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

by Todd Rose

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.”

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.18

But one-dimensional thinking fails when applied to just about any individual quality that actually matters—and

the reason it is not possible to rank individuals on size—reveals an important truth about human beings and the first principle of individuality: the jaggedness principle

This principle holds that we cannot apply one-dimensional thinking to understand something that is complex and “jagged.”

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.

The problem is that when trying to measure talent, we frequently resort to the average, reducing our jagged talent to a single dimension like the score on a standardized test or grades or a job performance ranking.

Mental abilities were decidedly jagged.

Cattell also measured the correlations between students’ grades in college courses and their performance on these mental tests and discovered very weak correlations between them.

even the correlations between students’ grades in different classes were low.

Ever since Cattell, study after study has revealed that individual intelligence—not to mention personality and character—is jagged.

Even Edward Thorndike, who fashioned our modern education system around the notion that if you are good at one thing, then you are good at most things, conducted his own research to examine the correlation between school grades, standardized test scores, and success at professional jobs. He also found weak correlations between all three—yet he still rationalized that he could safely ignore this fact because he believed in a hypothetical (though unproven) one-dimensional “learning ability” that undergirded success in both school and work.

Even today, scientists, physicians, businesspeople, and educators rely on the one-dimensional notion of an IQ score to evaluate intelligence.

Yet each of these women clearly possesses different mental strengths and weaknesses, and if the goal is to understand these women’s talents, it is obvious that relying on an IQ score is misleading.

mental talent is jagged and cannot be described or understood by a one-dimensional value like an IQ score.

No matter how fine you slice your mind, you are jagged all the way down.

If human abilities are jagged, why do so many psychologists, educators, and business executives continue to use one-dimensional thinking to evaluate talent? Because most of us have been trained in averagarian science, which implicitly prioritizes the system over the individual.

But if our goal is to identify and nurture individual excellence, then weak correlations tell us something different: we will only succeed if we pay attention to the distinct jaggedness of every individual.

“But the real surprise for me and for a lot of people at Google,” Carlisle told me, “was that when we analyzed the data we couldn’t find a single variable that mattered for even most of the jobs at Google. Not one.”52

there were many different ways to be talented at Google, and if the company wanted to do the best possible job of recruiting employees, it needed to be sensitive to all of them.

when organizations embrace jaggedness for the first time, they feel like they have found a way to uncover diamonds in the rough, to identify unorthodox or hidden talent. But the jaggedness principle says otherwise: while we may have identified overlooked talent, there is nothing unorthodox or hidden about it.

The real difficulty is not finding new ways to distinguish talent—it is getting rid of the one-dimensional blinders that prevented us from seeing it all along.

Fortunately, my father had a clearer sense of my jaggedness. He helped me see that my problem was not that I had weak analytical skills—the one-dimensional view I had settled on after failing practice test after practice test using my instructor’s method—but rather that I was relying on one of my weakest mental abilities, working memory, to solve the problems. Once my father helped me identify a strategy that played to my strengths, I could finally answer the test questions correctly and demonstrate my true talent.

When we are able to appreciate the jaggedness of other people’s talents—the jagged profile of our children, our employees, our students—we are more likely to recognize their untapped potential, to show them how to use their strengths, and to identify and help them improve their weaknesses, just like my dad did.

Recognizing our own jaggedness is the first step to understanding our full potential and refusing to be caged in by arbitrary, average-based pronouncements of who we are expected to be.

knowing someone’s traits seems to grant us the ability to predict how they will perform in school, on the job, or even (as dating websites insist) as a romantic partner.

But here’s the problem: when it comes to predicting the behavior of individuals—as opposed to predicting the average behavior of a group of people—traits actually do a poor job.

Shoda thought there was a third way to think about personality, not in terms of traits or situations, but in terms of the ways in which traits and situations interacted

Assessing personality on average may have been good enough for academics trying to draw broad conclusions about groups of people, but it is not good enough if you are looking to hire the employee best suited for the job or to deliver the most effective counseling to a student, and it is not nearly good enough for making decisions about you

Shoda demonstrated that, in fact, there is something consistent about our identity—it just wasn’t the kind of consistency anyone expected: we are consistent within a given context

the second principle of individuality, the context principle, which asserts that individual behavior cannot be explained or predicted apart from a particular situation, and the influence of a situation cannot be specified without reference to the individual experiencing it.21 In other words, behavior is not determined by traits or the situation, but emerges out of the unique interaction between the two.

If the school administrators (who I genuinely believe cared about me) had attempted to understand the context of my behavior, perhaps they could have helped me, instead of labeling me as aggressive, instead of consigning me to the troubled realm of the “problem child.” If they had tried to gain insights into why I was misbehaving in that context perhaps they could have intervened—by talking to the teacher or moving me to a new class—instead of presuming they understood something essential about my character.

“Companies always lament there’s a shortage of talent, that there’s a skills gap,” Adler told me. “But really there’s just a thinking gap. If you spend the effort thinking through the contextual details of the job, you’re going to be rewarded.”52 Companies that apply the context principle—companies that attempt to match the if-then signatures of candidates with the performance profiles of the positions they are trying to fill—will end up with more successful, loyal, and motivated employees.

Each time we find ourselves thinking someone is neurotic, aggressive, or aloof we should remember that we are only seeing them in one particular context.

Instead of asking why they are behaving in that way, we can reframe the question in terms of context and ask ourselves, “Why are they behaving that way in that context?

remembering that we only see others we interact with—like a coworker or boss—in a single context can help us to be more compassionate and understanding with others.

Many of us—not just my friend—instinctively regard deviation from the normal pathway as an unmistakable signal that something is wrong.

The key assumption of normative thinking is that the right pathway is the one followed by the average person, or at least the average member of a particular group we hope to emulate, such as successful graduates or professionals.

Our schools still follow the same rigid march through time as they did a century ago, with fixed class durations, fixed school days, and fixed semesters, proceeding through the same unyielding sequence of “core” courses, all of which ensure that every (normal) student graduates from high school at the same age with, presumably, the same set of knowledge.

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.

If you believe only one pathway exists to achieve your goal, then all there is to evaluate your progress with is how much faster or slower you hit each milestone compared to the norm. Consequently, we bestow tremendous meaning on the pace of personal growth, learning, and development, equating faster with better

If two students earn the same grade on a test, but one student finished in half the time, we assume the faster student is the more gifted one.

The assumption that faster equals smarter was introduced into our educational system by Edward Thorndike. He believed that the pace at which students learned material was correlated with their ability to retain it, which in turn was correlated with academic and professional success. Or, in his words, “it is the quick learners who are the good retainers.”

Even today, we remain reluctant to grant students extra time to complete tests or assignments, believing that it is somehow unfair—that if they are not fast enough to finish these tasks in the allotted time, they should be appropriately penalized in the educational rankings.

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.

We would evaluate students based on the quality of their outcomes, not the quickness of their pace. We would not rank students based on how they performed on a high-stakes test that must be finished in a fixed amount of time.

Bloom showed that when students were allowed a little flexibility in the pace of their learning, the vast majority of students ended up performing extremely well.

speed does not equal ability, and that there are no universally fast or slow learners—had

Equating learning speed with learning ability is irrefutably wrong.

What one person can learn, most people can learn if they are allowed to adjust their pacing. Yet the architecture of our education system is simply not designed to accommodate such individuality, and it therefore fails to nurture the potential and talent of all its students.