Alec Litowitz Author Interview on The Adaptability Quotient, AI, and Learning to Change

What happens when the ideas that once helped us succeed stop fitting the world around us? In The Adaptability Quotient, Alec Litowitz explores the ability to question assumptions, learn from evidence, and change course without losing the confidence to act. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience in investing and business, he describes adaptability as a distinct form of intelligence: AQ.

Following our review of The Adaptability Quotient, Litowitz discusses the experiences behind the book, the emotional challenges of letting go of old ideas, and the human abilities that matter as artificial intelligence becomes part of everyday decision-making. He also shares practical questions readers can use to approach uncertainty with greater curiosity and agency.

But First, Who Is Alec Litowitz?

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1. What inspired you to write The Adaptability Quotient, and why did you feel this was the right time to introduce the concept of AQ?

The book grew out of a pattern I watched for more than thirty years. The people and institutions that did best over time were not always the smartest or most experienced. They were the ones who noticed when reality had stopped matching their model and revised faster than everyone else. I came to think of that capacity as its own form of intelligence, distinct from IQ and EQ, and I called it AQ. The timing is not accidental. AI is becoming part of the environment in which we form judgments. When knowledge becomes abundant, judgment and agency become scarce.

2. How have your experiences as an investor and business leader shaped the ideas and strategies presented in the book?

I spent my career helping build and lead institutions whose success depended on making good decisions under uncertainty. Early on, investing was about finding a better answer than the market; later, I learned the harder challenge was asking a better question when no reliable model yet existed. Markets are unforgiving teachers — they expose weak assumptions quickly and do not care how persuasive your narrative sounds. The ideas in the book came from building systems that help people surface disagreement, test competing explanations, and change course without losing the conviction required to act.

3. Was there a particular experience or difficult decision in your own career that changed the way you understood adaptability?

There were several, but the most instructive were decisions in which I had a thoughtful thesis, strong evidence, and still lost money. Those moments taught me that being wrong is not the real failure. Staying wrong is. The danger was rarely a lack of intelligence or information. It was allowing a model, a strategy, or a past success to become part of my identity. Once that happens, new evidence feels like a personal threat. I began asking a different question before acting: what would I have to observe to conclude that my model no longer fits the world?

4. What are some of the most common assumptions or habits that prevent people from responding effectively to change?

The greatest obstacle is often past success. A method works, gets rewarded, and slowly hardens from a useful tool into an identity. We stop treating assumptions as hypotheses and begin treating them as facts about how the world works. Then, when the environment changes, we apply the old skill more forcefully instead of questioning whether it still fits. The first move in adaptability is metacognition: stepping outside your own thinking long enough to inspect the instrument doing the thinking.

5. How can someone distinguish genuine adaptability from simply reacting impulsively to every new challenge or trend?

The test is whether the change is driven by evidence or by novelty. Adaptability does not mean revising your view every time something new crosses your desk — that is reactivity wearing a more flattering name. It means holding a view with enough conviction to act and enough humility to abandon it when reality stops matching it. The trigger for updating should come from the world: a test that fails, a fact that does not fit, an assumption that no longer holds. The discipline lies in distinguishing real disconfirming evidence from noise.

6. How can organizations create cultures that encourage experimentation and adaptability without sacrificing stability or accountability?

The best organizations separate learning from blame. They also distinguish between reversible experiments and irreversible decisions: small, contained tests can be distributed widely, provided the objective, the downside, and the learning criteria are clear in advance. The results then need to travel through the institution rather than remain trapped inside one team. And accountability should attach not only to outcomes, which involve luck, but to the quality of the process — was the assumption explicit, was the experiment well designed, did the team update when the evidence changed? Stability comes from clear principles and decision rights, not from preserving every existing process.

7. As artificial intelligence transforms the way we work and make decisions, which distinctly human abilities do you believe will become more valuable?

AI will become extraordinarily capable at generating options, recognizing patterns, and producing persuasive answers. That makes human agency more important, not less. We still have to decide which problems matter, what objectives to pursue, which trade-offs are acceptable, and how much authority to delegate — and we remain accountable for the consequences. The danger is treating fluent output as settled judgment. The most valuable human capacities will be framing better questions, challenging hidden assumptions, integrating context and values, and retaining the willingness to make the final judgment rather than outsourcing it to an eloquent oracle.

8. Do you think our schools and workplaces currently do enough to teach adaptability? If not, what needs to change?

Not yet. Too often we reward people for producing the right answer rather than for improving the quality of their thinking. Foundational knowledge still matters — without it, people cannot evaluate what AI produces — but it is no longer sufficient. We should teach people to identify assumptions, generate competing explanations, test ideas in the world, seek thoughtful disagreement, and update when the evidence changes. The goal is not to collect more answers. It is to build the underlying capacity: to think, decide, and act when no reliable answer yet exists.

9. While researching and writing the book, was there an idea or discovery that challenged your own assumptions?

I began with a largely cognitive view of adaptability: better questions, better models, better experiments. What surprised me was how often the real barrier was emotional. People can understand intellectually that a model has failed and still be unable to release it, because their status, identity, or sense of safety depends on it. Adaptability therefore requires more than cognitive flexibility. It requires enough emotional coherence to encounter disconfirming evidence without becoming defensive or paralyzed. That changed the book. AQ is not just a method for thinking under uncertainty — it is the capacity to remain agentic while your understanding of the world is changing.

10. What do you ultimately hope readers will think, feel, or do differently after reading The Adaptability Quotient?

I hope readers come away less afraid of being wrong and more interested in noticing when the world is telling them something has changed. Uncertainty can make us cling more tightly to what we already know, but that is often precisely when we need to examine it. I want readers to develop the habit of asking: What am I assuming? What evidence would change my mind? What can I test before making a larger commitment? Most of all, I hope they leave with a greater sense of agency. We cannot control how quickly technology, markets, or institutions change, but we can strengthen our capacity to meet that change thoughtfully. Adaptability is not about predicting the future correctly. It is about becoming someone who can keep learning, deciding, and acting when the future refuses to behave as expected.