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

by Todd Rose

scientific management—often simply called “Taylorism”—swept across the world’s industries.

By 1927, scientific management had already become so widely adopted that a League of Nations report called it “a characteristic feature of American civilization.”

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.

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.

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.

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.28

new mission of education should be to prepare mass numbers of students to work in the newly Taylorized economy.

Following Taylor’s maxim that a system of average workers was more efficient than a system of geniuses, educational Taylorists argued that schools should provide a standard education for an average student instead of trying to foster greatness.

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 wil...

remake the architecture of the entire educational system to conform to the central tenet of scientific management: standardize everything around the average.

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.

introduced a new professional role into education: the curriculum planner. Modeled after scientific management, these planners created a fixed, inviolable curriculum that dictated everything that happened in school, including what and how students were taught, what textbooks should contain, and how students were graded.

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.”

Edward Thorndike embraced Taylor’s ideas about standardization before refitting the elder American’s ideas so that Thorndike could use them to separate school’s superior students from its inferior ones.

Thorndike fully supported the Taylorization of schools.

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.

“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 believed that some people were simply born with brains that learned quickly, and these fast-learning individuals would not only be successful at school, they would be successful in life.

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.

He wrote textbooks for arithmetic, vocabulary, and spelling that were all standardized around the average student of a particular age, a practice still used in our school systems today. He designed entrance exams for private schools and elite colleges; he even fashioned an entrance exam for law school.39 Thorndike’s ideas gave birth to the notion of gifted students, honors students, special needs students, and educational tracks. He supported the use of grades as a convenient metric for ranking students’ overall talent and believed that colleges should admit those students with the best GPAs and highest standardized test scores

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.

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.

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).

Overall, the universal implementation of averagarian systems across American society undoubtedly contributed to a relatively stable and prosperous democracy.

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

We have lost the dignity of our individuality. Our uniqueness has become a burden, an obstacle, or a regrettable distraction on the road to success.

In our jobs and in school we are told there is one right way to get things done, and if we pursue an alternate course, we are often told that we are misguided, naive, or just plain wrong.

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

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?

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.

Unfortunately for nineteenth-century physicists, it turned out that the majority of gas molecules, despite their apparent simplicity, are not actually ergodic.

“Using a group average to evaluate individuals would only be valid if human beings were frozen clones, identical and unchanging,”

Yet, even the most basic averagarian methods like ranking and typing all assumed that people were frozen clones.

This was why Molenaar called this assumption the ergodic switch: it takes something nonergodic and pretends it is ergodic.

If you could not use averages to evaluate, model, and select individuals, well then . . . what could you use?

why it has been so eagerly embraced by businesses, universities, governments, and militaries: because averagarianism worked better than anything else that was available.

After all, types, ranks, and average-based norms are very convenient. It takes little effort to say things like “She is smarter than average,” or “He was ranked second in his graduating class,” or “She is an introvert,” concise statements that seem true because they appear to be based on forthright mathematics.

That is why averagarianism was a perfect philosophy for t...

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.

Molenaar and his colleagues argue that to accurately understand individuals one should turn to a very different kind of math known as dynamic systems—the math of changing, nonlinear, dynamic values.20

The primary research method of averagarianism is aggregate, then analyze:

The science of the individual instead instructs scientists to analyze, then aggregate:

Averagarianism forces our thinking into incredibly limiting patterns—patterns that we are largely unaware of, because the opinions we arrive at seem to be so self-evident and rational.

an estimated 60 percent of Fortune 500 firms still used some form of single-score ranking systems to evaluate employees in 2012.

by 2015, Google, Deloitte, and Microsoft had each modified or abandoned their rank-based hiring and evaluation systems.

Despite Google’s continued growth and profitability, by the mid–2000s there were signs that something was wrong with the way it was selecting talent. Many of its hires were not performing the way management had imagined, and there was a growing sense within Google that company recruiters and managers were ignoring many candidates whose talent was not getting captured by the familiar metrics used by most companies, such as grades, test scores, and diplomas.

Meanwhile, at Microsoft, stack ranking was an unmitigated disaster. A 2012 Vanity Fair article called the era when Microsoft relied on stack ranking “the lost decade.” The performance rating system forced employees to compete for rankings, killing collaboration among employees and, worse, leading employees to avoid working with top performers, since doing so threatened to lower their own ranking as a result.