The Intelligence You Actually Need Right Now
Why every generation gets the intelligence framework it deserves — and what ours demands
For most of human history, the most valuable form of intelligence was practical. You needed to know which plants were poisonous, how to read the weather, where the animals went in winter. Survival depended on it.
Then the industrial era arrived, and we needed a different kind of smart. We needed people who could memorize, analyze, sort, and execute at scale. So we invented IQ as a way to measure and rank cognitive horsepower. We built entire systems around it. Our schools screened for it. Our hiring pipelines rewarded it. By the time I came along in 1975, we held up IQ as the scorecard that mattered above all others.
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This week’s guest on Hello Monday is Liz Tran, author of AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing.
At some point in the late 1990s, the business world embraced emotional intelligence — EQ. This was the ability to read a room, build trust, navigate relationships. This Harvard Business Review article, first published in 1998, suggested it was more critical to success than IQ. We updated the scorecard.
As we enter a new era that will be defined by AI and its adoption, it’s new time for another update. Enter your agility quotient—AQ.
This week on Hello Monday, I spoke with executive coach Liz Tran, who makes this argument in her new book, AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing. The intelligence that matters most right now, evaluates your capacity to handle change, disappointment, and uncertainty without losing your footing.
And unlike IQ, which is essentially fixed, or EQ, which has a ceiling, AQ is fully in your control. You can raise it.
Liz has a great way of thinking about it that I found helpful personally. She has developed a framework of four archetypes that describe your natural style of navigating change. Each has real strengths — and real blind spots.
The novelist plans, researches, and drives toward a clear end goal. They (we!) make timelines, love agendas, and find deep empowerment in having a map. Their core motivation is freedom — specifically, the freedom to chart their own course. The risk: when life goes off-script, they can be knocked sideways.
The firefighter thrives in real-time chaos. They’re the person you call in a crisis, a natural problem-solver who operates best when everything is on fire. The risk: they can resist planning altogether, assuming things will change anyway.
The astronaut moves fast, innovates instinctively, and leads from the front. Motivated by passion, they’re often the first to see what’s coming next. The risk: they can leave everyone else behind, changing direction so quickly that their team loses the thread.
The neurosurgeon won’t move until they’re ready — and their version of ready is exceptional. They hold an impossibly high bar, excel at complex projects with a lot of moving pieces, and bring a precision to their work that no one else can match. The risk: the perfect can become the enemy of the good, and speed sometimes matters.
I’m a novelist, unmistakably.
Understanding that has helped me make sense of decisions I’ve made throughout my career — including some I’m navigating right now. Like, I’m ruled by my need for autonomy, above all else. It’s irrational the degree to which it drives me.
If you’re curious where you sit in this framework, Liz has a quick quiz here that is remarkably reliable for the two minutes it will take you.
Our technical skills have a five-year half-life.
One more thing I haven’t stopped thinking about from our conversation. Liz mentioned research out of Harvard’s Digital Reskilling Lab, so I went back and looked it up. It was conducted in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group and published in a 2023 Harvard Business Review piece called “Reskilling in the Age of AI,” and it revealed that our technical skills have a five-year half-life. In some industries, its shorter. In tech, for example, it’s two and a half years. The researchers found that this erosion is accelerating — driven by AI, automation, and the pace at which entire job categories are being restructured.
What the research also surfaces is where organizations are failing to respond. Most companies are still investing in technical reskilling — teaching people new tools, new platforms, new hard skills — when the evidence suggests that’s a losing game. The skills you retrain people on today will be half as valuable in five years. What holds its value, the researchers argue, are the durable human capacities underneath the technical ones: the ability to learn, to adapt, to navigate ambiguity, to work across difference. These are the things that no software update can replicate.
Reframing “reskilling” from tool acquisition to human development feels like the most important career insight hiding in plain sight right now.
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I’ve spent 20+ years covering tech from the inside for BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Wired. My mission is to close the gap between the people building the future—and those of us living it.
