W44 - Similarities Between Organizational Evolution and Human Evolution

These days we've seen the power of the elegant design called “living water.” True to its name, it acts like a powerful pump, agitating the company's largest asset pools and leaving visible disruption everywhere. At the same time, we should clearly recognize that this does not hinder the development of departmental businesses or the implementation of overall strategy. Short-term fluctuations will eventually be smoothed out, and a large organization will become more resilient.

For individuals this is mixed news. The upside is that it forces us to consider how to ensure colleagues fighting alongside us find value recognition and come to believe in that highly explosive long-term vision. The downside is that organizational evolution inevitably brings local turbulence and personal sacrifices. These are consistent with historical patterns; below I want to briefly discuss some views from Sapiens, hoping to reflect on similarities between human evolution and organizational evolution, though I may take things somewhat out of context.

A few words about Sapiens. The author Yuval Harari offers many disruptive, provocative ideas in the book. Conventional history treats humans as unique actors who create history, writing narratives of rise and fall from a human-centered perspective. Harari, however, adopts a species-level view to survey world history and outline the essence of human development. 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 is immense suffering experienced by individuals.

I'll give an example from the Agricultural Revolution. Compared with the foraging era, people after the Agricultural Revolution exhibited signs of individual degradation. Settled life produced a narrower diet, so physical robustness declined relative to foragers. With a relatively stable environment, fewer skills were needed to cope with complexity, and post-agricultural ordinary people even had smaller brain volumes than their predecessors.

But is this really a biological regression? That raises a fundamental question.

From a biological perspective,the measure of evolution is not how strong or fast individuals are, but how effectively a species spreads its genes.The familiarity of that idea reminds me of finite and infinite games.

After entering agricultural society, humans became sedentary animals and could reproduce every year, causing population growth to surge. Although individual physical fitness declined, the efficiency of gene propagation across the population increased dramatically — which is the true meaning of evolution. So Harari argues the Agricultural Revolution appears to be progress, but for individual humans it was actually a huge trap.

From ancient peasants oppressed by theocratic and royal powers to modern workers exploited by capitalism and consumerism, the pattern is the same. Each wave of revolution and leap has not fundamentally changed this model; instead, it has pushed the model's benefits and harms to more extreme levels: the more developed human imagination becomes, the deeper the suffering faced by each individual.

This conclusion is somewhat unsettling, and in his later book Homo Deus Harari seems to offer an even harsher vision of the future.