Working Origins: A Big Idea
Practical Lessons from Our Human Past
Hello. This is Chris Gray. At the time of this writing, I live in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. My product development career has included work at Honeywell, Microtest, EMC, KVH, and Cogneti.
Alongside the technical work, I’ve kept a steady focus on a basic question of teamwork: Why do people work the way we do?
Working Origins answers that question using modern science to propose a big idea—supported by a clear purpose, approach, and audience.
The Big Idea
Working Origins lists eight times in our past when a valuable workplace behavior emerged from a particular culture. Emotion & drive, social learning, trust and trade, instruction and language, myth & mediation, agility, tilling & tending, and education.
Each of these behaviors came from a series of both genetic and cultural adaptations.
The BIG IDEA is that these past cultures now act as templates for how powerful team behaviors may emerge in our own workplace. Each of these eight cultures suggest a pattern of excellent leadership.
Working Origins identifies eight such culture–behavior pairings, organized as timeline markers.
Purpose
Working Origins has two objectives.
First, to make our human past easier to understand and remember.
Second, to translate that understanding into practical leadership insights for modern teams.
Approach
My approach relies on easy-to-remember models of our human past.
The first is the Working Origins timeline—eight markers that provide the high-level view of our shared past.
Together, these markers form the acronym ESTIMATE:
E — Emotions, states, and drives (~3 million years ago)
S — Social learning (~2 million years ago)
T — Trust and trade (~1 million years ago)
I — Instruction and language (~750 thousand years ago)
M — Myth and mediation (~350 thousand years ago)
A — Agile cultures (~70 thousand years ago)
T — Tilling and tending (~12 thousand years ago)
E — Education and writing (~5 thousand years ago)
Each marker represents a cultural pattern that supports a specific kind of behavior still visible in today’s teams.
The second model is the matryoshka, or Russian nesting doll. It illustrates how earlier capabilities remain embedded within later ones. Each layer of our past still operates within us today.
The third model is the Taijitu, often called the yin–yang symbol. It represents the dynamic relationship between culture and behavior—how behavior generates culture, and culture in turn shapes behavior.
Together, these models offer a practical way to understand how the modern workplace came to be.
Audience
Working Origins is written for working people—across roles, industries, and levels of experience. This includes church groups, sports teams, gardening clubs, or businesses.
While there is a focus on the business workplace, the leadership lessons apply broadly.
The way we work together presents real challenges. There is real conflict, distrust, resistance to change, status friction, abuse, burnout, and more.
Working Origins offers a grounded framework for understanding and improving how teams function under those conditions.
Working Origins Motto
Each post ends with the Working Origins motto: Working together well is the most human thing we ever do.
This reminds us that our humanity literally began with the first workplace. Roughly 3 million years ago, early humans used tools to make a better living. They passed the key skills to their children.
That is the beginning of culture, and in a very real sense, it is the beginning of the workplace.
Every point on the Working Origins timeline builds from that foundation.
Science
Working Origins draws from three primary fields of study.
Human biology, including genetics, cranial development, and paleoneurology, helps explain how our bodies and brains evolved over time.
Archaeology and related disciplines reveal how people lived—through tools, art, and material culture across time and place.
Behavioral sciences act as an interdisciplinary bridge—linking material culture (tools, symbols, skills) to inferred brain function and structure. These include cognitive archaeology, paleoneurology and developmental psychology. These researchers help us understand how culture shapes behavior—how we think, feel, and act.