The Law of Averaging

The Hotpot | By Lisanne

We pay too much attention to the top.

The Olympic athlete shaving a tenth of a second. The executive making one brilliant decision. The exceptional few who make improvement look visible.

If you want to raise the standard of a group, improving the best performers often matters less than helping everyone else get a little better.

A few exceptional employees can’t transform a company like thousands of customer-facing employees becoming a little more thoughtful, capable, or engaged.

The same is true of efficiency. Improving a Prius from 50 to 55 miles per gallon is useful. But improving millions of SUVs from 10 to 15 has a much bigger impact.

The top gets our attention because its progress is visible.

The base is where scale lives.

If we care about raising standards, the question isn’t only

“How do we make the best better?”

It’s:

“How do we make better the new normal?”

Thank you for reading! The question of the day:

Are you averaging averages, or raising the floor?

Let me know in the comments!