W44 - Similarities Between Organizational Evolution and Human Evolution

These days we've witnessed the power of the elegant design called "living water." As its name suggests, it acts like a powerful pump, churning the company's largest pool of assets and leaving things looking battered everywhere. At the same time, we should clearly recognize that this does not impede the development of department-level business or the execution of the overall strategy. Short-term volatility will eventually subside, and a large organization will become more resilient.

For individuals, the effects are mixed. The upside is that it forces us to consider how to ensure teammates fighting alongside us feel valued and believe in that distant, explosively promising vision. The downside is that organizational evolution inevitably brings localized turbulence and personal sacrifices. These patterns follow historical logic. Below I want to briefly discuss some ideas from Sapiens, reflecting on the parallels between human evolution and organizational evolution, though I may quote selectively.

A few words about Sapiens. The author Yuval Noah Harari offers many provocative, disruptive ideas in the book. Conventional history treats humans as unique agents who make history, narrating rise and fall from that perspective. Harari instead adopts a species-level lens to survey world history and outline the essence of human progress. He divides human evolution into four phases: the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the unification of humankind, and the Scientific Revolution.

One of the book's most important points is:Behind every revolution and leap, there are immense sufferings endured by individual humans.

I'll give the Agricultural Revolution as an example. Compared with the foraging era, people after the Agricultural Revolution displayed a degree of individual degradation. Settled life produced a narrower diet, so physical robustness declined relative to foragers. A more predictable environment reduced the need for diverse survival skills. As a result, ordinary people after the Agricultural Revolution even had smaller brain volumes than their predecessors.

But does this mean biological evolution has regressed? That raises a fundamental question.

From a biological standpoint,the measure of evolution is not how strong or fast individuals are but how widely the species' genes are propagated.The familiar resonance here reminds me of finite and infinite games.

Once humanity entered agricultural societies and became sedentary, people could reproduce year after year and population growth soared. Although individuals' physical condition declined, the efficiency of gene transmission across the group increased dramatically — which is the true meaning of evolution. Therefore Harari argues the Agricultural Revolution appears to be progress but, for individuals, it was actually a great trap.

From ancient peasants oppressed by theocratic and royal power to modern workers exploited by capitalism and consumerism, the pattern persists. Each revolution and leap fails to fundamentally change this model; instead it magnifies the model's benefits and harms. The more developed human imagination becomes, the deeper the suffering each individual may face.

This conclusion is somewhat unsettling, and in his subsequent book Homo Deus, Harari seems to sketch an even harsher future.