From LinkedIn

…the average depth of the river is 10 cm

The fact that a river has an "average" depth of 10 cm doesn't automatically mean you can ford it with your car.

If you try, you will probably end up like the one in the picture (and if it doesn't happen, it's because you were lucky, not the other way round): plans based on assumptions of average conditions usually go wrong.

It's not Murphy's law, it's science: use it or lose.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying that a theory should be "as simple as possible, but not simpler".

Unfortunately, executives' desire to over-simplify and to work with "a number" (the average) is legendary. But whenever an average is used to represent an uncertain quantity, it ends up distorting the results, because it ignores the impact of the inevitable variations.

This is what Sam Savage explains so clearly in his work on "The Flaw of Averages".

Rather than "Give me a number for my report", every executive should be saying "Give me a distribution for my simulation".