PDF Summary:The End of Average, by Todd Rose

If you’re like most people, you’ve been judged in comparison to the average for your entire life. In school, your performance was defined by your difference from the average student. At work, your manager might judge your performance with benchmarks calibrated to the average worker. However, psychologist Todd Rose argues in The End of Average that our blind faith in the average as a tool to understand people has led to deep-seated structural problems in society—problems that encourage conformity and diminish our unique strengths.

In this guide, you’ll learn how treating students as individuals can unlock their potential, and why companies can profit by hiring employees from unique backgrounds rather than top schools. In our commentary, we’ll expand our view of individuality in education and business with books like Excellent Sheep and Linchpin. We’ll also investigate research that supports, challenges, and clarifies Rose’s societal critiques.

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However, this approach is based on a misunderstanding of human personality. Contrary to popular belief, personality is context-dependent: People behave differently in different situations. No one is intrinsically a bad student; they’re just not in a learning environment that fits them as an individual.

(Shortform note: In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo takes this idea further, arguing that the situation a person is in doesn’t just shape their personality, but also their morality. He contends that any of us could seriously hurt our fellow humans if we were placed in the wrong situation. To counteract this, do everything you can to stay away from environments that may influence you to behave immorally—for instance, you might stop spending time with friends who don’t share your morals.)

Furthermore, Rose notes that although personality is context-dependent, it remains fixed across the same context. In other words, people behave consistently when they repeatedly face the same situation. This means that when students behave in a way that prevents them from learning—for instance, rebelling against teachers—you can permanently change their behavior by putting them in a new situation.

To resolve context-dependent issues, investigate what aspect of the environment is triggering harmful behavior and try to create a context without that trigger. For example, if a child in elementary school keeps distracting their classmates in the middle of an educational video, you might conclude that the student gets bored by videos and give them the option to read the same information in another room.

Internal Causes of Children’s Misbehavior

Arguably, Rose misses part of the bigger picture by focusing solely on the environmental triggers that cause children to misbehave in school. In The Explosive Child, Ross W. Greene contends that children often have disruptive, emotional outbursts when they lack the self-regulatory skills necessary to accomplish a practical task.

Greene would argue that if you falsely conclude that a child’s misbehavior is entirely caused by their environment, rather than a missing internal skill, moving them to a new learning environment won’t help. They’ll just become frustrated again and act out in the new environment. This could further encourage teachers to label the child as a fundamentally bad student.

Greene adds that you can’t just teach children the sophisticated skills they need to solve this problem—they can’t develop these skills that easily. He instead recommends having a dialogue with the child: Help them realize what’s making them act out and brainstorm a solution with them. If you just try to change the child’s environment without consulting them (as Rose suggests), they may see this as an arbitrary punishment or display of power and become defensive and frustrated.

For example, if a child is disruptive during a video shown in class, and you assign them to watch it on an iPad alone in the other room, they may burn with anger at this perceived injustice instead of learning anything. Instead, you might be able to discuss the issue with the child and discover a solution together. If the child understands why a given video is important, they may agree to sit away from their friends.

We Need Individuality in the Workplace

In addition to harming the education system, Rose says, averages do significant damage to society when people abuse them in the workplace.

Rose contends that many commonplace business practices at modern companies around the world also follow an outdated model. Instead of seeking uniquely talented individuals, factory managers in the late 19th century sought to maximize efficiency by creating systems that could produce consistent results using workers of “average” skill. They created standardized assembly line-style processes that the average worker could execute consistently without any unique skills. Then, factory managers declared these processes to be the model of perfect efficiency and prohibited workers from deviating in any way.

Because many modern organizations follow this same factory model, we have a system that treats workers more like robots than people. Companies expect their employees to follow instructions to the letter, resisting or punishing them if they try to devise their own ways to solve problems. Rose asserts that this is a lose-lose situation: Workers feel dehumanized and unfulfilled, and businesses miss out on the profit potential of their employees’ creative ideas and unique strengths as individuals.

Rose argues that the solution to these issues is to put individuality back in the workplace. When workers have the opportunity to productively utilize their unique skills, they feel more fulfilled and achieve better results than if they just follow instructions.

Today, We Need Unique Workers Even More

In Linchpin, Seth Godin also traces today’s average-obsessed business practices back to industrial-era assembly lines. He agrees with Rose that the rise of jobs where workers must strictly follow directions has made work less fulfilling for employees and less profitable for employers. Furthermore, he contends that developments in the 21st century have exacerbated these problems.

Ideally, people want to avoid unfulfilling jobs, but many workers are willing to do boring labor to cover their basic needs. However, in the 21st century, these unfulfilling jobs offer far less security than they used to. Because so many corporations have developed low-skill jobs that ask employees to follow directions, the supply of passable workers now far outpaces demand. This has made workers much more interchangeable, enabling companies to offer lower wages and making it easier for them to fire and replace anyone they want.

From an employer’s perspective, it’s nearly impossible for most companies to turn a significant profit with assembly-line business practices. Godin explains that companies that use interchangeable employees do so in an attempt to boost efficiency as much as possible. However, at this point, most companies can’t succeed solely through efficiency. No matter how efficient a company’s processes are, they probably can’t offer cheaper or faster products or services than decades-old massive conglomerates. The only way to survive in competition with such corporations is to offer something that no one else is. This requires new, innovative ideas that are impossible to get by hiring people to follow instructions.

Like Rose, Godin believes that the solution to these problems is for employees to be their authentic individual selves at work, deliberately refusing to work in a dehumanizing way. Doing so empowers employees to build genuine emotional relationships at work—with customers, coworkers, and anyone else around. Such relationships are one way that employees can provide unique value to their organizations, ensuring that they can’t be easily replaced.

Rose offers two main tips for employers who want to increase individuality in the workplace.

Tip #1: Give Employees More Autonomy

First, Rose recommends that employers give workers more control over the ways they spend their time. Instead of forcing employees to rigidly follow directions, managers should allow them to accomplish the organization’s goals the best way they can. By encouraging workers to find their own creative solutions, managers can leverage their team’s unique strengths to constantly improve the business.

For example, imagine you run a restaurant and hire someone to wait tables. One day, they tell you that customers frequently complain about the confusing menu layout. They reveal that they used to be a freelance graphic designer, and they ask if you’d be willing to pay them to design a new menu. Whereas most organizations wouldn’t even consider this offer, Rose might recommend asking for samples of their work, paying them to create a new menu, and giving them more graphic design work if they succeed.

(Shortform note: High-autonomy jobs result in more innovative work, but Cal Newport warns in So Good They Can’t Ignore You that jobs like this are unfortunately rare. Because they’re so fulfilling, these jobs are in high demand among job seekers, so they’re difficult to get. Thus, Newport argues that if you want a fulfilling career, you should focus on honing your skills rather than following your passion. If you turn yourself into a rare, valuable commodity, you can more easily exchange that value for a fulfilling, autonomous job.)

Autonomy Leads to Evolving Responsibilities

As the restaurant example above shows, giving employees more autonomy at work may lead them to entirely different job positions than what they were originally hired for. Rose argues that this is a good thing—ideally, organizations give their workers flexible career paths. This way, employees can develop and utilize all their unique strengths rather than trying to fit into standardized positions or paths designed for a generic “average” worker.

(Shortform note: In Reinventing Organizations, Frédéric Laloux offers one way organizations can create flexible internal career paths: by defining job roles rather than job descriptions. Whereas job descriptions list all the work bound to one employee, job roles define a single narrow duty that can be passed between employees. Job roles allow workers to tackle whatever tasks they’re the most equipped and motivated to do, instead of getting boxed in by a rigid description. Rather than getting “promoted” and being forced into “high-status” management tasks, employees advance by growing into whatever roles let them do their best work. Laloux contends that in the future, most successful businesses will likely adopt this practice.)

When managers give employees more control over their work and allow their job responsibilities to evolve, these managers show that they respect their workers as unique individuals rather than seeing them as machines. Rose contends that in turn, employees will repay them with more passionate work and loyalty to the company. This is profitable for the company—passionate employees are more productive, and loyal employees will stick with the organization in the long term, reducing the expense of employee turnover.

(Shortform note: In It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson concur with Rose, adding that if you want to maximize the benefits of investing in employees, it’s not enough to support them at work. To fully support employees as individuals, managers should offer benefits that encourage them to develop their personal lives, such as fully paid sabbaticals or gym memberships.)

Tip #2: Hire Individuals, Not Diplomas

We’ve established that employees with the opportunity to use their unique skills at work are more fulfilled and productive. However, according to Rose, current hiring practices often prevent workers from getting jobs that they’d be well suited for. A potential hire may have all the skills for a job, but if they don’t have a prestigious enough degree in a particular field, employers are likely to reject them.

To ensure that every position is filled by the best possible employee, employers should hire their workers for their skills rather than their educational history. Rose argues that diplomas indicate nothing more than that someone has taken a set of required courses. Diplomas don’t correspond to a specific set of skills, so employers can’t use them to accurately judge whether a potential hire is capable of doing a given job.

Rather than judging potential hires by what diplomas they have, Rose advises companies to judge them based on work they’ve done in the past, which is a more accurate indicator of their skills. In particular, companies should consider applicants who have experience working in an environment similar to theirs, even if it’s outside of their industry. Such applicants are likely to have the skills to do the job well.

For example, if you’re hiring a manager for a software company, a former executive assistant may be a good fit even if they don’t have the same experience in tech as most of your workers. If their past work coordinating schedules is similar enough to the organizational tasks you’re hiring them for, they’re likely to do good work.

(Shortform note: In How Will You Measure Your Life?, Clayton Christensen presents this same idea from an employee’s perspective: If you want to do a specific job, look for opportunities to work in environments similar to that job. This will give you the experiences you need to build the right skills for the job. For example, when Nolan Archibald, CEO of Black & Decker, first wanted to become a CEO, he chose not to directly hunt for jobs with the potential to lead to executive promotions. Instead, he pursued opportunities that would give him leadership experience, including managing an asbestos mine in Canada.)

Why Stick With Ineffective Hiring Practices?

Research has found that less than half of employers are satisfied with the skill level of their new hires. If this is the case, why do so many companies fail to develop more sophisticated hiring strategies and continue turning away applicants lacking prestigious degrees?

One reason is that their hiring practices are designed for efficiency rather than quality—filtering out people who lack diplomas means you have fewer applicants you have to spend time on. Another reason is that such hiring decisions are more defensible. To most people in the business world, hiring someone without a college degree seems like a big risk. Hiring managers who only make “safe” decisions by hiring college graduates are less likely to be blamed for poor hiring outcomes.

Credentials Help Employers Hire Individuals

On a broader scale, Rose argues that the best way we can ensure that more workers end up in jobs that fit them as individuals is by shifting from a diploma-centered labor market to a credential-centered one.

Credentials are alternative educational certificates that represent an individual’s skills more accurately than diplomas. You can earn a credential by passing a single course in a narrow domain, such as accounting or fluency in Spanish. A student’s collection of credentials would accurately indicate all the specific skills they’ve been trained in.

Rose contends that if credentials were more commonly accepted, employers could perfectly identify which candidates would be good fits for the jobs they need to fill. Additionally, credentials would allow workers seeking education to focus on learning the skills they need for the specific job they want to do. In other words, they’d receive a highly individualized education perfectly aligned with their unique goals.

Separating the Two Purposes of Higher Education

The vision of “credentials” that Rose describes here is likely inspired by the ideas of Salman Khan, founder of the online educational resource Khan Academy. Khan describes this same educational system in his 2013 book The One World Schoolhouse. He also refers to these credentials as “microcredentials” to emphasize their narrow focus.

According to Khan, higher education is currently performing two separate functions for its students: educating and credentialing (signifying to employers who has specific skills). Mixing and conflating these two functions is what causes trouble: The bachelor’s degree forces job-seekers to spend time and money to learn things they don’t need to know so they can earn a broad, vague credential.

Khan and Rose’s system would mean creating separate institutions for each of these functions—universities would handle education, and companies conducting narrow skill-based exams would handle credentialing.

Additionally, these institutions would serve two more or less separate groups: Job-seekers looking for credentials can find more direct paths to the skills they need to pass their exams (such as workshops or books). People seeking long-term education or research opportunities can have a more purely academic experience at universities without needlessly investing in broad career preparation. Students in both groups would be spending their time and money exclusively on services that help them reach their goals.