AQai

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

05/11/2026

On Tuesday 17 November, Mike Raven and Ross Thornley are running a 60 minute live session for coaches and consultants who are planning their 2027 offer. It is called From Coach or Consultant to the One They Call First.

A client brings a coach a team that has gone quiet in meetings, or a rollout that people nod at and then ignore. The coach who can say what is happening, in words the team recognises, is the one the client calls first. That vocabulary is what we call adaptability intelligence, and the A.C.E. model is the framework behind it. Clients are setting next year's budgets for coaching, AI and leadership development this quarter, which makes now the time to put a measured offer in front of them.

The session covers the adaptability intelligence era, AQ® in ten minutes with a real AQme® report, two certified partner stories on taking it to market, and the certification pathway. It runs on Zoom at 4:30pm UK, and everyone who registers receives the replay.

The registration link is in the first comment. What did your last client ask for first, and what was the problem underneath it?

04/11/2026

We asked a room of coaches and consultants one question in September: on a scale of 1 to 10, how often are clients talking about how ready their people are for change?

We asked because the world those clients work in has changed faster than most of the knowledge and toolkits built to help them. Conversations about transformation and AI are common now. What we wanted to hear was whether they have started to include the people side: how ready a team is to deal with a transformation, with AI, or with succession.

Change readiness is something the AQ® assessment measures, so a coach who hears that question has data to answer it with.

The clip is from our September seminar. Where would you put your own clients, from 1 (not hearing it at all) to 10 (hearing it all the time)?

03/11/2026

"How ready is my team for the next change?" A coach can answer that question with data, and it takes one certification to be able to.

We call the people who do this AQ® Certified Partners. Their client completes the AQme® assessment. The partner debriefs the profile, sets goals against it and tracks what moves. The method is the same for one executive, a team workshop, a leadership programme or a change project.

The way in is the AQ Level 1 Certification. It covers the research behind the A.C.E. model, how to run and interpret the assessment, and how to turn a debrief into an action plan. No formal coaching qualification is needed. It is open to coaches, consultants, HR and L&D professionals and independent practitioners who intend to use it with real clients or teams. Experienced coaches add an evidence-based specialism, and newer practitioners get a structured method to build a practice on. Many go on to Level 2 for team reports and coaching.

The carousel covers the route step by step. The next Level 1 cohort has live sessions on 1, 8 and 10 December.

If a client asked you tomorrow how ready their team is, what would you show them?

02/11/2026

One word now covers a new expense system and a round of redundancies. The word is "change", and it no longer tells anyone how big the thing coming at them is.

People fill that gap themselves, usually with the worst plausible version. Gartner research reported in Harvard Business Review found the average employee went through 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from 2 in 2016, while willingness to support them fell from 74% to 43%. We read that as a reasonable response to absorbing roughly 5 times as much with no better information about any of it.

When we measure how a person adapts, a single change turns out to ask 3 separate things. Ability: what has to be learned, and which familiar way of working has to be put down. Character: whether the message reaches people who move to protect something as well as people who move to win something. Environment: whether workload and team support leave any room.

An announcement that covers all 3 says how big the change is, what is being retired, what it protects as well as what it opens up, and what is coming off the list to make room.

What is your organisation calling "change" this quarter that deserves a more specific name?

28/10/2026

Hope can be measured. In one career-transition programme run by 2 of our Certified Partners, it was the score that moved most.

Dr. Johanna Wolf left the government sector and built her practice around accomplished women making a career pivot. In this clip from our September seminar she talks about what the AQ® assessment shows her clients about resilience and hope at the moment they change direction.

In the A.C.E. model, Hope has 2 parts: seeing a route to where you want to go, and believing your own effort can move you along it. Johanna and her co-founder Liz Kamins ran a 6-month programme with an assessment at each end. Hope rose for 5 of the 6 participants who completed both. A group of 6 is small and the result is not statistically significant, so we treat it as an early signal.

If you coach people through a transition, which do you look at first: the plan, or whether they believe a plan can work?

27/10/2026

Manager engagement fell from 31% to 22% between 2022 and 2025, according to Gallup. Engagement among the people they manage moved from 20% to 19%.

When one layer of an organisation drops 9 points and the layer beneath it barely moves, we look at conditions before we look at character. Gallup's span-of-control research gives a place to start: the average manager had 12.1 direct reports in 2025, up from 10.9 a year earlier. The median manager still leads 5 or 6 people, so a minority of very large teams accounts for much of that rise.

This is why the AQ® assessment scores a person's capacity and their conditions separately. 2 managers can look the same in a wellbeing survey. One is running low on her own reserves. The other has plenty, along with 14 direct reports, no peer group and 4 change programmes landing at once. They need close to opposite things, and a resilience workshop is only one of them.

Conditions are also the part leaders control. In organisations Gallup classes as following best practice, 79% of managers were engaged in 2025.

The carousel has the numbers. How many change programmes are your managers carrying right now, and does anyone know the figure?

26/10/2026

Adaptability has 3 parts, and only 1 of them is a skill. The other 2 decide whether that skill ever gets used.

In this clip from our September seminar, Ross Thornley walks through the A.C.E. model that sits behind every AQ® assessment. Ability is the part people can build: grit, resilience and unlearning are separate things, and each can be measured. Character is how a person is wired for change. Some adapt to win something, others to protect what they already have, and hope sits here too. Environment is everything around them: company support, team support and how much work stress they are carrying.

Ross’s point about the third part is the one we keep returning to. Nobody works in a vacuum, and the conditions around a person affect whether their abilities can be put to use.

Which of the 3 gets the least attention where you work?

21/10/2026

"Is this team ready for what we are about to ask of it?"

It is the question underneath most change projects, and the AQme® assessment has a metric built to answer it.

The metric is Change Readiness, one of 5 advanced metrics that sit on top of the 15 sub-dimensions the assessment measures across Ability, Character and Environment. The other 4 are Re-skill Index, Explore & Transform, Utilise & Improve and Change Uncertainty. Each one takes a profile and points it at a decision. Explore & Transform and Utilise & Improve, for example, show whether a team is set up to invent what comes next or to improve what already exists. That is worth knowing before a strategy asks for the other one.

In this clip from our September certification seminar we walk through how they work.

Which of the 5 would be most useful in the client conversations you are having this quarter?

20/10/2026

A leader can read everyone in the room perfectly and still not change a single thing about how they work. Emotional intelligence measures the first part. Adaptability measures the second.

Coaches who already use an EQ tool often ask us whether AQ® is the same thing with a new label. The two are related. Managing anxiety, staying motivated when the path is unclear and reading how other people are coping are emotional skills, and all of them feed adaptability.

Where they part is in what happens next. EQ covers the emotional side of a moment. AQ covers whether a person lets go of what used to work, learns something different and keeps going. It also measures the conditions around them, because the same person adapts differently in a supportive team and a draining one. Most EQ models do not look there.

Coaches who use both will recognise 2 clients. One is trusted and liked, and slow to change course when the strategy shifts. The other changes fast and leaves the team behind.

The carousel sets the two side by side. Where have you seen a high-EQ client get stuck when the situation changed?

19/10/2026

In 2022 Steve Botterill typed “adaptability” into Google. He has since used 1,377 AQme® assessments, and one of his first clients is now certified too.

Steve had left a long career in corporate HR to set up Resourceful People Group, and felt that personality profiling on its own was missing something. He signed up for Level 1 and Level 2 together, on the principle of not just putting a toe in the water. He still uses both tools side by side.

In this clip from our September seminar he says, hand on heart, that he now uses AQai in all 4 of the ways we had set out: development workshops, 1 to 1 coaching, reselling the assessment, and a client he started with who has since become certified and uses it in-house.

Steve is now a Level 3 Master and leads our Level 1 certification with Lucy Quick. Their next cohort, the last of 2026, opens on 24 November.

Which of those 4 would do most for your practice next year?

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