The End of Average By Todd Rose

Time to get back to the book reviews. Today's read was The End of Average by Todd Rose.

A revolutionary thought, a history lesson that explains the flawed mental models in society that Rose hopes to address, a call for different models, and a call for university and business reform. It was a great ready with less fluff and padding than a lot of other books in this genre.

The basic idea is that individuals are not average. If we take the average of 1000 person's bodies, we will find that no single person actually matches that average we created across all of the dimensions. The same goes for intelligence, personality traits, and workplace talent. In the end, using averages to set policy is fraught with low correlation assumptions. High or low performance against an average is scientifically unsupported and ignores the humanity in people.

People are jagged, meaning that they if we look at their many traits, we have strengths and weaknesses. Any attempt to average out those measurements, does not create meaningful simplifications and it has damaging impacts.

Context matters. All those personality traits (Meyers Briggs, Strengths Finders...) are based on averages and bundles of groups across many individuals, but they are not predictive of behavior at an individual level. People are better understood with If-Then statements. IF I am at a party, I am an introvert, but IF I am in a small group, I am an extravert. Nobody is one thing, or even a small set of things. The science doesn't back up these assertions. They are not predictive of success or behavior.

Pathways are numerous. There isn't one way to get to a result, but as many paths as there are people. Average pathways are often used to gauge success or failure, even pathways as simple as how infants learn to walk. Only the science shows there are dozens of pathways to learn to walk, crawling isn't even a requirement. Individuality requires customization and if we look at what happens in practice, everyone customizes.

Higher education can embrace this principles by creating credentialing programs, rather than degrees, that certify skills rather than time. Universities can drop grades, which ignores the jagged principle, oversimplifies students, and fails to acknowledge what they can do. Students need a customizable pathway without the long list of requirements universities put upon degree recipients. Self-paced and configurable options should be the norm.

Businesses can embrace these ideas by dumping ratings and ranking, dropping degree requirements from job reqs, and focusing on competencies.

I will be going back through the manuscript of my book to ensure my language aligns with Todd Rose's, because we have come to the same opinions through different logical paths.

Strong recommendation for educational and business operational innovators.