Miguel Galaz was inducted into the CX Hall of Fame for an argument with consequences far beyond his consulting practice: the way societies organize learning around age rather than mastery is a design choice, and a poor one.

Galaz grew up across Spain, South Africa, the United States, and Portugal before settling in Lisbon. The early conversations he had in college with a friend about how education could be built differently turned, years later, into the model now scaled by the Akshar Foundation across government schools in Assam, India. The system replaces age-based progression with mastery-based progression, has older students tutor younger ones, and is being studied as a template for government adoption at scale.

The operating insight is one teacher across thirty students cannot deliver what a peer-to-peer tutoring structure can. The student who has just mastered fractions is, by some measures, the best teacher of fractions for the student about to learn them. The progression is driven by demonstrated competence, not by the calendar. The teacher’s role shifts from primary instructor to the one who designs and supervises the learning architecture.

Galaz brings the same lens to his client work. His operating principle, that you give people room to bring their own conceptual framework rather than imposing one, mirrors the educational model. What earned him induction is the consistency of holding this position from a college conversation through to a government-scale program.