The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

by Todd Rose

The notion of a standard colon cancer pathway remained the consensus view among scientists until researchers, armed with more data and powerful methods, began focusing on individual patients instead of averages. They found, to their surprise, that the standard pathway only accounted for 7 percent of actual cases of colon cancer. Instead, researchers discovered there were multiple forms of colon cancer, each with its own developmental pathway—pathways that had been concealed by scientists’ belief that there must be a standard pathway.

The fact that there is not a single, normal pathway for any type of human development—biological, mental, moral, or professional—forms the basis of the third principle of individuality, the pathways principle. This principle makes two important affirmations. First, in all aspects of our lives and for any given goal, there are many, equally valid ways to reach the same outcome; and, second, the particular pathway that is optimal for you depends on your own individuality.

The first point is rooted in a powerful concept from the mathematics of complex systems called equifinality.19 According to equifinality, in any multidimensional system that involves changes over time—like a person interacting with the world—there are always multiple ways to get from point A to point B. The second point is derived from the science of the individual, which tells us that, because of the jaggedness and context principles, individuals vary naturally in the pace of their progress, and the sequences they take to reach an outcome.

But what if Thorndike was wrong? If speed and learning ability are not related, it would mean that we have created an educational system that is profoundly unfair, one that favors those students who happen to be fast, while penalizing students who are just as smart, yet learn at a slower pace.

The fundamental nature of educational opportunity in our society hinges on the question of how speed and ability are related—and it turns out that we have known the answer for the past thirty years thanks to the pioneering research of one of the most famous educational scholars of the twentieth century, Benjamin Bloom.

When Bloom compared the performance of students in each group, the results were astounding. Students in the traditional classroom performed exactly like you would expect if you believed in the notion that faster equals smarter: by the end of the course, roughly 20 percent achieved mastery of the material (which Bloom defined as scoring 85 percent or higher on a final exam), a similarly small percentage did very poorly, while the majority of students scored somewhere in the middle. In contrast, more than 90 percent of the self-paced students achieved mastery.

There was no such thing as a “fast” learner or a “slow” learner. These two insights—that speed does not equal ability, and that there are no universally fast or slow learners—had actually been recognized several decades before Bloom’s pioneering study, and have been replicated many times since, using different students and different content, but always producing similar results.30 Equating learning speed with learning ability is irrefutably wrong.

Khan Academy is a nonprofit educational organization that provides, in the words of its website, “a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”32 Today, Khan Academy boasts over ten million users around the world and consists of an extensive set of online modules covering just about any academic subject imaginable, from ancient history to macroeconomics.

Gesell set up a laboratory at Yale University where he tested babies and gave them “Gesell scores” indicating how their physical and mental development compared to the norm.43 If a child failed to progress through the proper sequence of stages, parents were often told (or left to assume) that something might be wrong with their child.44 These “Gesell scores” were also used as a basis for adoption: Gesell believed that he could improve the success of adoptions by matching smart babies with smart parents, and average babies with average parents.45 Many medical organizations, including the American Pediatrics Society, endorsed Gesell’s framework at the time,46 and today his ideas still form the basis for the “normal” ages for developmental milestones used in many pediatric guides and popular parenting books.

After his research undermined the notion of fixed sequences and helped resolve the crisis of variability, Fischer offered a new metaphor for development that he felt would allow people to break free of the old averagarian one. “There are no ladders,” Fischer once told me. “Instead, each one of us has our own web of development, where each new step we take opens up a whole range of new possibilities that unfold according to our own individuality.”

So often we imagine that a pathway to a particular goal—whether it’s learning to read, becoming a top athlete, or running a company—is somewhere out there, like a trail through a forest cleared by the hikers that came before us. We presume the best way to be successful in life is to follow that well-blazed trail. But what the pathways principle tells us is that we are always creating our own pathway for the first time, inventing it as we go along, since every decision we make—or every event we experience—changes the possibilities available to us. This is true whether we are learning how to crawl or learning how to design a marketing campaign.

When you hear my story, you might think I am a special case. But that is really the whole point of the principles of individuality: we are all special cases.

Taylorist “planners” or managers make all the important decisions about how to standardize the operations, and the workers implement those decisions, right or wrong. This is one reason why a 2013 Gallup study found that 70 percent of employees reported feeling disengaged from their jobs.1

One reason is employee loyalty. Not only are individual Costco employees much more productive than those at competitors like Walmart,16 Costco employees rarely leave the company. At Walmart the turnover rate is approximately 40 percent; at Costco, the turnover rate is 17 percent and drops to an astonishing 6 percent after an employee has been there for a year.17 One study found that when you factor the hidden cost of employee turnover that comes from having to hire and train the next round of replacements (conservatively set at 60 percent of an employee’s salary), Costco actually pays less per employee than Walmart.

Vembu’s intuition was soon backed up by hard evidence. As Zoho hired more and more people from lesser known schools—or with no schooling at all—Vembu discovered that there was little or no correlation between academic performance (as measured by grades and the perceived quality of the diploma) and on-the-job performance.

Zoho pays economically disadvantaged youngsters with little schooling to attend the university, where they learn programming skills, along with math, English, and current events. Vembu created a school that went out and found raw, unproven kids and gave them a shot.

Zoho’s international success does not come from producing software more cheaply than its competitors by paying low wages; it pays fair wages and provides great benefits for its employees. Zoho’s competitiveness is a direct result of the way Vembu identifies and nurtures talent—and how that talent responds: by being fully engaged and extremely productive.

At Morning Star, there are no managers. For that matter, there are no rigid titles, and virtually no hierarchy. Paul Green, a veteran of Morning Star who leads its training and development efforts, explained to me the philosophy behind such a radical business model: “All organizations are based upon fundamental assumptions about human beings, whether they know it or not. At Morning Star, we believe the individual is the single most important entity, and we do everything we can to promote the power of the individual.”

Costco, Zoho, and Morning Star demonstrate that when an organization makes the decision to value the individuality of its employees, it is not only the employees who win—the system wins, too, and wins bigger than ever. This is win-win capitalism, and it’s available to any business in any industry in any country.

Judy Muir is a college admissions consultant based in Houston, and she understands this problem of conformity better than anyone.9 She has dedicated her life to helping high school students get into college and succeed there, and for my money she’s the best at what she does. She consults for the children of celebrities, presidents, and wealthy Europeans and Middle Easterners, though most of her clients are middle-class teens.

If the architecture of higher education is based upon the false premise that students can be sorted by their rank—that a standardized, institution-centered system is necessary in order to efficiently separate the talented students from the untalented ones—then no matter how great the triumphs this system might produce, it is still guaranteed to produce some failures that we simply cannot tolerate as a society. Addressing these failures will require more than doubling down on the status quo: it will require committing to valuing the individual over the system, and changing the basic architecture of higher education so that the individual student truly comes first.

To transform the averagarian architecture of our existing system into a system that values the individual student requires that we adopt these three key concepts: • Grant credentials, not diplomas • Replace grades with competency • Let students determine their educational pathway

While the idea of credentials may seem a bit radical, the reality is that it has been an important part of skill-based education for a long time. For example, MIT already offers several credentialing programs (they call them “certificates”), including credentials in areas like supply chain management, managing complex technical projects, and big data (to name just a few).15 Virginia, meanwhile, has a large-scale state-sponsored program offering credentials in several industries, including information technology, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, energy, and health care.16 The jobs that credentialed graduates obtain in these industries pay well and offer long-term career opportunities. The program requires approximately two to three weeks of full-time training in a simulated work environment and costs a total of $250 for each credential (the remaining costs are shouldered by industry, who are getting employees trained in the skills they need). So far, 93 percent of credentialed graduates from the program have obtained jobs. According to Governor Terry McAuliffe, the program has a goal of delivering nearly half a million credentials by 2030.17

this is huge!!

MOOCs point the way to what a fully developed individualized credentialing system might look like: no more undergraduate programs where you are compelled to pay exorbitant tuition to a single university for four years in order to earn the necessary seat-hours for a standardized degree. Instead, you pursue as many credentials as you need, at the cost you want, on your own terms, in order to pursue the career of your choice.

The second element of our averagarian system of higher education that must be changed is its basic method of evaluating performance: grades.

There are two related problems with relying on grades for measuring performance. The first, and most important, is they are one-dimensional. The jaggedness principle, of course, tells us that any one-dimensional ranking cannot give an accurate picture of an individual’s true ability, skill, or talent—or, as psychologist Thomas R. Guskey wrote in Five Obstacles to Grading Reform, “If someone proposed combining measures of height, weight, diet, and exercise into a single number or mark to represent a person’s physical condition, we would consider it laughable. . . . Yet every day, teachers combine aspects of students’ achievement, attitude, responsibility, effort, and behavior into a single grade that’s recorded on a report card and no one questions it.”19 The other problem posed by grades is that they require employers to perform a complex interpretation of what a particular graduate’s diploma actually means.

Fortunately, there is a straightforward solution to this problem: replace grades with a measure of competency.

competency-based evaluation will have three essential features. The first is rather obvious: it should be pass/incomplete—either you have demonstrated the competency or you have not. Second, competency evaluations must be institution-agnostic. This means you should be able to acquire the necessary competency for a credential in whatever way you like.

The third feature of competency-based evaluations of performance is that they should be professionally aligned.

Does the idea of an industry-aligned, competency-based approach to education seem far-fetched? It is already here. Consider, for example, Western Governors University.20 WGU is a nonprofit university that offers programs in business, information technology, health care, and teaching.

Tuition at the school supports the notion of self-pacing: $6,000 covers as many courses as you can finish in two semesters of time.21

Replacing grades with competency-based measures of performance will ensure that students can learn at their pace, and be judged according to their abilities.23

These three concepts—granting credentials, not diplomas; replacing grades with competency; and letting students determine their educational pathways—can help transform higher education from a system modeled after Taylorist factories that values top-down hierarchy and standardization, to a dynamic ecosystem where each student can pursue the education that suits her or him best. A self-determined, competency-based credentialing system is also more closely aligned with the principles of individuality. It fulfills the jaggedness principle, since it allows students to figure out what they like, what they are good at, and what is the best way to pursue these interests. It fulfills the context principle by evaluating students’ competency in a context as close as possible to the professional environment where they will actually perform. And it fulfills the pathways principle by allowing each student to learn at their own pace, and follow a sequence that is right for them.

Universities are essential for a vibrant, healthy democracy and a thriving economy. But the present architecture of our higher education system is based on a false premise: that we need a standardized system to efficiently separate the talented from the untalented. No matter how great the triumphs this present system might produce, its architecture is still guaranteed to produce some intolerable failures—so we must strive to change it.

Equal fit may seem like a novel idea, but it is ultimately the same view of opportunity expressed by Abraham Lincoln, when he declared that government’s “leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

The good news is that we have it within our power, right now, to implement equal fit as a new foundation for equal opportunity in society.

If we are looking for the institution where implementing equal fit would have the biggest immediate impact on opportunity, the place to start is clear: public education.

We continue to enforce a curriculum that defines not only what students learn, but also how, when, at what pace, and in what order they learn it. In other words, whatever else we may say, traditional public education systems violate the principles of individuality.

James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “American Dream” in his 1931 book The Epic of America, which he published in the depths of the Great Depression. Adams argued for a view of the American dream that ran counter to the materialism of his time: “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”17 The original formulation of the American dream was not about becoming rich or famous; it was about having the opportunity to live your life to its fullest potential, and being appreciated for who you are as an individual, not because of your type or rank.

The ideal that we call the American dream is one we all share—the dream of becoming the best we can be, on our own terms, of living a life of excellence, as we define it. It’s a dream worth striving for. And while it will be difficult to achieve, it has never been closer to becoming a reality than it is right now. We no longer need to be limited by the constraints imposed on us by the Age of Average. We can break free of the tyranny of averagarianism by choosing to value individuality over conformity to the system. We have a bright future before us, and it begins where the average ends.

I would also like to thank David Sarokin, J.D. Umiat, and Bobbie Sevens, the ultra-competent researchers at Uclue.com;

Victor Lipman, “Surprising, Disturbing Facts from the Mother of All Employment Engagement Surveys,” Forbes, September 23, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/09/23/surprising-disturbing-facts-from-the-mother-of-all-employee-engagement-surveys/.