Averagarianism

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Rory Sutherland has an excellent snippet about the danger of managing toward averages. Among his reasons:

• The average — the top of the bell curve— is where everyone will be targeting their product, so existing markets will be mature, barriers to entry high, and margins will be the slimmest. Go for the tails, find the influencers and meet them drive your product into the mainstream. Have the average follow you, not the other way around.

• Convergence on the same place everyone is converging isn’t good business, but a recipe for bankruptcy. It is a race to the bottom. As with evolution, the secret is to realise the process is a continuous drift from the unsatisfactory status quo to something else that doesn’t have that drawback, as opposed to a process converging on a consensus. The ecosystem is not seeking an equilibrium. It is perpetually seeking to escape it.

Averagarianism

Not to be confused with tepid, cosy, easy mediocrity, which everyone loves.

Averagarianismthat forces actually different people into generic categories. It imputes commonalities that don’t really exist. Sanding off contours and wonky borders to make everything regular simply because that suits the hyper-scaled prerogatives of commerce.

The expression “community” to describe a disparate group that, but for one salient feature, have absolutely nothing in common and would likely be at each other’s throats on any other issue — you know, the “air-breathing community”, the “US intelligence community” or the “political extremist community” is an averagarianist tell.

See also

• The End of Average: How to Succeed in a World That Values Sameness
• Big data
• Data modernism
• Correlation
• Parable of the squirrels