Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker
Evolutionary Anthropologist and bestselling author of TEEMING: How Nature’s Oldest Teams Adapt and Thrive
Founder TEEM Innovation Group, LLC dba TEEMLab
Director and Founder Borrego Institute for Living Design, California 501(c)3 pending
Dean School for Biocultural Leadership, Geoversity Foundation, California 501(c)3
Tamsin is an evolutionary futurist and innovator known for her original research on baboon social structure and speciation and comparative applications to human organization and evolution, past and future.
Inspired by her mentor Dr. Robert Trivers, a towering figure in evolutionary biology who developed parental investment theory and the basis for sociobiology, Tamsin’s work studying speciation in wild populations of hybridizing baboons with Dr. Clifford Jolly remains a key reference for modeling speciation and gene introgression among ancient humans. Alternately living in a tent in Ethiopia’s Awash National Park and a genetics lab at New York University, she studied the relationship between individual behavior, mate choice, cooperation, and the speciation process itself in a social primate whose evolutionary history mirrors our own. With more than a thousand baboons sampled over a 25 year time span, this was the longest running and most complete population genetic study for non-humans at that time and developed important technologies and methodologies and many exciting findings.
Today, this work informs Tamsin’s work with communities and organizations.
TEEMING: How Nature’s Oldest Teams Adapt and Thrive
“the most important business book of the 21st century“
–YPO/Entrepreneur Organization founder Verne Harnish
Tamsin is widely regarded as the progenitor of Organizational Biomimicry – organizational design drawn from deep patterns in evolutionary biology, anthropology, sociobiology, and behavioral ecology, designed to release and empower evolutionary, and human, potential. Now in its second edition, the book was a bestseller in Organizational Learning, Environmental Economics, and Animal Behavior, and continues to grow readership with leaders worldwide.
A Biomimicry pioneer, Tamsin was an early contributor to the San Diego Zoo’s Bioinspiration Initiatives and the author of The Biomimicry Manual, a regular feature for Inhabitat magazine and later published as Letters from the Tangled Bank. She was the first Biological Strategy Editor for the Biomimicry Institute’s AskNature database, inaugural contributor and editor for their blog AskingNature, and one of the first cohort receiving the Masters in Biomimicry from Arizona State University. She has provided Biomimicry innovation and strategy for a Fortune 500 clientele for over a decade, both as an independent Biologist at the Design Table for industry pioneer Biomimicry 3.8, co-founded by Janine Benyus and Dayna Baumeister, and through her company TEEM Innovation Group.
In 2018 Tamsin was appointed Dean of the School for Biocultural Leadership at Geoversity, a 30-year 501(c)3 in Panama working to grow biocultural habitats and leaders, founded by Oxfam America founder Nathan Gray. Her curriculum for biocultural leadership, developed with Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice faculty-member Chris Lopez, is the centerpiece of “Gap Year at GeoSchool” programming and the core of our virtual and in-person Nature of place programming at The BILD.
The Endangered Generation? is a full-length feature documentary from Cannes-award winning Australian filmmaker Celeste Geer, following Tamsin and Guna activist Agar Tejada as they travel through the semi-autonomous Panamanian Guna Yala territory, speaking with the chiefs about their experiences of climate change.
Narrated by Academy Award winner Laura Dern, the film highlights scientists and First Nations leaders working together to restore the systems life depends on.
Tamsin’s new book, The TEEMING Transformation, anchors her findings from TEEMING to actionable methodologies and frameworks that help leaders of organizations and communties evolve their unique potential of people and Place through Living Design.
Developed with Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice faculty-member Chris Lopez and based on traditional and Western ecological knowledge and practices of Place, the book informs and supports Your TEEMING Transformation, a 3-track 9-module developmental learning journey designed to help purpose-led members of communities, organizations, and movements teem up to regenerate connect the unique nature and potential of Place.
Join Tamsin and the movement for Living Design.
“All human endeavors are biological, yet most leaders have little or no understanding of living systems or even human nature.
How can we hope to succeed if we don’t even know our nature?”