Write It Down

The Great Pyramid of Giza. Not only is it the oldest of the seven wonders being erected around 2560 B.C.E but it was also the tallest. The original height was 147 meters (482 feet). It was the tallest man-made structure until 1311 when the Lincoln Cathedral was finished. Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, it remains the only one.

Sometimes bigger is better.

For nearly 4000 years nothing came close to its size and scale and yet we don’t know how it was built. It took over 20 years to build and around 2.3 million stone blocks were used to build the final resting place of Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops).

How Was It Built?

No one knows. There are many theories about huge ramps of earth, bricks, and sand where the stone bricks were hauled up with rollers or levers.

Another discovery from around the same time in a rock quarry in the east of Egypt shows another ramp solution but it was steeper than expected and had recurring holes along it that would have contained wooden posts. Those posts would have been used to create a rope and pulley system. A similar rope and pulley system was used by the greeks some 2000 years later. This is known because of the well-documented information the greeks left us (some foreshadowing there.)

There are other, very crazy, theories about aliens making the Pyramid or astronomical amounts of slave labour. But the mystery still remains.

What we can tell is that the practice they used must have been so common and obvious that no one thought of writing it down because everyone knew what it was.

How does knowing this help us?

Assumptions

You run a meeting about company culture. You may think that everyone else “gets” what you are saying. They all nod and give the right feedback to you, but they don’t know what you are saying, only what they understand of what they think you mean.

Culture is ongoing, implicit, and pervasive.

Ongoing means that like a rolling stone it will keep going in the same direction until something pushes it off course.

Implicit is that everyone thinks they know what it is so no one confirms what they are thinking because why would they need to – “we all know what it means”.

Pervasive means that it touches all parts of the team/organisation.

We don’t have the information about how the ancient Eqyptian Stone Masons built the Pyramids because they thought that everyone else knew how it worked. Therefore, why would we need to write it down? And no one challenged or questioned it.

Confirmation Machines

We also love to be right. We are just 2-year-old ego monsters with a facade of maturity but we seek out being right over learning and being correct.

When discussing ideas, our confirmation bias kicks in and we seek to receive the information we want to hear and not what the other parties are saying.

Feeling right is a hell of a drug and that dopamine hit is a good time.

Building Culture

When building your culture or just focusing on better communication within the team you have to make things clear.

Write down and display the cultural values that the team has, but, and a huge but, then you have to live up to them.

How many of you have heard the intercom at an airport that the weight of your carry-on must be less than X and it will be strictly enforced. And then it isn’t. So you don’t care and you bring a massive bag that breaks all the rules.

If you set up values, you have to live by them and demonstrate them or no one will follow them.

Have people explain what they think the values are.

Seek to listen and understand what they are saying. Don’t hear what you want to hear.

Culture is difficult. Communication is difficult. It is an ongoing process. People will go with the loudest, scariest, most charismatic person so you can’t let the implicit win over the explicit it. Be clear about what you want and live that every day.

Or the values you don’t want will spread far and wide and the things you think people should know, they won’t, and that is why we don’t know how the pyramids were made.