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

The End of Average: How to Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. 2012. Todd Rose. London, England: Penguin. 256 pages. There is no such thing as an average person. When an organization designs and builds social systems to meet the needs of the “average” member, they are actually designing them for no one, resulting in predictable problems and dissatisfaction. These are the core premises of Todd Rose’s book, The End of Average: How to Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. In a very accessible, deeply personal, and unpretentious way, Rose presents data that undermine more than a century of thinking on how to study, organize, manage, and educate people. He articulates three principles upon which to usher in the “Age of Individuals”: the jaggedness principle, the context principle, and the pathways principle. In the last section he describes how one might apply these principles in business and educational contexts. The jaggedness principle says that for any sufficiently interesting characteristic of human beings— intelligence or personality, for example — the subcomponents of this characteristic tend to have little or no correlation to one another, creating a “jagged” profile of subcomponents. Any attempt to combine the subcomponents into a composite measure, such as IQ or personality type, will be hopelessly uninterpretable. Furthermore, the context principle establishes that even these subcomponent measures are likely to change in various situations. One might be very introverted in a meeting with his or her boss, but not with his or her coworkers. This dependence on context makes measuring people extremely difficult. However, even if one could measure and classify people reliably, the pathways principle demonstrates that there are many (perhaps infinite) ways to achieve a performance goal. Any management or education strategy that constrains individuals’ ability to discover for themselves how best to reach or satisfy a goal is doomed to be suboptimal. This is an important book because of how clearly it articulates something most people have known or sensed for a long time: that individuals matter and there is no shortcut to high-quality management or learning that allows one to ignore idiosyncrasy. Grounded in decades of research, this book will be a source of concrete wisdom and guidance for anyone who has a role in determining or deploying performance management systems.