Adapting to change is the most critical professional skill today

Employees with high learning agility are promoted more and receive higher salary increases than their low-agility peers.

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BY Next Big Idea Club

Below, Liz Tran shares five key insights from her new book, AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing.

Liz is a leadership coach to the CEOs and founders of some of the world’s fastest-growing companies. Her work has been featured by the Today show, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and other outlets.

The most consequential divide in modern society is not economic or political. It’s psychological. The gap between people who can adapt to constant change (high agility quotient) and those who feel undone by it is shaping everything from workplaces to mental health.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Liz herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.

1. AQ, or the Agility Quotient, is the primary intelligence needed for today’s world.

One of my primary responsibilities when I worked in venture capital as an executive at a top firm was to try to understand what all the most successful founders in our portfolio had in common. I started with a personality assessment for every founder we deemed successful, and then I also had long conversations with them about their childhood influences, education, and current hobbies.

At the end of a two-year research period, I discovered that all the most successful, happy, and fulfilled leaders have just one thing in common: they’re always changing. Not only are they always developing themselves, but they also have a standout capability to handle change, uncertainty, and the unknown. This is what we call the agility quotient, or AQ.

And it’s not just leaders. According to the Journal of Managerial Studies, employees with high learning agility are promoted more and receive higher salary increases than their low-agility peers. A study from the University of Minnesota showed that agility is a better predictor of an employee’s potential for career advancement than IQ. It no longer matters how smart you are. In a world where stability is a myth, AQ is the primary aptitude that matters.

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