AQ stands for Adaptability Quotient. It measures the skills people can build, how they are wired to meet change, and what their workplace does to both.
Adaptability is not one thing. It is a chain. Something goes in, something happens, something comes out. The AQ® model measures all three.
1. Input, what you bring
Character is why you adapt. Ability is the skills you can learn. Environment is the workplace that frees you or holds you back.
2. Process, what you do
Explore new ideas. Make the most of what you already have. Solve problems. Create.
3. Outcome, what the business gets
Faster innovation. People who stay, grow and move. Less stress and burnout. Better performance.
We built this with Dr Nicholas T. Deuschel, a research professor at Spain's leading Carlos III University. It uses the input-process-outcome model, one of the most robust models in organisational psychology. In our case, adaptability is the outcome.
Twenty elements in all: three dimensions, fifteen sub-dimensions measured directly, and five advanced metrics built on top of them. The two letter codes are the shorthand used in your report. Open any tile to see what it measures.
The adaptability skills you can build. These move with practice, which is why they are where most development starts.
Grit, a key aspect of adaptability, measures your ability to stay committed to long-term objectives, driven by consistent interest and persistent effort. This distinct skill involves a blend of passion and perseverance. It is distinct from resilience (recovering from setbacks) and is considered a learnable skill.
Mental Flexibility is the ability to observe the current situation and create new pathways, adapting effectively as needed. It involves embracing competing demands and seeing tensions as opportunities for learning and growth.
This skill is vital for individual and organizational adaptability, allowing exploration, experimentation, efficiency, and refinement. It goes beyond open-mindedness to actively pursue opposing behaviors and thoughts for greater success through adaptive experiments.
Mindset refers to your beliefs and outlook on change. It captures your optimism and ability to visualize positive outcomes. A growth mindset, crucial for thriving in a changing world, embraces the idea that human attributes can be developed through effort and hard work.
Your AQ Mindset score offers insight into your attitudes towards change and helps identify areas for growth, determining whether you have a fixed, pessimistic mindset or a flexible, optimistic one.
Resilience is your capacity to recover swiftly from setbacks, adapt effectively, and navigate challenges. It is a crucial aspect of adaptability, allowing you to process new information and environmental changes. While often considered an innate trait, resilience can in fact be developed. Highly resilient individuals recover rapidly, experience less stress, and embrace significant transformations.
It is essential to differentiate resilience from grit: grit focuses on consistency of interests and goals over time, while resilience remains neutral concerning the stability of one's interests.
Unlearning refers to the ability to intentionally let go of outdated information, beliefs, and practices, paving the way for new ideas and approaches. In an ever-changing world, unlearning is a vital component of adaptability, enabling individuals and organizations to remain agile and competitive.
This conscious process involves re-evaluating based on new data and environmental factors, often causing discomfort as it requires parting with past experiences and beliefs. Highly adaptable individuals can identify areas of struggle and uncertainty, updating perceptions, knowledge, and behaviors as needed.
How you are wired to meet change. These are preferences, so there is no better or worse end.
Emotional Range, derived from the concept of neuroticism, measures one's predisposition to psychological stress. It examines how individuals experience emotions due to situations in their environment, particularly in the workplace.
This dimension is crucial during times of significant change and uncertainty. Emotional Range, scored on a sliding scale between Reactive and Collected, is not about good or bad but rather understanding the appropriate response to different situations.
Extraversion preference is an aspect of adaptability that influences your enthusiasm and energy in social situations, affecting decision-making and adaptability. High extraversion scorers thrive in social interactions, while low scorers are more reserved.
This dimension relates to the Big Five personality traits, with both introverts and extroverts capable of adapting successfully in the right environments and with the right support.
Hope, a measurable psychological state, is the mindset to pursue goals and the ability to create alternative ways to reach them when challenged. Rooted in positive psychology, hope consists of agency (goal-directed energy) and pathways (planning to meet goals).
It resembles self-efficacy and optimism but uniquely emphasizes generating strategies to overcome obstacles. In the AQ model, hope is a powerful dimension associated with self-esteem, positive affect, and self-efficacy, while negatively correlated with negative emotions and burnout.
Motivational Style explores what drives you to achieve goals and adapt to change. It is based on regulatory focus theory, which has two main systems: promotion (maximizing opportunities) and prevention (fulfilling duties and minimizing errors).
The AQme assessment measures your preference on a continuum from play to protect (motivated by preserving what you have) to play to win (motivated by potential gains). Knowing your motivational style helps you better understand how to adapt and succeed in changing environments.
Thinking Style explores how you process information, categorize, and make sense of the world in your work environment. It is influenced by theories from Dr. Robert J. Sternberg and Dr. Fiona Beddoes-Jones, focusing on the balance between big-picture and detailed thinking.
As you progress in your career, you may develop a more ambidextrous thinking style, allowing you to better adapt to change and seize opportunities by effectively combining broader perspectives with attention to detail.
What your workplace does to your capacity to adapt. It is measured as how the people in it experience those conditions, and it is the part a leader can change most directly.
Company Support focuses on employee perceptions of how their organization values their contributions and cares for their well-being. Research has shown high levels of company support correlate with job performance, satisfaction, and lower staff turnover.
When employees perceive their organization as supportive and caring, they are more likely to adapt to changes and align their goals with the company's.
Emotional Health measures your ability to thrive at work by experiencing positive emotions while limiting negative ones. It is crucial for adaptability since it influences your energy and engagement in continuous change.
An environment with poor emotional health impacts work performance and adaptability. Thriving individuals experience vitality and learning, which is essential for adaptability. A low Emotional Health score risks struggling with changes, while a high score indicates better adaptation in the organization.
Team Support represents the extent to which employees feel comfortable sharing knowledge, addressing challenges, and expressing their opinions within their team. A supportive team environment is crucial for building psychological safety, trust, and connection among team members.
An absence of team support can hinder adaptation and innovation within an organization. As a dynamic aspect of adaptability, team support should be reassessed regularly to maintain its positive impact on organizational adaptability.
Work Environment assesses the systems, processes, and methodologies in your organization that influence adaptability. It evaluates whether your organization fosters self-disruption, experimentation, and adaptation or hinders them. This sub-dimension considers rewards, observable acts, punishment, space, process and forums, and public celebration.
A beneficial Work Environment for adaptability is one where failures are viewed as learning opportunities, openly discussed and celebrated company-wide. A closed and pragmatic environment hampers adaptability, whereas an open and experimental environment nurtures it.
Work Stress gauges the sense of task overwhelm. Managing work stress effectively is crucial for adaptability. High levels of stress can limit adaptability, while low levels may reduce the motivation to adapt.
A balance of healthy stress, or eustress, is vital for growth, adaptation, and change. Long-term high work stress can lead to consequences such as high employee turnover, poor sleep, sickness, and burnout. Understanding and optimizing work stress is essential to maintain a productive and adaptive workforce.
The Change Readiness Index looks at how prepared you are to navigate and absorb change as it arrives. It is weighted from your measured adaptability skills, your approach to uncertainty and the strength of the support around you, rather than from a separate set of questions.
A higher index points to readiness to lead and support a transition. A lower one shows where support is needed first.
The Re-skill Index looks at capacity to learn new skills and adapt to evolving job requirements. It is weighted from mental flexibility, unlearning outdated practice, the degree to which existing skills are being protected, and how work stress is being managed.
It is most useful where roles are being redesigned around new technology, because it shows how much of the learning load can be carried now and what is getting in the way of carrying more.
Explore and Transform describes the pull towards radical innovation and transformative change: venturing into new territory, backing disruptive ideas and building new models rather than refining existing ones. It rests on continual experimentation and a culture that treats failure as learning, which is why it shows up most clearly in small cross-functional teams with high psychological safety.
Success here looks like rapid learning, wide experimentation and first-mover advantage in areas the organisation has not worked in before. The risk at the other end is stagnation.
Utilize and Improve describes how far current strengths and expertise are being used to improve what already works. It is a systematic approach to incremental gains, focused on customer satisfaction, quality control and extending the value of activity already underway.
It favours predictable growth and measured trade-offs over radical experimentation, and it is judged on consistent performance, accuracy and beating established targets. Most organisations need this and Explore and Transform in different places at the same time.
Change Uncertainty looks at how often someone feels unsure during change. Not whether they can adapt, but how much of the picture is missing while they try to. It is built from three aspects: how ready someone feels to respond, how much impact they expect the change to have, and how severe they judge that impact to be.
It is the newest part of the model and the only element scored in reverse, so it is read alongside the rest rather than on its own.
They are not a second questionnaire. Nothing extra is asked. All five are derived from the same assessment that produces the fifteen sub-dimensions, and they surface where readiness, learning appetite and unresolved uncertainty currently sit, so a leader can decide where to put support first.
They are not forecasts either. They describe where things stand now, from answers given now, which is why a reassessment after a period of change is the way to see what actually moved. What is and is not yet established sits in the next section.
Each sub-dimension is shown against a global norm base of 16,491 working adults, in low, medium and high bands rather than against a pass mark.
Ability and Environment are scored on bars because they move. Character is shown on a continuum, because a preference has no better or worse end.
The report points to where development would make the most difference, and a reassessment later shows what actually moved.
We publish the evidence, including its limits. Criterion validity, meaning studies linking AQ® results to later workplace outcomes, is not yet established, and prospective studies are planned.
Every engagement below was run by a certified practitioner and written up with the client named or described in their own words. Three of them are here. There are more on the case studies page.
Measured adaptability rose while conditions declined
Read the case study
Nine months. Sixty people. A 21-point NPS gain.
Read the case study
Transforming engagement and retention through AQ®
Read the case study
All three start from the same assessment. One person answers it once, in about 22 minutes. What changes is who sees the results and what gets done with them.
Take AQme® yourself and get your own report across the fifteen sub-dimensions and five advanced metrics. $99 per person, about 22 minutes.
Take the assessment
The human side of AI transformation, measured before any change or leadership programme starts. AQteam® combines five or more people into one shared picture of where a team is strong, where it is stretched, and what the workplace is doing to both. Five is the minimum because the report is anonymised, so no individual can be identified from it.
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Get certified to run assessments and debriefs, and bring a measured evidence base to leadership restructure, positive change and communication work.
See certificationFour situations people bring us most often. Each one points to the route that fits it.
We are restructuring in ninety days and we do not know where to put the support.
See a team reportMy client says they are fine with change. Their behaviour says otherwise.
Get certified to debrief itWe gave everyone the AI tools. Adoption is uneven and nobody can tell us why.
See how others have done itOur internal survey tells us engagement has dropped. It does not guide us where or what to check.
Talk it through with usThe AQ® model is a framework for measuring workplace adaptability. It has three dimensions, fifteen sub-dimensions and five advanced metrics built on top.
The three dimensions are Ability, the adaptability skills a person can build; Character, how a person is wired to meet change; and Environment, what their workplace does to their capacity to adapt.
IQ measures reasoning ability and EQ measures emotional awareness. AQ® measures adaptability, which is how effectively a person responds to change.
The practical difference is that IQ is relatively stable in adulthood, while the AQ model treats adaptability as developable, and it measures the person's environment alongside the person.
No. It is an assessment rather than a test, and only the five Character sub-dimensions describe stable preferences.
The other ten measure skills that can be developed and environmental conditions that can be changed. AQme® is a self report instrument, so it measures self perception, and debriefs are framed accordingly.
It can be improved. The Ability sub-dimensions are learnable skills, and the Environment sub-dimensions describe conditions a leader can change directly.
Character sub-dimensions are preferences that shift more slowly through experience and context. This is why the model measures all three rather than producing a single number.
About 22 minutes. It is completed online in a conversational format, and there is no time limit or pass mark.
AQme® is $99 per person, which includes your individual report.
Team and organisation pricing depends on the number of people and what you want alongside the assessment, such as a debrief or a workshop.
You get your own report covering all fifteen sub-dimensions and the five advanced metrics, with your results set against a global norm base.
The report sets out what each result means in context rather than reducing you to one number, and it points to where development would make the most difference.
You do. Each person decides who else sees their individual results.
Where an organisation runs AQteam®, the team report is built from an anonymised aggregate and requires at least five people, so no individual can be identified from it.
AQai® is ISO 27001 certified for information security. Full details of how assessment data is handled, stored and retained are set out on our Trust and Security page.
The A.C.E. model draws on established research traditions in psychology and organisational science. What is new is combining them into a single model, so this is an emerging assessment and we publish the workings as we go.
Reliability, factor structure, cross group invariance, fairness screening and banding method are all set out in the AQme® Validation and Evidence Pack, along with what is still being researched. Criterion validity, meaning studies linking AQ® results to later workplace outcomes, is not yet established.
No. AQme® and AQteam® are built and supported for development, coaching and change planning.
They are not designed or validated for selection decisions, and we do not recommend using them that way.
Everyone answers the same assessment. AQme® returns one person's own picture across the fifteen sub-dimensions.
AQteam® is then derived from an anonymised aggregate of each individual AQme report, so a leader sees the pattern across the team without identifying individuals.
Yes. Reassessment is commonly used before and after a development programme or a period of change, to see what moved.
Reassessment stability has been measured across all fifteen sub-dimensions, which is what makes a before and after comparison meaningful rather than noise.
They answer different questions. A change methodology gives you the process. The AQ® model gives you the readiness picture underneath it, showing where teams currently sit and where the environment may need to change first.
Many practitioners run them together.
AQ® Certified practitioners deliver them, trained through AQai's ICF accredited certification programme.
Organisations can also run the platform directly, with support from the partner success team.
Take it yourself, bring it to your team, or learn to run it with others.
Copyright adaptai Ltd. All rights reserved. AQ® and AQai® are registered trademarks of adaptai Ltd.
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