Are You Programmed To Lick Adversity?

“Adversity Quotient @ Work”
By Paul G. Stoltz, Ph.D.
Harper Collins Publishers, 2000


Intelligence quotient is something we have known since many years back. Emotional quotient is relatively recent, presenting a type of intelligence that puts premium on emotional maturity over intellectual superiority. Now comes “Adversity Quotient.” It is a measure of how well you or your team currently responds to adversity.

Adversity is definitely on the rise. The book, “Adversity Quotient @ Work,” reveals that individuals face an average of 23 adversities each day. In a fast-paced world, the individual is faced with many hurdles – deal with complexity and deliver in speed.

Here is a book that illuminates what we have been observing so far among our colleagues or friends.

You have dealt with basically two types of people. We simplistically call the positive-minded type as an optimist. It is he, as been said many times, who sees that the glass is “half-full.” So, too, we simplistically enough call the negative minded a pessimist, who sees the glass as “half empty.”

We have seen them at work and at play. One individual receives news of a problem, and he responds: “This comes with the territory; so we might as well face up to it.” Another would exclaim: “Woe to me; this problem will grow so big that I won’t be able to handle it.”

The book says that the first individual has a high AQ, and the second one has a low AQ. But the author is not only putting some labels. He has expanded his theory into a book with scientific findings. And he uses a language that appeals to computer literate people like most of us.

For example, he underscores the need to be re-trained to deal with adversity better, and so he says: “You must upgrade your human operating system to remain viable and strong.”

One enlightening part of the book is his discussion of the CORE dimensions of your Adversity Quotient – which include Control, Ownership, Reach and Endurance. What makes the discussion interesting is his addition of new goals, for example, for training. He adds to the skills of problem solving and decision-making the goal of “team resilience.”

Prof. Stoltz draws from his varied experience with many companies as he explains why “most people communicate and behave poorly when adversity strikes.” A person loses clarity, focus, direction and perspective, he says. Many people have been given to “unproductive outbursts,” he points out.

We need to be “rewired,” he suggests, theorizing that we have been “hardwired” when we were younger. The way we respond is influenced by the way people we saw in our early years responded to adversity – and “we somehow acquired a pattern.”

The appeal of using Adversity Quotient as a motivator and a liberating system stems from many findings that AQ is a good “predictor of sales performance,” Stoltz says.

The entire human body responds as one brain to adversity. The author demolishes the “myth of the human machine.” We are a “highly networked system,” he declares. “The brain does not exist just in our head. Ever have a gut feeling or butterflies in your stomach? Dr. Michael Gershon states that we have 100 billion neurons in the gut (the same number as in the brain) that signal stress and influence health.”

The book has chapters and sections for individuals and for team leaders who wish to lead their teams toward having better “response-ability,” meaning better control of their responses.

The discussion on AQ’s CORE dimensions will prove most helpful.

For instance, in discussing the first dimension, Control, the author simply asks the questions: “To what extent are you able to positively influence a situation? To what extent can you control your own response to a situation.” He debunks viewpoints that “control” is exploitative. On the contrary, he says, “Control is a very precise and powerful source of freedom, not oppression or constraint.”

The second dimension, Ownership, asks to what extent you take it upon yourself to improve the situation, regardless of its cause. He correctly points out that “blame-throwing” is unproductive. He elaborates: “Blame occurs when people get caught up in assigning fault rather than learning from the behavior and moving on.”

Reach, the third dimension, simply advises the individual to limit the impact of the problem or any situation. Stoltz cautions readers against the tendency to “catastrophize,” meaning exaggerating a problem to catastrophic proportions! Sounds familiar to many people?

The fourth dimension, Endurance, asks how long one perceives the adversity to endure. He advises that one should have a realistic grip of a problem. It is always useful to say that such a problem will “come to pass.”

The book, despite its forbidding title (to those who hate Math 101) about “quotients” has a surprise for the readers. It speaks to both heart and mind. To both individual and team leader. To the solitary entrepreneur and the CEO of a big corporation. One thing we all share: Adversity comes our way everyday. Therefore, make time for this book. It will liberate you from worries and imagined catastrophes.