Are you a Firefighter, a Novelist, a Neurosurgeon, or an Astronaut?
Liz Tran, an executive coach who has worked with more than 200 business leaders, including at corporate giants like Apple and Google, started her session on Nov. 9 at Learn Serve Lead 2026: The AAMC Annual Meeting asking the room full of attendees to take a quiz, sorting each into an archetype.
Detailed in her recent book, AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing, Tran developed the framework, which she calls the Agility Quotient (AQ), as a new version of intelligence for an emerging era.
The Intelligence Quotient (IQ), she explained, was developed in France at the dawn of the industrial revolution and helped make sense of a world that was changing from one where most people stayed in the village of their ancestors to one where workers flocked to urban centers and took on new kinds of jobs and lives. In the 1990s, with the rise of computers and globalization, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) — a person’s “soft skills”— became a measure for success. In the 2020s, in a post-pandemic world on the verge of an artificial intelligence (AI) upheaval, Tran proposes AQ, a tool to gauge adaptability to change.
“It has been a pretty volatile and pretty uncertain past few years,” Tran said. “And more than any other industry, you, the people in this room, educators as well as people who work in health care, have felt it the most.”
When faced with significant change, such as that which AI promises to bring, individuals and organizations can find themselves in one of the three stages of AQ, as Tran defines it: they can stay in the avoidant stage where they ignore the change; they can enter the fighting stage, when they are proactively adapting to what is seen as a problem to be fixed; and finally, they can achieve full AQ by embracing the change and going from seeing it as an obstacle to embracing it as an advantage.
According to Tran’s approach, all archetypes can achieve full AQ by developing their strengths and leaning on others in areas where they are weaker. The Novelist, for example, is an excellent planner and visionary, but struggles to adapt in a crisis, while the Firefighter thrives under pressure, but can often miss the bigger picture. The Neurosurgeon is detail-oriented and sometimes bogged down by perfectionism, while the Astronaut is an innovator with little patience for sluggishness in the face of change.
“We should spend more time actually thinking about how to flush out the things that we don’t want to do,” Tran said. “We want to lean into our strengths and there’s no need to be self-critical … but instead, just think, ‘Okay, maybe I don’t have that [quality], but who does? How can I celebrate the people around me?’”
Tran recommends optimizing AQ using four strategies: anchors, bets, durable skills, and recovery rates:
- Anchors are the grounding practices and routines that keep one going in times of change. This can range from a workout routine to volunteer work to attending conferences like Learn Serve Lead, Tran said.
- Bets are the calculated risks that an individual or company takes to ensure they don’t become stagnant. “Bet very fast, and do it before you’re ready,” she said.
- Durable skills are different from technical skills, which Tran said studies show have a half-life of about five years today. Instead, durable skills are transferable across specializations and are immune to technological advancement. These are things like critical thinking and emotional regulation.
- Recovery rate is a way to measure success that goes beyond outcome. Instead of seeing success as a binary of whether a goal was achieved or not, it measures how well and how quickly one was able to adapt and recover after a setback.
Tran asked attendees to reflect on the challenges they’d faced in recent years, from the loss of nearly $1.5 billion in National Institutes of Health funding, to layoffs, to the loss of control the COVID-19 pandemic created. Then, she encouraged them to think about how they were able to draw upon their strengths to create opportunities out of challenges. This resilience is what will be necessary to take away the fear and anxiety around the rise of AI and turn it into an exciting gateway into a new era.
“As AI comes in, I think a lot of people ask, ‘Is AI going to take my job?’ And I think that the answer is yes, in part, but there will always be a subset of very human, durable skills that technology will not be able to replicate,” Tran said. “The career ladder, as we think about it, used to be an upward trajectory. You could see the next rung. You reach up and grab it and then pull yourself up. But now it’s a spiral staircase. You know you’re going somewhere, but you can’t quite see the next step in front of you. And so, what we’re doing now is equipping ourselves for an unknown reality.”
