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by
Todd Rose
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August 16 - September 13, 2016
For the next three decades, the size and shape of the seat, the distance to the pedals and stick, the height of the windshield, even the shape of the flight helmets were all built to conform to the average dimensions of a 1926 pilot.
if you wanted to design something for an individual human being, the average was completely useless,” Daniels told me.8
Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all ten dimensions.
There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.
Any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail
the air force demanded that all cockpits needed to fit pilots whose measurements fell within the 5 percent to 95 percent range on each dimension.24
aeronautical engineers rather quickly came up with solutions that were both cheap and easy to implement.
Once these and other design solutions were put into place, pilot performance soared, and the U.S. Air Force became the most dominant air force on the planet.
Imagine the good that would have resulted if, at the same time the military changed the way it thought about soldiers, the rest of our society had followed suit. Rather than comparing people to a misguided ideal, they could have seen them—and valued them—for what they are: individuals
concept of average as a yardstick for measuring individuals has been so thoroughly ingrained in our minds that we rarely question it seriously.
no one is average
It is not that the average is never useful. Averages have their place. If you’re comparing two different groups of people,
as opposed to comparing two individuals from each of those groups—then the average can be useful.
Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.
there is no such thing as average body size, there is no such thing as average talent, average intelligence, or average character.
Our modern conception of the average person is not a mathematical truth but a human invention, created a century and a half ago by two European scientists to solve the social problems of their era.
we can only understand individuals by focusing on individuality in its own right.
individuality matters.
Today we have the ability to understand individuals and their talents on a level that was not possible before.
instead of viewing talent as a scarce commodity, schools will be able to nurture excellence in every student, and employers will be able to hire and retain a wider range of high-impact employees.
It’s unacceptable that in an age when we can map the human genome and tweak genetic coding to improve our health, we haven’t been able to accurately map human potential.
At first, I felt like the solution was to strive to be the same as everyone else—but that usually ended up in disaster.
Eventually, I decided to stop trying to conform to the system and instead focused on figuring out how to make the system fit to me.
if you build a theory about thought, perception, or personality based on the Average Brain, then you have likely built a theory that applies to no one.
The untold story of how our scientists, schools, and businesses all came to embrace the misguided notion of the “Average Man” begins in 1819, at the graduation of the most important scientist you have never heard of, a young Belgian by the name of Adolphe Quetelet.
Ever since Quetelet introduced the idea of the Average Man, scientists have delineated the characteristics of a seemingly endless number of types, such as “Type-A personalities,” “neurotic types,” “micro-managers,” and “leader types,” arguing that you could make useful predictions about any given individual member of a group simply by knowing the traits of the average member—the group’s type.
validating people’s natural urge to stereotype others,
Karl Marx adopted Quetelet’s ideas to develop his economic theory of Communism, announcing that the Average Man proved the existence of historical determinism.
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.
It would prompt generations of parents to worry if their child did not develop according to the average milestones, and cause almost every one of us to feel anxiety when our health, social life, or career deviated too far from the average.
Galton, whose family had made its fortune in banking and gun manufacturing,
the growing democratization of society was polluting the greatness of the British Empire.
Galton agreed with almost all of Quetelet’s ideas, save one: the idea that the Average Man represented Nature’s ideal. Nothing could be further from the truth, claimed Galton. For him, to be average was to be mediocre, crude, and undistinguished—like the lower classes who were now voting for representatives in the House of Commons.
Luminaries who were far above average—like Galton and Queen Victoria and Isaac Newton—were assuredly not monstrosities, but instead formed a distinct class that Galton dubbed “the Eminent.” Those who were far below average Galton termed “the Imbecile.”41
Put simply, Galton wanted to preserve Quetelet’s idea that the average member of a group represented that group’s type, but reject Quetelet’s idea that an individual’s deviation from average represented error.
Galton carved up humankind into fourteen distinct classes, ranging from the “Imbeciles” in the lowest rank through the “Mediocre” in the middle ranks all the way up to the most “Eminent” members of the highest rank. This was a monumental shift in the meaning of average, transforming the notion of normality into mediocrity.
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.
Much of the time, we don’t even think about what, exactly, we’re trying so hard to be above-average at, because the why is so clear: we can only achieve success in the Age of Average if others do not view us as mediocre or—disaster!—as below-average.
When the average was first introduced into society, many educated Victorians recognized right away that something vital was under threat by their strange new approach to understanding people, driving many to warn, rather prophetically, of the perils of ignoring individuality. In an 1864 essay, a well-known British poet named William Cyples acknowledged the ostensible triumphs of a new generation of average-wielding scientists and bureaucrats, before endowing them with a moniker as distinctive as it was disparaging: averagarians. This term is so useful and apt that I employ it to describe
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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.
we have all become averagarians.
the entire workplace was designed according to the tenets of averagarianism, the supposition that individuals can be evaluated, sorted, and managed by comparing them to the average.
American factories embraced Taylor’s principles of standardization and were soon posting work rules, printing books of standard operating procedures, and issuing job instruction cards, all laying out the requisite way to get things done. The worker, once celebrated as a creative craftsman, was relegated to the role of automaton.
Taylor’s belief that “the system must be first.”
In a standardized system, individuality does not matter, and that was exactly what Taylor intended.
Who should create the standards that governed a business? Certainly not the worker, insisted Taylor. He argued that businesses should take away all planning, control, and decision making from the workers and hand it over to a new class of “planners” who would be responsible for overseeing the workers and determining the one best way to standardize an organization’s processes. Taylor adopted a recently invented term to describe this new role: “the manager.”
Factories needed brains to direct the hands.
It was Taylor’s singular vision that shaped our modern sense of the manager as an executive decision-maker.
that quickly came to define our modern workplace: the managers in charge of running the show, and the employees who actually did the work.
