragmenting, through emptiness without retreating?
It is not a better framework. It is not a more sophisticated methodology. It is interior work — the development of a set of capacities that most professional training never touches.
Consider what the passage through emptiness actually requires. It requires the ability to sit with one’s own discomfort without immediately suppressing it or projecting it outward. It requires the recognition that another person’s behavior, however provocative, is not the source of my feelings — that my feelings arise from my own needs, met or unmet, and that confusing the two is the beginning of every breakdown in human communication. It requires the release of the canopy wants — the deep, often unconscious drives for approval, control, and safety that govern so much of human behavior and that make genuine encounter with another person almost impossible, because we are too busy managing the interaction to pacify the wanting, rather than actually be present within it.
And it requires a new relationship with honesty. Not honesty as a decision — not the calculated act of choosing what to disclose — but honesty as recognition. The recognition of what is already present in me, what arrived before I had a chance to manage it. Honesty, in its deepest form, is simply this: that which I didn’t choose, but it’s here. The feeling that showed up uninvited. The need that has been present all along, whether named or not. This is what must be communicated if culture is to become real — not the polished version, not the professionally appropriate version, but the thing that is genuinely alive in the room. And it must be received with reverence from others. It is a dance. We truly and meaningfully respond to each other.
This is the territory that Loving Assertiveness inhabits. Not communication skills in the conventional sense — not techniques for difficult conversations or frameworks for delivering feedback — but the prior condition: the development of the human instrument itself. The capacity to know what is genuinely alive in you, and to bring it into contact with another person with honesty and with care.
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The distinction between sympathy and empathy is one place where this becomes concrete. Sympathy is my private emotional response to your experience — what I feel about what you are going through. It keeps me at the center. Empathy is something altogether different: the willingness to feel with you, to enter your experience without immediately translating it into mine. And crucially, empathy is not about the story. It is not the retelling or the analysis of what happened. It is contact with what is alive in you now — which may flow from the story, but is not the story itself. The quality of presence this requires is rare. It cannot be performed. It can only be practiced.
When these capacities are developed — when people in an organization can genuinely meet themselves and genuinely meet one another — something changes in the field. You can feel it. The same way you felt the absence of it when you walked in. And when by choosing our purpose and envisioned aspirations we liberate the enabling behaviors, cacophony evolves into a concerto.
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Culture, understood this way, is not a destination. It is not achieved by a workshop or a set of commitments or a newly articulated set of values, however thoughtfully chosen. It is a daily practice — built conversation by conversation, in the ordinary moments that accumulate into the lived experience of what it means to belong to this particular group of people. It is a fascinating inquiry; there is magic as what emerges from this crucible is both unique and precious.
A culture of possibility and connection and care is not declared into existence. It is chosen, repeatedly, by individuals who have developed the interior capacity to be honest about what is alive in them, to receive what is alive in others, and to speak the loving truth that neither flatters nor diminishes — but simply, courageously, tells it as it is, on behalf of and in service to what we most care about and are committed to.
When an organization builds that culture internally, something else happens too. It begins to bring a different quality of presence into every room it enters — with clients, with communities, with the complex human situations its work is meant to serve. The scenario conversation becomes more than a planning exercise; it is a way to set the table, and collaboration becomes co-creation and is almost sanctified as communion. The negotiation becomes more than a strategic interaction; we begin to sculpt possibility together. Something genuinely transformative becomes possible, because the people facilitating it are no longer managing their own interior life at the expense of their presence.
Jung’s loneliness begins to lift. Not because the world changed. Because the communication did. Paradigm prisons fall away, and we become prisms for loving assertiveness.
Aldous Huxley wrote:
“The choice is always ours.
Then let me choose the longest art, the hard Promethean way.
Cherishingly, to tend and feed and fan,
that inward fire, whose small precarious flame,
kindled or quenched, creates
the noble or ignoble men we are,
the worlds we live in,
and the very fate, our bright or muddy star.”
The inward fire is what Loving Assertiveness tends. The choice of culture — genuine, chosen, lived — is always ours.
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Omar Khan
Omar Khan is the creator of Loving Assertiveness and the founder of 3S Catalyst Consulting . He works with leaders and organizations across the world on the inner conditions that make genuine culture possible — and which allow us to thereby recreate the worlds we live in, and as Aldous Huxley wrote, the very fate of our bright or muddy star.
