Human Centric Organization Design : A Perspective from Evolutionary Psychology

The core tenet of evolutionary psychology is that the human mind features multiple adaptations to ancestral environments that were social and involved living in groups. To be truly human-centric, the designers of modern organizations need to accept and incorporate this fact. Human-centric organization design does not necessarily mean either pandering to human preferences and limitations nor overruling or ignoring them. Rather it calls for organization design that begins with a robust understanding of these aspects. We first describe the designs of the social groups in which human beings spent a significant amount of their evolutionary history- our “ancestral organizations”. We then review the evidence of humans possessing adaptations that appear to support the functioning and design of the ancestral organizations they once lived in. Finally, we draw implications of these adaptations for each of the core elements of organization design – task division, task allocation, provision of rewards, provision of information and exception management. In doing so, we build a blueprint for what a human-centred organization design might look like, particularly in an era in which artificial intelligence technologies are rapidly making inroads into organizations