Why the Future of Work Looks More Like Our Past

The Paradox of Progress

We live in an age where organizations stretch across continents, powered by artificial intelligence systems that can process in seconds what once took teams of humans months. The rhetoric of growth still dominates: bigger companies, bigger valuations, bigger teams. But something curious has happened. The companies that are capturing attention — and markets — are not the ones hiring armies of people. They are the ones staying lean, cohesive, and strangely familiar in form.

This is the paradox of progress: the future of work is beginning to look a lot like its past.

At the heart of this paradox is a finding that comes not from management science, but from evolutionary anthropology. Humans have a natural limit to the number of relationships we can maintain. That limit is not cultural, and it is not a matter of preference. It is biological.

From Apes to Humans: The Social Brain Hypothesis

Robin Dunbar’s early research in the 1990s began not with humans, but with apes. He noticed a correlation: primate species with larger neocortexes could maintain larger social groups. The brain was the bottleneck. Grooming among primates — not just for hygiene, but for reinforcing social bonds — was the behavioral anchor of this discovery. The more neocortex, the more grooming partners, the larger the group.

Extrapolating this finding to humans, Dunbar estimated our own “cognitive ceiling” for stable social relationships at around 150. This became known as Dunbar’s Number. What is striking is how consistently this number appears across history: the size of hunter-gatherer clans, Neolithic villages, military units, even effective business teams of the modern era.

Dunbar’s insights fed into the Social Brain Hypothesis: the idea that human intelligence evolved not primarily for abstract reasoning or tool-making, but for managing complex webs of relationships. As Dunbar himself put it, “The neocortex is an engine of gossip.”

Other researchers have layered evidence onto this view. Michael Tomasello showed that humans are uniquely cooperative, built for shared intentionality — aligning our minds around common goals. Neuroimaging studies confirm that the same prefrontal regions involved in planning and working memory also underwrite social cognition and theory of mind. Joseph Henrich has argued that our species’ success depends less on individual intelligence and more on cultural learning and group-based cooperation.

In short: the human brain is not designed for sprawling bureaucracies. It is designed for tribes.

When We Exceed Our Limits

Of course, humans did eventually grow beyond tribes. Roughly 12,000 years ago, the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to permanent settlements far larger than any hunter-gatherer band. Once populations exceeded Dunbar’s threshold, the informal regulators of cooperation — gossip, reciprocity, reputation — could no longer maintain cohesion.

The solution was cultural innovation: the invention of external systems of prosociality. Religion, ritual, and shared myth emerged to hold large groups together. Anthropologist Ara Norenzayan has shown how “Big Gods” — powerful, moralizing deities — expanded cooperation by enforcing moral codes in groups far larger than the brain alone could sustain. Dr. Nick Hobson’s research describes how rituals, costly displays, and moral narratives bound strangers together into functioning collectives.

These were ingenious workarounds. Belief systems substituted for familiarity. Shared ceremonies substituted for face-to-face accountability. And while they extended the reach of cooperation, they came with costs: rigidity, conformity, and a reliance on authority.

Modern organizations mirror this same trajectory, but without the effectiveness of religion and ritual. Once teams exceed the Dunbar threshold, bureaucracy fills the gap. Policy manuals, compliance systems, and procedural checklists act as attempts at mass coordination. They allow strangers to collaborate, but at the expense of agility and innovation. Like religion in early civilization,

bureaucracy becomes necessary once human limits are surpassed. But it is a poor substitute for the intimacy and trust of smaller groups.

Why Group Size Matters for Work

This is why the design of teams is not just an organizational question — it is a psychological and biological one. When groups grow beyond 150, relationships shift from personal to transactional. Reputation weakens. Informal trust evaporates, replaced by oversight and process. And with oversight comes bureaucracy.

But within human limits, something else happens. Teams below the Dunbar threshold don’t just enjoy more trust — they unlock a set of psychological conditions that large companies spend millions trying to engineer.

Identity clarity

In human-scale teams, people understand their role not just in abstraction but in relation to the whole. They know how their contribution connects to others, how it advances the mission, and where responsibility begins and ends.

This clarity reduces duplication of effort and the defensive “turf wars” that plague larger organizations. When everyone can see where they fit, less energy is wasted protecting boundaries or jockeying for visibility. Instead, energy is channeled into the work itself. Small groups make it possible to “map the tribe” in your head — something impossible in sprawling bureaucracies.

Accountability

In groups under 150, reputational consequences are immediate and visible. Everyone knows who is pulling their weight and who is coasting. The informal checks of peer observation make free-riding, politicking, or withholding information harder to sustain. 

This is not accountability imposed through surveillance or process; it is accountability born of familiarity. When colleagues are not abstract entities but people you interact with daily, the cost of letting the group down is personal. As Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-winning research on the governance of commons showed, small communities regulate themselves remarkably well through trust and reciprocity, without the heavy hand of external enforcement.

Cognitive synchrony

‍Smaller groups are better at developing and sustaining shared mental models, or what organizational scientists call team mental models. These are the invisible maps that allow members to predict each other’s behavior, anticipate needs, and coordinate under uncertainty. When a team shares these models, decisions are quicker, coordination is smoother, and adaptation to shocks comes naturally. 

Cognitive synchrony is nearly impossible in bloated organizations, where fragmented silos prevent the formation of a common operating picture. In compact, well-bonded groups, people literally “think together.” This synchrony is the basis of agility in high-performing teams, from elite military units to AI-native startups.

Psychological safety

‍Edmondson’s research shows that innovation thrives when people feel safe enough to raise concerns, admit mistakes, and challenge assumptions. Psychological safety emerges more naturally in smaller groups, where familiarity breeds trust and where people know they will be heard. In large organizations, anonymity and hierarchy often suppress candor. In human-scale groups, the opposite occurs: people feel accountable to the group, and that very accountability creates courage. Speaking up is not a risk — it is a responsibility. When psychological safety is present, teams experiment more, learn faster, and innovate with less fear of failure.

These four dynamics are not “soft” benefits. They are the infrastructure of high performance. Without them, organizations default to structures and systems: more meetings, more policies, more disengagement. People don’t stop caring — they stop feeling connected.

Lessons from Organizations That Honor the Limit

Some organizations have long intuited this truth. W.L. Gore & Associates — maker of Gore-Tex — has structured its workforce into autonomous units of no more than 150. When a unit grows larger, they split it, even if it means opening a new facility. Leadership emerges not from title but from credibility and followership. The result: decades of sustained innovation and one of the most admired workplace cultures in the world.

The military, too, has respected these boundaries for centuries, structuring platoons and companies around numbers that reflect the same human limits. When survival depends on coordination, exceeding cognitive capacity is not an option.

And now, AI-native companies are rediscovering the principle in a new context. Startups like Gamma are scaling globally with teams counted in dozens, not hundreds. Their leverage comes not from swelling headcount, but from alignment — small, bonded groups amplified by technology.

The Irony of the “Fifth Tribe”

The irony is that the further into the future we go, the further back we seem to look. Tomorrow’s most effective organizations will not resemble the sprawling corporations of the twentieth century. They will look more like the villages and tribes of the Neolithic.

This is the spirit of the Fifth Tribe:

• Technology does not erase biology.
• Trust scales best when it is human in scope.
• The most advanced organizations will reconnect us to our deepest evolutionary design.

AI doesn’t dissolve Dunbar’s Number. It sharpens it. When machines handle the bureaucratic overhead, what remains is what only humans can do: coordinate, create, and commit. But those capacities flourish only within human limits.

A Call to Leaders

The lesson for leaders is clear. If you want speed, innovation, and resilience, don’t build bigger teams and hope to control them with more process. Design for human scale. Respect the boundary of 150.

The future belongs to organizations that embrace the paradox: technologically infinite, biologically bounded. Future-facing, but ancient in structure.

This is our manifesto at Labs150:

• Human limits are not flaws but design principles.
• Small, well-bonded teams are the true engines of performance.
• The future of work lies not in breaking our biology, but in honoring it.

The most advanced organizations of tomorrow will thrive not by outgrowing what we are, but by remembering it.

The future looks ancient.