When France began mandatory education for all children in the late 1800s, it required a way to assess the “mental age” of students to properly place them in the right classrooms. Two French psychologists, Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, leaped at the invitation and created the first-ever practical intelligence test. Since then, the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale has inspired countless other researchers, including Lewis Terman, who transformed the original framework into the Stanford-Binet Test, the standard IQ assessment in the United States for most of the 20th century.
Terman believed that high IQ indicated genius, and he sought to prove this with a study he launched in 1921 that tracked 1,528 kids with IQ scores over 135, following them for their entire lives as they grew from children to adults, with the research ending only when they died. Active for more than eighty years, Terman’s Genetic Studies of Genius was the longest-running study in the history of psychology. At first, the results proved Terman’s belief in the power of IQ. These ultraintelligent children, affectionately dubbed Termites, grew into generally healthy and successful adults who finished college, registered patents, and published papers at far higher rates than their counterparts of average intelligence.
However, as time went on, these differentiators diminished. The vast majority of Terman’s Termites grew into regular people: engineers, typists, lawyers, filing clerks, and police officers. Not a single Termite became a Nobel Prize winner or a world-famous artist. In fact, two future Nobel laureates, Luis Alvarez and William Shockley, were rejected from Terman’s study because their IQ scores weren’t high enough.
Around the same time that the Genetic Studies of Genius started to yield questionable results, our collective attention turned away from IQ toward EQ, when Peter Salovey and John Mayer coined the term emotional intelligence in 1990, and Daniel Goleman popularized it with his 1995 book. Suddenly, emotional skills that could not be measured by an IQ test, like self-awareness, empathy, and self-regulation, were recognized as essential to a successful life. Corporations invested in EQ training, schools pushed for emotional literacy, and new movements like social and emotional learning (SEL) became widespread. In the era of collaboration, globalization, and entrepreneurship, EQ surpassed IQ as the must-have aptitude for an interconnected world.
Let’s step back to absorb the full timeline. IQ, the product of Industrialization, emerged in the early 20th century as a mechanism for ranking, sorting, and placing individuals by aptitude, starting with schoolchildren and expanding to organizations like the military, civil service, and higher education. Ninety years later, the rise of knowledge work ushered in EQ, which was needed for new types of jobs that involved less doing and more stewardship. Suddenly, success required managing up, managing down, and working well with colleagues across cultures, and EQ enabled this highly interpersonal work.
Now here we are, thirty-five years later, in a culture defined by unprecedented technological advancement, and it’s clear that IQ and EQ aren’t the end of our story. Our circumstances have dramatically shifted since 1900 and 1990, and while I’m not a futurist, and I don’t have a crystal ball, I do know we’ve been looking in the wrong places, expecting IQ and EQ to be enough for our current reality. What we really need is a new kind of intelligence that directly addresses our ability to handle today’s ever-fluctuating challenges and opportunities. We need AQ.
The Agility Quotient
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Meanings, ideas, concepts, and qualities cannot exist if we don’t have the proper words to describe them. Take the German word Schadenfreude, for instance, which describes the pleasure found in another person’s misfortune. In Buddhist texts, you find its opposite — the Sanskrit word mudita, which means the pleasure found in another person’s happiness and well-being. Both words, Schadenfreude and mudita, are terms used to describe complex feelings that we don’t have a precise shorthand for in English.
I never knew that I could experience either emotion until I discovered that terminology. After all, the act of labeling something is what enables it to exist. When a new word becomes a part of the vernacular, it expands our capacity to make sense of the world: Take the pop culture terms like plant-based, binge-watch, and selfie that emerged in this generation, for example.
Agility is no longer a talent or a nice-to-have personality trait: It’s a non-negotiable orientation toward life.
That is what we’re doing with the phrase AQ, which I define as the ability to handle change, uncertainty, and the unknown. My hope is that this phrase makes its way into our colloquial language and gives this aptitude the focus it deserves. By defining AQ as a stand-alone intelligence, we allow it to take its rightful place alongside IQ and EQ as an important, valid, and observable way of being. More than a hundred years ago, IQ established what it means to be intelligent. Then EQ came along and broadened the meaning. Both were helpful frameworks for the time and context from which they emerged, but now our world in flux demands AQ.
Agility is no longer a talent or a nice-to-have personality trait: It’s a non-negotiable orientation toward life. Just as IQ and EQ previously informed how successful or happy we might become, the Agility Quotient is a new kind of intelligence for a world that’s always changing. By naming it, we imbue it with the importance it deserves, and we acknowledge its impact on every facet of our lives.
- Let’s use AQ in our job descriptions (a fast-paced environment for high-AQ candidates) . . .
- in our home lives (I’m raising high-AQ children) . . .
- and to give direction to our choices (I’m working on my AQ, so let’s try someplace new).
We finally have the right language to describe today’s most important ability, and now that we’ve defined it, we can achieve it.
This article The Agility Quotient: Why we need to move on from IQ and EQ is featured on Big Think.