#3 Built for a Ghost
How a non-existent man became the blueprint for broken systems
Back in the 1940s, the US Air Force was crashing a lot of planes.
And I mean a LOT of planes. We’re talking up-to-17-crashes-a-day lot of planes.
There hadn’t been any malfunctions or instrument failures, so the Air Force said that “pilot error” was to blame. Which you’d think would be fair. But the pilots were firm in their response. They weren’t the problem.
Eventually, the Air Force took a closer look at their planes.
When the USAF had designed its cockpits 20 years earlier, they’d used measurements from hundreds of pilots to standardise the controls. Everything from the seat, to the pedals, to the windshield, was built to fit the average pilot. Even the helmet.
So now they were wondering.
Had pilots just gotten bigger? Or smaller?
So, they brought in 23-year-old Lt Gilbert S. Daniels to remeasure thousands of pilots. He collected data from 4,063 individuals and calculated the average range of the 10 most critical physical dimensions. Things like height, chest circumference, arm length.
The assumption at the time was that most pilots would fall within the average range on all ten. That’s what averages are for, right?
Gilbert decided to test it.
He crunched the numbers, ran the data, and came back with a stunning finding:
Not one single pilot matched the average across all ten dimensions.
Zero.
Nada.
Not a single one.
So Gilbert lowered the bar. What if a pilot only had to match three of the ten?
Still, less than 3.5% of pilots were “average” sized.
The average pilot didn’t exist.
By building a cockpit to fit the average pilot, the USAF had built it to fit no one.
Immediately, the USAF banned the average. They instructed all manufacturers to design “to the edges”, to build adjustable cockpits that could accommodate extremes: tallest to shortest, widest to narrowest. The result? Fewer crashes. Better performance. A system finally aligned with reality.
Over time, Gilbert’s insights reshaped design far beyond the military. Adjustable car seats. Ergonomic furniture. Even bike helmets.
And you’d think the lesson would’ve stuck.
But decades after the Air Force abandoned the “average pilot,” entire industries kept designing for a mythical average standard. And one of the most disturbing examples is crash test dummies.
For most of modern automotive history, the default crash test dummy was based on the average male body: 5’9”, 77 kgs. That was the standard used to design seatbelts, airbags, and impact response systems.
Astonishingly, it wasn’t until 2022 that the first female crash test dummy was developed, in Sweden. Before then, testers worldwide just used a scaled-down male model. No adjustments for different bone density, muscle distribution, or spinal alignment. No real difference in data modeling.
The result?
Women are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in a frontal car crash, almost twice as likely to become trapped in the wreckage of a car crash, and 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash. Not because they’re more fragile, but because the system was never designed for them.
When we treat the nonexistent “average man” as the universal template, and everyone else as an exception, is it any wonder why the system fails us?
And if we’re still getting it wrong with visible differences…
…how much are we missing when the differences are invisible?
Differences in how we think, in how we experience the world, don’t show up in a tape measure. You can’t weigh how someone processes information. Or scan their brain for how they prioritise ideas, make decisions, or respond under pressure.
But those differences are real. And just as impactful.
Some minds are wired for exploration. Others for precision. Some are attuned to harmony. Others to disruption. These aren’t soft skills or quirks, they’re specialisations, honed by millions of years of evolutionary pressure.
And yet we still design workplaces, learning systems, and leadership pipelines around the average brain.
No wonder we’re crashing.
Let’s talk about bell curves.
In biology, virtually everything falls along a bell curve. Height, eyesight, cholesterol levels, working memory, even pain tolerance. That’s just how nature works. You get a clustering around the middle, and tapering extremes at both ends.
So when we design systems, schools, jobs, and tools for the “average,” we are excluding everyone outside that tight cluster in the middle. Whether we intend to do this, or not. Often 30–40% of the population, depending on the curve.
We tell ourselves it’s efficient. Practical. Scalable.
But there’s a deeper impact we don’t always acknowledge. Because when we design only for the centre, we make it harder for those at the edges to thrive.
So to bridge that gap, we create accommodations. We create workarounds that help people participate in systems that weren’t built with them in mind. And we tend to frame this as generosity.
But what if it’s simply a missed opportunity to design for the full range of human variation from the start? To design “to the edges” to stop the crashes.
This isn’t just a flaw in system design.
It’s a deep societal rift.
We’ve internalised the myth of the average as truth.
We’ve come to believe that the majority way is the right way.
That the middle of the bell curve is the “correct” way to learn, work, lead, behave, speak. And that the edges are abnormal.
But human cognition is just as biologically variable as height or cholesterol. Some brains are wired to seek novelty. Others to refine detail. Some are driven by alignment and harmony. Others by disruption and divergence.
None of these are flaws.
All of these are specialisations.
And all of these are “normal”.
So when we ignore this. When we build for the average. We generate friction.
Burnout, boredom, performance gaps, poor communication, missed potential.
Not just for those at the edges.
Even those closest to the middle suffer when the fit is wrong.
Most of us sit somewhere between the peaks and the tails, just like the Air Force pilots. But when systems are built on averages, no one fits.
The world we need won’t come from squeezing everyone into the same mould.
It will come from recognising the breadth of our design. From building workplaces, schools, and systems that flex (like the cockpit did) to support the full range of human minds.
Because this isn’t about accommodation. It’s about alignment.
And when we design for the full range of human minds, something powerful happens. Not only do more people find their place, but we all move further, faster, together. With more ease, more creativity, and more humanity.
Imagine what could we build, what problems we could solve, if we stopped designing for the average and started designing for all of us?
And that is why we need diversity in workplaces. Cause if the same'type' of people are employed no one else fits and the product or service you provide only fits one type.