Agile Cultures
I graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering some years ago. My studies covered historical figures like James Watt, who helped to reshape the modern world. His story is a good introduction to this post on Agile Cultures.
Watt was slight, frequently ill, socially awkward, and prone to depression. In 1772 he inherited the debt of his partner John Roebuck after their steam engine venture collapsed. Years earlier, while repairing a model engine at the University of Glasgow, Watt had recognized a major inefficiency in the Newcomen engine design and developed the separate condenser to solve it. Watt’s great insight was the basis for his venture with Roebuck.
But as many of us painfully learn, good insight is not the same as business success. Watt’s engines were expensive and hard to build. Manufacturing lacked consistency, and investors hesitated.
Matthew Boulton saw something different. He was an accomplished manufacturer at the Soho Manufactory in Birmingham, and Boulton understood organization and scale. He met Watt at a meeting of the Lunar Society, an informal club of scientists, industrialists, and thinkers. Recognizing what the engine could become, he acquired Roebuck’s share of Watt’s patent. Where Watt saw a better machine, Boulton saw a newly powered world.
Under Boulton’s leadership, production stabilized, installations expanded, and financing improved. Steam power shifted to an industrial foundation. Mines drained faster, mills ran more reliably, and power was no longer tied exclusively to rivers or muscle. Within a generation, the improved steam engine spread across Britain and beyond, helping to drive the Industrial Revolution.
Watt’s name remains with us each time we purchase a light bulb measured in watts, a quiet reminder of his work.
Steam engines existed before Watt. Mechanical knowledge was not new. What changed was vision—the ability to imagine a transformed future and reorganize people and effort around it.
But that ability to envision future possibilities did not begin in Birmingham. It began long ago, and is part of a different story.
Deep Origins
Between roughly 90,000 and 12,000 years ago, Homo sapiens expanded from East Africa across the Middle East, into Eurasia, Australia, and eventually the Americas. This movement unfolded across glacial cycles, shifting coastlines, and many ecosystems. Groups encountered new animals and plants, extreme climates, deserts, tundras, jungles, and other hominin populations.
Other hominin populations already possessed fire, tools, language, trade networks, and early belief systems. These ingredients of culture were widely present. Yet Homo sapiens emerged out of East Africa and soon migrated throughout the world. They demonstrated a novel form of cultural agility in response to many new challenges.
Hunters became fishers along coasts. Toolmakers adapted to bone and antler. Clothing was tailored for cold climates. Nets, needles, lamps, and storage pits appeared. Notched bones and symbolic markings preserved memory across seasons. These things required anticipation—preparing for winter, spring floods, and animal migrations. They adapted to new foods and preparations. They buried their dead with grave goods to prepare for the unseen afterlife.
They imagined opportunities beyond the horizon.
Biological Foundations
The out-of-Africa populations reflect key biological adaptations. Interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans increased genetic diversity. Brain systems supporting episodic memory, emotional integration, and social cognition became more developed and more coordinated.
Humans demonstrated stronger recall of past experience and greater ability to project possible futures. Symbolic thought expanded. Childhood lengthened, allowing extended learning and social development. Interestingly, overall brain size declined slightly after about 35,000 years ago while neural efficiency improved. Integration mattered more than sheer volume.
Biology alone did not cause expansion, but it supported flexibility, foresight, and coordination at the level of communities.
Core Behaviors of Agile Cultures
Four behaviors are evidenced by diasporic Homo sapiens during this period of expansion from 90,000 to 12,000 years ago.
Roles within a group were specialized but not fixed. Responsibility changed as conditions changed.
Exploration was driven by curiosity, and improved episodic memory preserved the lessons of success and failure.
Planning extended well beyond our immediate need, incorporating seasonal cycles, migration timing, and preparation of tools and materials.
Shared ideas - visions of a better future - unified group effort. Our human ancestors gathered in the firelight each evening and used language, arts, and symbols to tell stories of the past and envision a better future.
The Foundation Layers
Agile cultures did not arise in isolation. As described by the Working Origins timeline, they were built on earlier layers of emotions and drives, social learning, trust and trade, instruction and iconic language, myth and mediation. By 90,000 years ago, Homo sapiens already had these core foundations.
What emerged was a better integration of biological capacities. Improved memory and foresight aligned with cultural practices of exploration, planning, and shared meaning. Flexible communities formed and crossed ecological barriers, carrying human presence across the globe.
These same capacities later supported the domestication of plants and animals in the Neolithic period. Humans shifted from moving through landscapes to reshaping them. Over time, expanding coordination and symbolic systems laid the groundwork for settled societies and eventually civilizations. Agile cultures became the platform for everything that followed.
In the Modern Workplace
Seen in this light, Watt and Boulton were expressing something ancient. Watt explored, experimented, and refined solutions through careful planning. He understood his role. Boulton understood his own and respected the distinction. He brought manufacturing discipline, financial structure, and networks, but most importantly he contributed a broader vision.
A shared vision helped smooth over points of friction, guide the progress, and scale up to real growth.
Modern organizations often resemble Watt before Boulton. Skilled people, functioning systems, and genuine innovation are present. Curiosity exists. Planning occurs. Experience accumulates. What may be missing is alignment around a credible future.
Agile cultures emerge when exploration, role clarity, and planning are coordinated by a shared vision of a better way.
Takeaways
I feel a personal connection to those who read Working Origins. Some of you are preparing for a career, some are well into one, and some are struggling to find direction. Many people feel that these are uniquely turbulent times. Political division, ecological change, fake news, economic uncertainty, artificial intelligence, gene editing, remote work, and social media can make the future seem uncertain.
My advice is simple. We are built to handle change.
From 90,000 years ago, humans learned to navigate glacial cycles, droughts, shifting coastlines, sweeping technological change, many defeats, many conquests, and long migrations. Today’s disruptions are not very different from those we have overcome.
As leaders, we should cultivate the four core behaviors of an agile culture when adapting to a new situation or set of conditions.
First, new and differentiated roles should be expected.
Second, encourage exploration of new ideas, assessing the efforts for potential success and failure.
Third, planning should focus on new tools, materials, and training.
Fourth, a vision of a future time and place should be widely shared within the group and harmonized with their feedback. This vision can unify and give direction to the roles, explorations, and planning.
These four group behaviors were well expressed by the agile cultures of our human ancestors, and the biological foundations within us today.
We should be mindful of the prior foundations of social cohesion, trust, language, and belief. These are also well expressed in a healthy workplace culture.
Agility is not new to us. It is one of our oldest strengths.
Please take comfort - hopefully - in the Working Origins motto: Working together well is the most human thing we ever do.
For more information on this post, see the Working Origins Library and these recommendations…
For more information…
The Evolution of Paleolithic Technologies by Steven L. Kuhn (2021) — for how shifting tools and techniques reflect adaptable human behavior across changing environments.
Neanderthal Man by Svante Pääbo (2014) — for insight into our interaction with Neanderthals and what genetics reveals about shared histories.
Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich (2018) — for a clear account of human migrations and population mixing revealed through ancient DNA.
Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff (2022) — for the peopling of the Americas and the long arc of migration into new worlds.