AQai

AQai Transforming the way people and organizations adapt to change by measuring and improving employee ad

A convention and business-events centre in Malaysia was preparing to expand its capacity. Before committing, its leaders...
20/08/2026

A convention and business-events centre in Malaysia was preparing to expand its capacity. Before committing, its leadership wanted an answer to something harder than any revenue forecast: could the commercial team actually carry the business through the change?

10 leaders across Sales, Business Development and Marketing completed the AQme® assessment with AQai® Certified Partner Jonathan Low of Global Success Learning Academy. The team profile showed a group strong at optimising what already worked and under-equipped for transforming toward growth, with Mindset, Resilience and Unlearning sitting low in Ability, and a low-scoring Environment around them. That is a specific problem, and a very different one from "the team needs to be more agile".

Jonathan translated the data into a 2-day programme and one-to-one coaching with every leader, then into practical moves: high-adaptability individuals named as change champions to model new sales behaviours, learning sprints designed around the gaps, and sales rituals rebuilt around the expansion strategy. The engagement scored 10/10 NPS and 7/7 for clarity of the AQ® debrief, with a re-assessment proposed at 3 to 6 months to track progress.

One participant summed it up better than we could: "The first time we saw data that made sense of how we feel during change."

If your organisation is about to scale, what would your commercial team's adaptability data say about whether it is ready?

Most things we measure at work are skills, where higher is better. Your motivation style is not one of them.It simply de...
10/08/2026

Most things we measure at work are skills, where higher is better. Your motivation style is not one of them.

It simply describes the direction you are driven in. Some people are pulled hardest by what they could gain, so they play to win. Others by what they could lose, so they play to protect. Neither is stronger. The colleague who checks the numbers twice and the one chasing the big idea both care just as much. They just want different things.

That changes what "getting better" means. You are not trying to become more of a play-to-win person, because there is no better place to get to. You are building range: the ability to flex into the other mode on purpose when the moment calls for it, and to notice when your usual setting is helping you and when it is quietly costing you.

Our new guide breaks down what motivation style is, why a higher score is not the goal, and simple ways to build range in either direction.

Read it here: https://aqai.io/blog-article/how-to-improve-your-motivation-style

Before you roll a new HR platform out to thousands of employees, who prepares the People & Culture team that has to lead...
28/07/2026

Before you roll a new HR platform out to thousands of employees, who prepares the People & Culture team that has to lead it?

That was the question behind our latest case study. The Canadian operation of a global services multinational was about to move its whole workforce onto a cloud-based enterprise HR platform. Its 30-person People & Culture team, working bilingually across five sub-teams, wanted to lead that change as advocates of adaptability rather than just administer it. What they didn't have was a shared way to understand how different people, and different sub-teams, would actually respond to a shift of that scale.

Working with AQai® Certified Partner Jay Reid of The Making Box, they used the AQ® Assessment to map exactly that. The standout move was a cross-mapping that linked each of the client's five named priorities, including the platform rollout itself, to the three AQ® sub-dimensions most likely to carry them. A complex team report became a single page showing where their adaptability investment would land hardest: Hope as a genuine strength, with 63% scoring hopeful and none fearful, and Mental Flexibility as the universal gap to develop.

The team left with a shared language and a clear place to focus. 70% asked for one-to-one coaching to keep going.

When your own people are the ones leading a change, how much do you actually know about how they adapt to it?

Grit gets sold as "never give up". The research is more interesting than that.Grit is the persistence of effort and cons...
24/07/2026

Grit gets sold as "never give up". The research is more interesting than that.

Grit is the persistence of effort and consistency of interest that carry you toward a long-term goal, and it is one of the best predictors of achievement we have. But more grit aimed at the wrong goal is just wasted grit, and the people most likely to fall into that trap are the grittiest ones, because their persistence keeps them in a goal long after others would have moved on.

So building grit has two halves. First, check the goal still deserves you: does it still fit who you are becoming, and would you set it again today? Then, if it holds, build the capacity to stay with it. Five levers do most of the work: a genuine interest, deliberate practice in small doses, a purpose bigger than you, hope, and a few people who share the goal.

Of those five, hope carries the most weight. Not optimism, but the working belief that your effort changes outcomes. Grit without hope is not endurance, it is the runway to burnout.

We pulled the five into a short carousel, plus the one question to ask before you double down on any goal.

Which of your current goals would survive the question "would I set this again today"?

"Handles change well" is a compliment you cannot manage. You cannot develop a hunch.Adaptability Quotient turns it into ...
15/07/2026

"Handles change well" is a compliment you cannot manage. You cannot develop a hunch.

Adaptability Quotient turns it into something you can. It measures readiness for change across three dimensions: Ability (the skills you can build), Character (your natural tendencies), and Environment (the conditions around you).

The dimension most tools skip? Environment. The same person can thrive in a supportive team and stall in a hostile one, and only measuring the conditions shows a leader where to actually intervene.

Here is how AQ is measured, and how it differs from EQ and DISC. →

Full guide in the comments.

They set out to nearly triple the business in five years. The first thing they did was take the President's own scores o...
14/07/2026

They set out to nearly triple the business in five years. The first thing they did was take the President's own scores off the table.

An established automotive aftermarket business in India had turned decades of steady, single-digit growth into a stable, well-run operation. Now its leadership had set a very different kind of target: roughly 3x in five years. The President was clear-eyed that a number that big could not be delivered top-down. It would depend on whether his nine senior leaders were genuinely aligned, and equipped as a team to pursue it. The gap he saw was cultural, a group with real operating discipline that reviewed last month and last quarter far more readily than it designed the next five years.

Working with AQai® Certified Partner Ramesh Srinivasan of LeadFac Solutions, all nine leaders completed the AQ® Assessment, configured as a shared team report. The President's own results were deliberately held out of the aggregate, so one strong profile could not skew the group picture. Ramesh ran the two days without slide decks: half a day of honest self-awareness first, using breakouts and whole-team synthesis so the leaders named their own development areas, then a day and a half of strategy, weaving the AQ® data through Force Field Analysis, the Ansoff matrix, Porter's Five Forces & de Bono's Six Thinking Hats.

The shift was in ownership. For the first time, the team built what came next instead of reviewing what had already happened, and left with a plan each leader felt accountable for, not one handed down from the board. Working through the Ansoff matrix they concluded business-as-usual would not deliver a step-change, and committed to new products and new markets as the route to it. In the President's words, the session "positively contributed to strengthening our leadership team's shared understanding and strategic direction."

When your leadership team meets, how much of the time goes on reviewing the past versus designing what comes next? And if you took the most senior person's voice out of the room for an hour, what would the rest of the team finally say?

IQ measures how you reason. EQ measures how you manage emotions. AQ measures how well you adapt when everything changes....
08/07/2026

IQ measures how you reason. EQ measures how you manage emotions. AQ measures how well you adapt when everything changes.

Adaptability Quotient turns "handles change well" into something you can actually measure, across Ability, Character and Environment, and then build on purpose.

Here's what AQ is, and why it's the capability that decides whether the rest ever gets used. →

Full guide in the comments.

Zero out of 12. Not one leader on the team reported high team support.The General Manager of a provincial farm federatio...
07/07/2026

Zero out of 12. Not one leader on the team reported high team support.

The General Manager of a provincial farm federation already sensed her 12-person leadership team was fragmenting. Individually they were committed and capable, but defensiveness was creeping in, there was no shared language for navigating change together, and she could feel the cracks without being able to prove them. In a not-for-profit representing tens of thousands of farms, fragmentation at the top is not a soft problem. It compounds.

Working with AQai® Certified Partner Jay Reid of The Making-Box, the team ran the AQ® Assessment across all 12 leaders, generating individual profiles and a composite team report. Jay paired the assessment science with game-based learning, connection before data, opening with a session built on trust and laughter before any scores appeared, then adding 24 one-to-one coaching sessions between the group phases.

The data made the felt problem fixable. Grit was the team's dominant strength. Emotional Range was wide, Extraversion & Hope evenly split. But the Environment gap was stark: zero of 12 reporting high Team Support. That single number catalysed the most important conversation of the programme, and the team made its own commitments, voiced in their own words: stop the gossip, assume positive intent, move sensitive conversations to live calls. Six months on, the General Manager reported those shifts were still holding, with measurably less complaining and far more collaboration between meetings.

When a leadership team can finally see the thing it has only been feeling, what becomes possible? If you had one honest data point about your own team, which one would you most want to see?

Nine months. A 60-person cohort. A 21.8-point jump in NPS.When the Financial Management group inside a major U.S. financ...
30/06/2026

Nine months. A 60-person cohort. A 21.8-point jump in NPS.

When the Financial Management group inside a major U.S. financial institution ran its internal client survey in 2020, the score told a stark story: an NPS of -31.3, with nearly 44% of the people they served classified as detractors. The number named the problem. It didn't explain what to change.

That is where adaptability science came in. Working with AQai® Certified Partner Debora McLaughlin and her team at The Renegade Leader Coaching & Consulting Group, the group used the AQ® Adaptability Assessment to turn a felt gap into a measurable, multi-dimensional view of how the team engaged with change, ambiguity & client expectations across Ability, Character & Environment.

The results compounded over five years. Phase 1 produced a verified 162% ROI in 90 days. The final phase delivered a 21.8-point NPS gain in under nine months. Across the full engagement NPS moved 70 points, from -31.3 to 38.5, promoters rose fourfold from 12.5% to 50%, and strong preference to consult the team more than doubled from 41% to 84%. With 82.8% of final-survey respondents being repeat participants, this was sustained behavioural change, not a survey blip.

A spotlight on the partner behind it. Debora McLaughlin is an Adaptability Consultant, Executive Coach & Amazon bestselling author who has helped over 300 leaders elevate their adaptability and ex*****on speed across tech, banking, healthcare & government. This engagement shows what a Certified Partner can build when adaptability data meets patient, structured delivery.

If your internal team ran an honest client survey tomorrow, what would the number tell you, and would you know what to change?

"We should have done this on day one, not day three."That was the Global VP of HR's reaction, mid-conference, watching a...
23/06/2026

"We should have done this on day one, not day three."

That was the Global VP of HR's reaction, mid-conference, watching a global healthcare business finally see its EMEA commercial team clearly. Employee surveys had already flagged change fatigue and uneven cohesion across the 89-person team. What the surveys couldn't say was where the exposure actually sat, with a high-stakes commercial cycle bearing down and people spread across multiple countries, languages & functions.

That is the gap AQai® Certified Partners Steve Botterill & Lucy Quick of Resourceful People Group Ltd set out to close. In eight weeks from scoping to delivery, they ran AQ® assessments across all 89 people, then broke the team into eight sub-group cohorts: field sales, marketing, technical services, senior leaders, plus tenure, age & region. A 90-minute virtual prep session led into a full-day workshop at the EMEA commercial conference, built around five dimensions: Hope, Resilience, Unlearning, Mindset & Team Support.

The data said things a survey never could. Senior leaders were showing following rather than leading traits when it came to adaptability. Hope was underdeveloped across the team. And employees with fewer than six years of service were measurably more adaptable than longer-tenured colleagues.

Within two weeks, every participant had a personal action plan tied to their AQ® profile, the engagement extended into the organisation's senior global HR team, and the regional HR Director went on to complete her AQ® Level 1 certification.
This is what AQ® gives leaders ahead of a change cycle, not a feeling about the team, but a map of exactly where to invest.

What would you rather know before a high-stakes year: how your team feels, or how it actually responds to change?

Address

London

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when AQai posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to AQai:

Shortcuts

Share

Category