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

About

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…