Michelle: Mark, I have a question for you. In a study of over 4,000 U.S. Air Force pilots, they were measured on ten key physical dimensions to find the perfect "average" size for a new cockpit design. How many of those 4,000 pilots do you think actually fit the average profile? Mark: Oh, wow. Okay, ten dimensions. It's the military, they're probably looking for a specific type. I'll say... maybe 5%? A few hundred? It has to be a decent number, or why bother? Michelle: The answer is zero. Mark: Come on. Zero? Not one? Michelle: Not a single pilot. It turns out, when you design something for the average person, you are quite literally designing it for no one. Mark: That is completely mind-blowing. And it feels like a perfect metaphor for... well, everything. Michelle: It is. That incredible finding is the explosive opening to the book we're diving into today: The End of Average by Todd Rose. Mark: And Rose is the perfect person to write this. He’s a Harvard researcher, but what's fascinating is that he was also a high school dropout with a 0.9 GPA. He lived the failure of the 'average' system before he started studying it. Michelle: Exactly. He argues this one flawed idea, born in the 1840s, still shapes everything from our schools to our workplaces. And that's where our story begins—with a life-or-death crisis in the sky.

Michelle: So, picture the late 1940s. The U.S. Air Force is entering the jet age. Planes are faster, more complex, and more powerful than ever. But they have a huge problem. Pilots are crashing. A lot. And not in combat. Mark: Okay, so what's going wrong? Mechanical failure? Michelle: That's what everyone thought. But engineers would inspect the wreckage and find nothing wrong with the planes. The official cause of death, over and over, was "pilot error." The military was losing its best and brightest, and they couldn't figure out why. Mark: That's terrifying. To be a pilot and know that you could just... lose control, and no one would know why. Michelle: Precisely. The blame fell on the pilots. But a few officials started to wonder if the problem was somewhere else. They looked at the cockpit design and realized it was based on measurements of hundreds of male pilots taken way back in 1926. Their solution? Update the average! Mark: Of course. The classic bureaucratic response. When in doubt, form a committee and measure things. Michelle: They measured over 4,000 pilots on 140 different dimensions of size, from thumb length to crotch height. They crunched the numbers to create the new, definitive "average pilot of 1950." But this is where a young researcher, a newly hired physical anthropologist named Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels, enters the picture. He had this nagging feeling. He'd studied hand sizes at Harvard and realized that if you wanted to design something for an individual, the average was useless. Mark: Wait, so this one guy, Daniels, is looking at this massive project and thinking, "You're all asking the wrong question"? Michelle: Exactly. He decided to test his hunch. He took the data from the 4,000 pilots and focused on just ten key dimensions—the ones most critical for controlling the plane. He defined the "average" range as the middle 30 percent for each dimension. Then he asked a simple question: How many of these 4,063 pilots were average on all ten dimensions? Mark: And that's where the "zero" comes from. Michelle: That's the "zero." Not a single pilot. He found that less than 3.5% of pilots were average on just three of the ten dimensions. Daniels's conclusion was revolutionary. He said, and this is a direct quote that should be on the wall of every design firm, "If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one." Mark: Wow. So the "pilot error" wasn't the pilots' fault at all. The system was setting them up to fail. But hold on, how did we get so obsessed with this idea of the 'average man' in the first place? It seems so obviously flawed now. Michelle: It's a fascinating and slightly disturbing story. Rose traces it back to the 1840s and a Belgian astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet. Quetelet was the first to apply statistical methods, which were used to track the movement of planets, to human beings. He measured things like the chest circumference of Scottish soldiers. Mark: As one does. Michelle: Right. But here's the critical error he made. In astronomy, when you average multiple observations of a star, you get closer to its true position. The variations are errors. Quetelet applied that same logic to people. He believed the average chest size of all those soldiers was the "true" chest size, as nature intended. Any individual soldier who was bigger or smaller was an error. A deformity. Mark: That's a horrifying leap in logic. He's saying deviation from the average is a mistake of nature. Michelle: He literally called it a "monstrosity." He created this concept of l'homme moyen, the Average Man, who he saw as the pinnacle of human perfection—great, good, and beautiful. This idea was intoxicating. It promised to turn the messy art of governing people into a predictable science. And it was supercharged a few decades later in America by a man named Frederick Winslow Taylor. Mark: I feel like I should know that name. Michelle: You know his work, even if you don't know his name. Taylor is the father of "scientific management," or Taylorism. He was obsessed with efficiency. He believed there was "one best way" to do any job, and his mission was to find it by studying the average worker, and then standardizing the process for everyone. He famously said, "In the past the man was first; in the future the system must be first." Mark: And suddenly you have the modern factory, the modern office, and even the modern school. Everyone doing the same thing, the same way, measured against the same average. It’s a direct line from Quetelet's "perfect average" to my soul-crushing annual performance review. Michelle: It is. And the book makes it clear this isn't just inefficient; it's dangerous. Just like it was for those pilots. The Air Force was trying to find pilots who fit the system. But once Daniels proved the average pilot was a myth, they made a brilliant shift. Mark: They changed the cockpit. Michelle: They changed the cockpit. They demanded that manufacturers create adjustable systems—seats that could be raised and lowered, foot pedals that could slide, helmet straps that could be tightened. They stopped trying to find average pilots and started building a system that could fit the individual. Mark: And what happened? Michelle: Pilot performance soared. The pool of eligible pilots expanded dramatically. The U.S. Air Force cemented its position as the most dominant on the planet. All because they stopped believing in a ghost.

Mark: Okay, that Air Force story is an incredible illustration of the problem. But it also feels like the beginning of the solution. If designing for the average is the wrong approach, what's the right one? Michelle: That's the entire second half of the book. Once the Air Force realized the average pilot was a myth, they embraced a new philosophy: designing for the individual. And Rose argues that we can do the same in our lives and our organizations by understanding what he calls the "Principles of Individuality." Mark: Alright, give me the first one. How do we start thinking like the Air Force and not like Quetelet? Michelle: The first principle is called the Jaggedness Principle. It states that you can't understand a person—their talent, their intelligence, their character—with a single number. We are all "jagged." Mark: Jagged. What does that mean, exactly? Is it like being rough around the edges? Michelle: Think of it like a graphic equalizer on a stereo, not a single volume knob. Your abilities aren't one uniform level. You might be high in verbal reasoning, medium in spatial awareness, and low in working memory. Your profile is a jagged line of peaks and valleys. The mistake of "averagarianism" is trying to smooth that jagged line into a single, flat average, like a GPA or an IQ score. Mark: Right, which tells you almost nothing useful. It's like saying the average temperature in a country is 70 degrees. That could mean it's 70 everywhere, or it could mean it's 120 in the desert and 20 in the mountains. The average hides the reality. Michelle: That's a perfect analogy. And companies are slowly waking up to this. Rose tells the story of Google in the mid-2000s. They were the ultimate averagarian company. They hired almost exclusively based on a few metrics: high SAT scores, high GPA, and a degree from a prestigious university. Mark: The holy trinity of modern hiring. Michelle: But they had a problem. Many of these "perfect" hires weren't performing well. So a human resources director named Todd Carlisle ran a massive internal study. He analyzed hundreds of factors to see what actually predicted success at Google. Mark: And let me guess. It wasn't SAT scores or where you went to school. Michelle: He found zero correlation. None. Your SAT score told them nothing about how you'd perform as a Google engineer or manager. Grades only mattered a little, and only for the first couple of years out of college. He couldn't find a single variable that was a reliable predictor for most jobs. Talent, he realized, was jagged. Mark: So what did Google do? They couldn't just throw their hands up and hire randomly. Michelle: They changed their entire process. They stopped asking for test scores. They de-emphasized GPA. They started asking behavioral questions designed to reveal a candidate's jagged profile—how they solve problems, how they learn, how they collaborate. They started looking for fit, not a score. They had to get rid of their one-dimensional blinders to see the talent that was there all along. Mark: That makes so much sense. But it also leads to another question. If we're all jagged and unique, what about the path to success? We're all told to follow a certain ladder: go to a good school, get a good job, get promoted. Isn't there a "best way"? Michelle: Ah, you've just stumbled upon the second principle: the Pathways Principle. This principle states that for any given goal, there is no single, normal path. There are many equally valid pathways to the same outcome, and the best one for you depends on your own unique jaggedness. Mark: That feels both liberating and terrifying. Liberating because it means I don't have to follow the herd. Terrifying because it means there's no map. Michelle: But the map was an illusion anyway! Rose uses the example of infant motor development. For decades, pediatricians had a fixed chart: babies sit up, then they crawl, then they stand, then they walk. A rigid, universal pathway. Mark: I've seen those charts. My friends with kids obsess over them. "Is he crawling yet? He's supposed to be crawling!" Michelle: Exactly. But a scientist named Karen Adolph actually studied individual babies. She found 25 different pathways to crawling. Some babies did the classic hands-and-knees crawl. Others did a "scoot" on their butts. Some did a "combat crawl" on their bellies. Some skipped crawling altogether and went straight to walking. The "normal" pathway was just a statistical average, not a biological necessity. Mark: So the pressure to hit those milestones in a specific order is completely artificial. Michelle: Completely. And Rose applies this directly to our lives with his own powerful story. Remember, he was a high school dropout. When he finally got to college, his academic advisor gave him the standard "normal pathway" advice: take remedial math, take freshman English, follow the sequence. Mark: The safe route. The one designed for the "average" struggling student. Michelle: But Rose knew his own jagged profile. He knew he was terrible at the kind of abstract, step-by-step math taught in remedial classes, but he was great at visual and conceptual thinking. So he forged his own path. He used a book to study for and pass a competency exam, skipping remedial math entirely. He postponed the boring freshman English class and instead front-loaded his schedule with fascinating psychology and philosophy courses that lit his brain on fire. Mark: He played to his strengths. He created a pathway that fit his jaggedness. Michelle: And he graduated with straight A's and went on to Harvard. He succeeded not by trying to be a better version of the average student, but by embracing his own individuality and creating a path that worked for him. He took the road less traveled, because for him, it was the only road that led to his destination.

Mark: It all comes back to this, doesn't it? We live in a world built on a statistical ghost—the average person. Our schools, our jobs, our entire idea of a "career ladder"... they're all trying to fit us into a mold that doesn't actually exist. And we judge ourselves against it constantly. Michelle: And the most profound takeaway from Rose's work is that opportunity isn't about giving everyone the same standardized path—that's what he calls 'equal access.' It's a noble idea, but it's still rooted in averagarianism. True opportunity is what he calls 'equal fit.' Mark: Equal fit. I like that. What does it mean in practice? Michelle: It means creating systems that are flexible enough to honor the jagged profile and unique pathway of every single individual. It’s the Air Force building an adjustable cockpit instead of searching for an average-sized pilot. It’s Google looking for problem-solving skills instead of a GPA. It's a university allowing a student to craft a curriculum that ignites their passion, instead of forcing them down a standardized track. Mark: It's a fundamental shift from "How can we make the person fit the system?" to "How can we make the system fit the person?" Michelle: That is the revolution in a single sentence. The book is a powerful call to stop measuring ourselves against a mythical yardstick. Our jaggedness isn't a flaw to be smoothed out. It's our greatest strength. Our unique pathway isn't a deviation from the norm. It is the norm. Mark: It really makes you wonder, where in your own life are you being judged against a mythical average? Your job, your health, your parenting, even your own expectations for yourself. Michelle: It's a powerful question to sit with. And we'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our social channels and share one area where you've felt the pressure of 'the average.' Let's talk about it. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.