Have you ever “ridden the curve?”
If you’ve been in a tough university class, you’ll know what I mean. It’s an expression that refers to benefiting from a bell curve that pulls up your grade in order for the course to attain the average the professor is expecting.
In my daughter’s current law school experience, that same curve is used not only to bring some grades up, but to push some down. Pretty annoying if you are at the right-hand side of that bell.
I was a strong student, so was used to being at the upper end of most academic curves. But when a bell curve shows the chronology of adoption of a new technology rather than grades, I’m not usually at the leading edge. If a new Tesla or iPhone is being released, I’m not at the front of the line.
So it’s been an exciting and at times disconcerting learning curve to find myself among only a dozen people globally to embark on Level Two professional certification to use a new assessment tool called AQai to measure Adaptability Quotient.
Have you ever been among the first 12 people in the world to do something? Me neither.
Being an early adopter requires being willing to co-create and learn together because not everything is figured out. We put up with some glitches and bumps when not all elements have been road-tested. But it’s also exhilarating to know we’re among a very small group of people who have access to a tool with the power to transform the performance of individuals and teams.
How do I know?
The focus of the AQ tool is on helping people be more ready for the future of work. With global change happening at a pace, breadth and duration we’ve never experienced before (have you read about The Great Resignation, for example?), you likely don’t need me to convince you that adaptability is a critical skill. But if you’d like some evidence to support what we intuitively know, you can look to this recent McKinsey report that cites adaptability as the #1 determinant of employability in the future.
I want adaptability to be a skill that energizes rather than depletes us. It’s my hope that by being an early adopter, I can help many of you become early adapters.