Why Workplaces Feel Broken: The Evolutionary Mismatch We Rarely Talk About

Talks on Tuesdays: Real lectures in your favourite venues. 45-min& Q+A with Dr Anne Burlinson Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner. This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about. Event Schedule: 6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open 7pm Lecture Starts 7.45pm Q&A 8pm Talk Concludes 8.30pm Event Closes. *Please arrive close to 6.30pm A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go. Your Topic: Workplace dysfunction is the TikTok trend that never ends. It keeps trending, year after year, despite decades of leadership training, culture surveys, and restructures. In seeking out the reason, we tend to love a tidy story: the boss is bad, the culture is toxic. Dr Anne Burlinson suggests that's the comforting answer, and possibly not the accurate one. Drawing on anthropology and human ethology, she makes the case that our instincts for trust, meaning, and handling complexity were shaped over hundreds of thousands of years in small, face-to-face groups, while modern organizations changed in mere decades. What we call dysfunction is what happens when those two clocks collide, a gap anthropologists call evolutionary mismatch. And on top of it all, we now have AI to deal with: it's speeding up one of those clocks faster than ever, and it's starting to expose things about work and leadership that used to stay hidden. Your Speaker: Dr Anne Burlinson is a systems anthropologist and the founder of Human Evolution Lab in Perth. She has spent over a decade in leadership roles, has taught organizational behavior and leadership at university level, and has been through three separate organizational change processes from the inside. Her work examines how inherited biological and cultural patterns, shaped over deep time, play out in modern workplaces, building on her doctoral training at the Max Planck Society for Human Ethology. She is currently researching how "survival instinct" language is used in management thinking. Beyond her research into modern organizations, she is preparing Embodied. Excavated., an exhibition under her Art of Uncertainty research progra