Your TEEMING Transformation with Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker, September 12th – Oct 3rd 2023
New Dates: Tuesdays, Sept 12, 19, 26, Oct 3 at 10 AM Pacific
Location: On Zoom All sessions will be recorded (except breakout groups)
Zoom Information: Once you have registered for this program, please ensure you are signed in to your account and return to this page to access the “Get Your Zoom Link” lesson at the very bottom of the page. The Zoom link will be added 2 weeks before the sessions. You will then also get an email once the Zoom has been created. You must register separately on Zoom to get your participation codes and reminder emails.
Faculty: Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker
Academic Credit: Masters – 1 credit; Doctoral – 1 credit
Enrollment: This course is available both to enrolled students and lifelong learners.
Email our Registrar Veronica Saldias for more information.
The Endangered Generation with Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker | Trailer
Your TEEMING Transformation! Info-Video
Course Description:
Most decision-making today is governed by global mandates for growth and profit, the imperative to scale. We achieve this by suppressing deviation through best practices, standard operating procedures, and quality control. But diversity is the raw feedstock of evolutionary potential, and the effects of our Machine Mind straitjackets are calamitous: declining resilience, eroding potential, panic, and powerlessness.
We know we need to change the way we live, but how?
The good news is life creates conditions conducive to life: the answers are in our bones, around and within us, in the earth beneath our feet and all that springs from it.
But while other living things seem to do this without thinking, “human being” requires a great deal of conscious and collective effort. Our ancestors had tens of thousands of generations of expertise for this, but most of us no longer notice evolutionary processes or ecological relationships. It’s hard to even know what kind of animals we are meant to be. Made to compete for grades, fame, and promotions. Our time-honored ways of collaborating and growing collective value have been severed and erased.
How can we hope to think straight in when we’re three-fourths blind to possibility and reality?
This course presents simple, proven evolutionary insights that will change the way you see, think, and design, so you can revitalize potential wherever diversity has been suppressed, flows obstructed, or connection severed by mechanistic thinking, in order to grow conditions conducive to life.
What You’ll Get
Four 90 minute interactive sessions, pre-recorded lectures, reading assignments, videos, and unique frameworks that help you:
- align your work with life and human nature
- grow collective intelligence and swarm creativity
- increase collaboration, trust, and reciprocity
- grow flexibility, adaptability, agility
- expand capacity and develop unique potential
- grow resilience and returns for your community to reinvest
- be more purposeful, responsive, effective
- grow more meaningful work and relationships
- teem up for lasting value
- cultivate and protect generous communities and ecologies
- grow true wealth for seven generations
Machine Mind is over if you want it!
Faculty:
Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker is a well-known Evolutionary Anthropologist whose work on social structure and speciation in wild baboons is the Wikipedia entry for hybridization in primates and our best model for human evolution. Her lifetime efforts are focused on understanding the way people like to live, so we may live to our inherent potential. Can we rehumanize life and work, revitalize communities and organizations, and regenerate our human roles in the ecosystems life depends on?
Tamsin has undergraduate degrees in Botany and Art from the University of California at Santa Cruz (1991), a Masters (1996) and Ph.D. (1999) in Biological Anthropology from New York University, and was one of the first recipients of the M.S. in Biomimicry from Arizona State University in 2015.
She is the Bestselling Author of TEEMING: How Nature’s Oldest Teams Adapt and Thrive, regarded as the defining work in Organizational Biomimicry, now in its second printing. Tamsin is the Dean of Geoversity’s School for Biocultural Leadership in Panama, and Director and Founder of the Borrego Institute for Living Design in Borrego Springs in San Diego County, providing immersive outdoor education and biocultural leadership development to humans ready for rehabilitation and reintroduction to the wild. She is the Founder and Principal at TEEMLab, LLC, providing transformational education and consulting for organizations, and pioneers regenerative biocultural models in partnership with The Four Cups and Seeding Change as Living Design Spaces, LLC. She recently co-starred in the feature-length documentary The Endangered Generation, which follows her transcontinental trek across the Americas with Guna climate activist Agar Iglenia Tejada.
Weekly Sessions: Your TEEMING Transformation
Week 1: Life Mind
Life’s processes are inherently effective, adaptive, and resilient, sculpted over evolutionary time by the same constraints we face every day. What holds our lives, organizations, and communities back from that inherent teeming potential? How can we break free of Machine Mind to live our lives to the fullest while growing widening possibility? This session awakens your curiosity, creativity, and skills of observation––the first steps to dispelling our well-trained barriers to life mind. Change the way you see, and thus what is possible.
Week 2: Teeming Together
Superorganism communities like ants and bees consist of many unique, diverse, and independently creative individuals that fundamentally depend on one another to succeed from one generation to the next. Our own societies are strikingly ant-like, though we are certainly prone to chimp-like states! How do nature’s most successful organizations put collective intelligence, swarm creativity, and distributed leadership to work to grow unstoppable team-of-teams that eat change (and chimps) for breakfast?
Week 3: Chimp Mind
Members of a hive can amass great wealth for members, but this inevitably attracts deceptive parasites looking to steal their hard-won food and labor. Vigilant individuals work to protect the colony from entry. Other individuals work in the nursery, caring for the future while consistently maintaining equitable use of the colony’s hard-won wealth. How does this Distributed Leadership grow and protect the hive’s common value? How can we reactivate such patterns in our own communities and organizations?
Week 4: Living Design
Collapsing world systems seem beyond our ability to affect. Despair is easy. But in reality, the answers are everywhere around us––in the earth beneath our feet and all that springs from it. Tiny miracles blossom underfoot, if we have eyes to see. What eroded, severed, blocked, or diluted processes and patterns struggle to reappear beneath it all? What flows, relationships, and meanings could be restored? Discover the power of Biocultural Renaissance and land-people reciprocity to reawaken our shared purpose, commitment, imagination, and love.
Required Reading
TEEMING: How Nature’s Oldest Teams Adapt and Thrive by Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker
End of course essay on describing the impact on your life of studying this material
For BA students – 6-9 pages in length
For MA students – 10-15 pages in length
For PhD students – 20-25 pages in length
