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

by Todd Rose

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. BERTRAND RUSSELL, BRITISH PHILOSOPHER

“When I left Harvard, it was clear to me that if you wanted to design something for an individual human being, the average was completely useless,” Daniels told me.

Just as Daniels’s study revealed there was no such thing as an average-size pilot, the Norma Look-Alike contest demonstrated that average-size women did not exist either.

Rather than suggesting that people should strive harder to conform to an artificial ideal of normality, Daniels’s analysis led him to a counterintuitive conclusion that serves as the cornerstone of this book: Any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail

The recommended change was radical: the environments needed to fit the individual rather than the average.

From the cradle to the grave, you are measured against the ever-present yardstick of the average, judged according to how closely you approximate it or how far you are able to exceed it.

no one is average. Not you. Not your kids. Not your coworkers, or your students, or your spouse. This isn’t empty encouragement or hollow sloganeering. This is a scientific fact with enormous practical consequences that you cannot afford to ignore.

Human potential is nowhere near as limited as the systems we have put in place assume. We just need the tools to understand each person as an individual, not as a data point on a bell curve.

The hardest part of learning something new is not embracing new ideas, but letting go of old ones.

Quetelet followed the same line of reasoning with regard to humanity as a whole, claiming that every one of us is a flawed copy of some kind of cosmic template for human beings. Quetelet dubbed this template the “Average Man.”25 Today, of course, we often consider someone described as “average” to be inferior or lacking—as mediocre. But for Quetelet, the Average Man was perfection itself, an ideal that Nature aspired to, free from Error with a capital “E.” He declared that the greatest men in history were closest to the Average Man of their place and time.

He invented the Quetelet Index—today known as the body mass index (BMI)—and calculated men’s and women’s average BMIs to identify average health. Each of these average values, claimed Quetelet, represented the hidden qualities of the One True Human, the Average Man.

In 1846, Quetelet organized the first census for the Belgian government, which became the gold standard for all modern censuses; Quetelet even consulted with James A. Garfield, then a member of the U.S. Congress, about ways to improve the American census.

Quetelet’s invention of the Average Man marked the beginning of the Age of Average. It represented the moment when the average became normal, the individual became error, and stereotypes were validated with the imprint of science.

In 1851, the Great Exhibition—sometimes called the first World’s Fair—was held in London.

of his statistical inventions were predicated on what Galton called the “law of deviation from the average”: the idea that what mattered most about an individual was how much better or worse they were than the average.

The Age of Average—a cultural era stretching from Quetelet’s invention of social physics in the 1840s until today—can be characterized by two assumptions unconsciously shared by almost every member of society: Quetelet’s idea of the average man and Galton’s idea of rank. We have all come to believe, like Quetelet, that the average is a reliable index of normality, particularly when it comes to physical health, mental health, personality, and economic status. We have also come to believe that an individual’s rank on narrow metrics of achievement can be used to judge their talent. These two ideas serve as the organizing principles behind our current system of education, the vast majority of hiring practices, and most employee performance evaluation systems worldwide.

“Physicians have nothing to do with what is called the law of large numbers, a law which, according to a great mathematician’s expression, is always true in general and false in particular.”

Typing and ranking have come to seem so elementary, natural, and right that we are no longer conscious of the fact that every such judgment always erases the individuality of the person being judged. A century and a half after Quetelet—exactly as the poets and physicians of the nineteenth century feared—we have all become averagarians.

One economist has written that Taylor “probably had a greater effect on the private and public lives of the men and women of the twentieth century than any other single individual.”

He believed that he could systematically eliminate inefficiency from business by adopting the core precept of averagarianism, the idea that individuality did not matter. “In the past the man was first,” announced Taylor, “in the future the system must be first.”

“An organization composed of individuals of mediocre ability, working in accordance with policies, plans, and procedures discovered by analysis of the fundamental facts of their situation, will in the long run prove more successful and stable than an organization of geniuses each led by inspiration,” affirmed Taylor.

According to Taylor, there was always “one best way” to accomplish any given process—and only one way, the standardized way.12 For Taylor, there was nothing worse than a worker trying to do things his own way. “There is a rock upon which many an ingenious man has stranded, that of indulging his inventive faculty,” warned Taylor in a 1918 magazine article. “It is thoroughly illegitimate for the average man to start out to make a radically new machine, or method, or process to replace one which is already successful.”

Since thinking and planning were now cleanly separated from making and doing, businesses developed an insatiable appetite for experts to tell them the best way to do all that thinking and planning. The management consulting industry was born to satisfy this appetite, and Frederick Taylor became the world’s first management consultant. His opinion was so highly sought after that he sometimes charged the modern equivalent of $2.5 million for his advice.

Today, scientific management remains the most dominant philosophy of business organization in every industrialized country.25 No company likes to admit it, of course, since in many circles Taylorism has acquired the same disreputable connotation as racism or sexism. But many of the largest and most successful corporations on Earth are still organized around the idea that the individuality of the employee does not matter. All of this leads to a profound question that transcends Taylorism: If you have a society predicated upon the separation of system-conforming workers from system-defining managers, how does society decide who gets to be a worker and who gets to be a manager?

The question that occupied the earliest education reformers was what the mission of the new school system should be. A group of educators with a humanist perspective argued that the proper goal of education was to provide students with the freedom to discover their own talents and interests by offering an environment that would allow them to learn and develop at their own pace. Some humanists even suggested that there should be no required courses, and that schools should offer more courses than any student could possibly take.27 But when it came time to establish a nationwide, compulsory high school system, the humanist model was passed over in favor of a very different vision of education—a Taylorist vision.

It was never a fair fight. On one side stood the humanists, a coterie of tweed-coated academics at cushy, exclusive northeastern colleges. They were opposed by a broad coalition of pragmatic industrialists and ambitious psychologists steeped in the values of standardization and hierarchical management. These educational Taylorists pointed out that while it was nice to think about humanistic ideals like educational self-determination, at a time when many public schools had a hundred kids in a single classroom, half unable to speak English, many living in poverty, educators did not have the luxury of giving young people the freedom to be whatever they wanted to be.

By way of example, John D. Rockefeller funded an organization known as the General Education Board, which published a 1912 essay describing its Taylorist vision of schools: “We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians . . . nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. . . . The task that we set before ourselves is very simple as well as very beautiful . . . we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”

Schools around the country adopted the “Gary Plan,” named after the industrialized Indiana city where it originated: students were divided into groups by age (not by performance, interest, or aptitude) and these groups of students rotated through different classes, each lasting a standardized period of time. School bells were introduced to emulate factory bells, in order to mentally prepare children for their future careers.

In 1924, the American journalist H. L. Mencken summarized the state of the educational system: “The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.”

Thorndike fully supported the Taylorization of schools. In fact, Thorndike played a leading role in the country’s largest training program for school superintendents, preparing them for their roles as scientific managers in the standardized educational system.34 But Thorndike believed that Taylorists were making a mistake when they argued that the goal of education was to provide every student with the same average education to prepare them for the same average jobs. Thorndike believed that schools should instead sort young people according to their ability so they could efficiently be appointed to their proper station in life, whether manager or worker, eminent leader or disposable outcast—and so that educational resources could be allocated accordingly. Thorndike’s guiding axiom was “Quality is more important than equality,” by which he meant that it was more important to identify superior students and shower them with support than it was to provide every student with the same educational opportunities.

Thorndike was an enthusiastic advocate of the ideas of Francis Galton, whom he revered as “an eminently fair scientific man.”35 He agreed with Galton’s notion of rank, the theory that if a person was talented at one thing, he was likely to be talented at most other things, too.

Thorndike agreed that every aspect of the educational system should be standardized around the average, not only because this would ensure standardized outcomes, as the Taylorists believed, but because it made it easier to measure each student’s deviation from the average—and thus made it easier to determine who was superior and who was inferior.

For Thorndike, the purpose of schools was not to educate all students to the same level, but to sort them, according to their innate level of talent. It is deeply ironic that one of the most influential people in the history of education believed that education could do little to change a student’s abilities and was therefore limited to identifying those students born with a superior brain—and those born with an inferior one.

Our twenty-first-century educational system operates exactly as Thorndike intended: from our earliest grades, we are sorted according to how we perform on a standardized educational curriculum designed for the average student, with rewards and opportunities doled out to those who exceed the average, and constraints and condescension heaped upon those who lag behind. Contemporary pundits, politicians, and activists continually suggest that our educational system is broken, when in reality the opposite is true. Over the past century, we have perfected our educational system so that it runs like a well-oiled Taylorist machine, squeezing out every possible drop of efficiency in the service of the goal its architecture was originally designed to fulfill: efficiently ranking students in order to assign them to their proper place in society.

I’m not going to pretend that the Taylorization of our workplace and the implementation of standardization and rankings in our schools was some kind of disaster. It wasn’t. When society embraced averagarianism, businesses prospered and consumers got more affordable products. Taylorism increased wages across society as a whole and probably lifted more people out of poverty than any other single economic development in the past century. By forcing college applicants and job seekers to take standardized tests, nepotism and cronyism were reduced and students from less privileged backgrounds attained unprecedented access to opportunities to a better life. Though it is easy to disparage Thorndike’s elitist belief that society should divert resources toward superior students and away from inferior ones, he also believed that wealth and inherited privilege should play no part in determining a student’s opportunities (on the other hand, he attributed different levels of mental talent to different ethnicities). Thorndike helped establish a classroom environment that made Americans out of millions of immigrants and raised the number of Americans with a high school diploma from 6 percent to 81 percent.41 Overall, the universal implementation of averagarian systems across American society undoubtedly contributed to a relatively stable and prosperous democracy.

Yet, averagarianism did cost us something. Just like the Norma Look-Alike competition, society compels each of us to conform to certain narrow expectations in order to succeed in school, our career, and in life. We all strive to be like everyone else—or, even more accurately, we all strive to be like everyone else, only better

Excellence, too often, is not prioritized over conforming to the system.

Yet we want to be recognized for our individuality. We want to live in a society where we can truly be ourselves—where we can learn, develop, and pursue opportunities on our own terms according to our own nature, instead of needing to conform ourselves to an artificial norm.42 This desire prompts the billion-dollar question that drives this book: How can a society predicated on the conviction that individuals can only be evaluated in reference to the average ever create the conditions for understanding and harnessing individuality?

In essence, both Quetelet and Lord and Novick assumed that measuring one person many times was interchangeable with measuring many people one time.

Molenaar recognized that the fatal flaw of averagarianism was its paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality. He gave a name to this error: “the ergodic switch.” The term is drawn from a branch of mathematics that grew out of the very first scientific debate about the relationship between groups and individuals, a field known as ergodic theory.

According to ergodic theory, you are allowed to use a group average to make predictions about individuals if two conditions are true: (1) every member of the group is identical, and (2) every member of the group will remain the same in the future.

A century and a half of applied science has been predicated on Quetelet’s primal misconception.13 That’s how we ended up with a statue of Norma that matches no woman’s body, brain models that match no person’s brain, standardized medical therapies that target nobody’s physiology, financial credit policies that penalize creditworthy individuals, college admission strategies that filter out promising students, and hiring policies that overlook exceptional talent.

If he truly wanted to overthrow the tyranny of the average once and for all, he needed to offer an alternative to averagarianism—some practical way to understand individuals that provided better results than ranking or typing.

Recall that the two defining assumptions of the Age of Average are Quetelet’s conviction that the average is the ideal, and the individual is error, and Galton’s conviction that if someone is Eminent at one thing they are likely Eminent at most things. In contrast, the main assumption of the science of the individual is that individuality matters19—the individual is not error, and on the human qualities that matter most (like talent, intelligence, personality, and character) individuals cannot be reduced to a single score.

The primary research method of averagarianism is aggregate, then analyze: First, combine many people together and look for patterns in the group. Then, use these group patterns (such as averages and other statistics) to analyze and model individuals.21 The science of the individual instead instructs scientists to analyze, then aggregate: First, look for patterns within each individual. Then, look for ways to combine these individual patterns into collective insight.

An individual is a high-dimensional system evolving over place and time. —PETER MOLENAAR, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

While stack ranking was in effect, the article reports, the company had “mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.”15 In late 2013, Microsoft abruptly jettisoned stack ranking.16 So where did Google, Deloitte, and Microsoft go wrong?

Our minds have a natural tendency to use a one-dimensional scale to think about complex human traits, such as size, intelligence, character, or talent. If we are asked to assess a person’s size, for example, we instinctively judge an individual as large, small, or an Average Joe. If we hear a man described as big, we imagine someone with big arms and big legs and a big body—someone who is large all over. If a woman is described as smart, we assume she is likely good at solving problems across a wide range of domains, and is probably well educated, too. During the Age of Average, our social institutions, particularly our businesses and schools, have reinforced our mind’s natural predilection for one-dimensional thinking by encouraging us to compare people’s merit on simple scales, such as grades, IQ scores, and salaries.

the jaggedness principle. This principle holds that we cannot apply one-dimensional thinking to understand something that is complex and “jagged.” What, precisely, is jaggedness? A quality is jagged if it meets two criteria. First, it must consist of multiple dimensions. Second, these dimensions must be weakly related to one another. Jaggedness is not just about human size; almost every human characteristic that we care about—including talent, intelligence, character, creativity, and so on—is jagged.

Women have long protested the artificially exaggerated dimensions of Mattel’s Barbie doll, but the principle of jaggedness tells us that an average-size doll—a Norma-size doll—is just as phony.