My Greatest Learnings This Year

Wow, what a year 2024 has been! In 2024, elections have taken place in over?60 countries, involving approximately?2 billion voters, which represents approximately a quarter of the global population.?No wonder we are all feeling exhausted and at least a little unsettled.

This time of year is a great opportunity to reflect on the year past, the challenges and the learnings.

The Magic Third

I have been working in the governance space for over ten years, advising boards and founders on how to set up a high-performance, value-adding board, but had not realised until this year why diversity of culture and thought has such a positive impact when done properly and why the voice of a particular stakeholder group can be so overpowering when not.

Malcolm Gladwell followed up on his groundbreaking book ‘The Tipping Point’ with more of a warning than a sequel. His latest book is titled “The Revenge of the Tipping Point”. It goes through various case studies and examples describing how and when various ‘tipping points’ occur and the pros and cons of each, or how they can be used to create good and not so good outcomes.

One chapter that really caught my attention was Chapter 4 – ‘The Magic Third’.

Gladwell’s research has identified that a very powerful tipping point occurs then a group of people of a particular culture in an organisation reach and exceed one third of the total members i.e. there is a significant difference between making up “2 out of 10” and “3 out of 10”. If a group makes up less than 30%, it doesn’t influence the culture or direction of the organisation unless those individuals are exceptional because they can be easily ignored or put into a stereotypical box. If more than 30%, the group is seen as a 'group' and is seen and heard when opinion is sought. When you are a small minority, you are seen as a ‘token’. When you make up more than 30% you are seen as a ‘team’.

Professor Mervyn King SC and the King series of governance codes, principles and practices (the current iteration being King IV?) advocates that a board should be made up of a majority of non-executive directors and that the majority of the non-executives should be independent. If we take the simple example of a board of five members, that means that two should be executives (typically the CEO and CFO), two should be INEDs (Independent Non-Executive Directors) (ideally one of whom is the chairperson) and one should be an NED (Non-Executive Director) who is often a shareholder, or retired founder.

In this example, the execs make up 40% of the board, which is greater than 30%, so they have an influence, but the NEDs with 60% are dominant and can carry the vote if there is a lack of consensus. Of the NEDs, 66.67% are independent and 33.33% are not, so the independent perspective is dominant, while the NED voice is still heard.

What this means is that the culture of the board and the discussions that take place are less likely to become very operational, because non-execs carry the majority, while the exec team carries enough weight to not be ignored. Also, in this set-up, shareholders can never have so strong a voice that they completely dominate, even if all execs (2) and the NED (1) are shareholders, because INEDs make-up more than 30% of the rest.

Looking at this from the perspective of women having an influence on a board, if the board has nine members, then at least three need to be women. If it has six members, then at least two need to be women. The 30% Club is pushing for a minimum of 30% female representation at board and C-suite level because it is a ‘tipping point’. Anything less than 30% may as well be zero.

Human Civilisation Is Much Older Than We Thought

On a completely different topic, my biggest learning this year is more of a shift from curiosity, to faith, to belief that has been a culmination of reading and watching TV programs and YouTube videos for many years. What is becoming more and more apparent and more and more accepted amongst scientists and engineers (it appears that there is still a way to go before there will be consensus among archaeologists) is that a very sophisticated society, which used technology that we still cannot reproduce, existed before a great cataclysm that occurred approximately 12,000 years ago. Even more interesting is that theories are also being proposed that this is a cycle that has happened multiple times over tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years.

Growing up, I remember there being various 'pseudo scientists' who proposed that the great pyramids and the sphynx were far older than commonly believed and that there was a place called Atlantis that existed before a great flood, but there was scant physical or scientific evidence.

What has been uncovered more and more in recent years are discoveries of very similar sophisticated civilisations and technologies, and ancient stories of a great flood, that are common to all cultures around the world. Much of the physical evidence has been found under water, or meters of sediment, which always seemed to me to be quite an obvious place to look if there had been a huge tsunami-type flood and an increase in sea levels. But I’m an engineer not an esteemed archaeologist, so what do I know?

All of this information was all well and good, but I was sceptical because I had never knowingly seen any evidence myself.

By pure luck I was given the opportunity to visit Cairo this year and took the opportunity with both hands. I spent two days with a guide visiting as many sites as I could, near and around the city, with the highlights being the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities and entering the Great Pyramid (also known as the “Pyramid of Cheops”). There have been many theories about what the Great Pyramid was built for, but the two opposite ends of the scale are that it was either a burial site for the pharaoh Khufu built by dragging stones over the ground, or some kind of energy generator that was built using sophisticated machinery and still unknown technologies for cutting and moving huge blocks of very hard stone (mostly high quartz content granite) with ease.

When I arrived at the site, my first observations were that the biggest stones were indeed exceptionally flat and level and fitted together with incredible precision over long distances. Also, the blocks at the base were bigger, made of far harder stone and more accurately fitted than those further up. The blocks further up were much more weathered, of softer stone, smaller, and less well fitted as if they had been added later as some form of repair. It also wasn’t the case that the stones got smaller above the base throughout the structure. The stones all the way up the gallery and in the “King's Chamber” are huge, made of granite and expertly fitted together.

Most remarkable was that some of the largest stones at the base and visible inside the structure showed circular saw cut marks, either as straight, parallel lines, or semi-circular marks – exactly like the marks I would expect to see after cutting or smoothing a piece of wood using my table saw at home. When inside the structure, it also felt far too deliberate, the passages far too steep and small, or far too big (e.g. the gallery is like a cathedral but the steep entrance passage is low and narrow) to be used to bring pharaoh’s treasure into the building. There is also absolutely no adornment, carving or paint on any of the surfaces, unlike every other pharaoh’s tomb in Egypt. This was a structure built for a purpose far more specialised than keeping a coffin safe.

Visiting the museum in Cairo only served to confirm what I had seen at the pyramids. Over and over again, pre-dynastic artefacts are made with the hardest stone and are made to the finest tolerances and symmetry. Some looked as though they were cut on a lathe, while other shapes are so complicated that they would be incredibly difficult to produce on anything less than a resin 3D printer. There is also an example of an unfinished stone box that clearly shows two semicircular cuts made by 1m diameter saws cutting from both sides of the block simultaneously. The machine’s cut clearly went off track and a piece that was intended to be the lid of the box broke off. No-one with a chisel could have made a 50cm deep, 2-3mm wide cut into a block of granite so quickly that they went 1cm off track before they could stop cutting. They needed to be using a high-speed circular saw with a diamond coated edge and also some means for softening the stone because the cut rate was far higher than we can produce with modern machines.

There have been many other learnings that I do not have the space for in this article, but I can highly recommend the power and importance of sitting down and reflecting on what have been your biggest learnings in 2024, and also what have been your proudest moments. They can be quickly forgotten and lost under the sands of time.