Agility for the Win

By Avice Meehan

As Liz Tran worked on her first book, a conversation with a good friend made her realize that she needed to start over. If that wasn’t challenging enough, Tran found herself working inside a canvas camping tent during a hot Norfolk summer—just so that she could have decent internet service. As Tran relates in her second book, “AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing,” she eventually grew so accustomed to the daddy longlegs all around her that she started naming them.

“It was different from what I planned, but I could recognize that it wasn’t so bad,” she writes. “I was alive. I was writing for a living. I had a house and grass and daddy longlegs roommates.” The anecdote, though shared with a light touch, helps make the case for Tran’s thinking about “AQ” or agility quotient – a way of approaching a dynamic world, right up there in importance with emotional intelligence and intellect.

Norfolk residents will have an opportunity to hear from Tran at an author talk and book signing planned for Sunday, April 26, at 4 p.m., at the Norfolk Library. A leadership coach, Tran and her husband Dev Aujla, CEO of Bode Inc., live part-time in Norfolk with their two daughters, the youngest of whom was born in March. Tran went on a planned maternity leave in the middle of the book tour and, nothing daunted, will pick back up in April.

At the heart of Tran’s book, which is laced with hard-won insights from her own life, is the notion that the ability to adapt to change is a necessary skill in uncertain times that are marked by technological upheaval and disruption. She identifies four archetypes: the neurosurgeon, novelist, firefighter and astronaut, each of which respond to challenges in life and work in different ways. Anyone who is curious about where they fit can take an online quiz at https://liz-tran.com.

During a Zoom conversation just before starting maternity leave, Tran said she decided to leave the world of venture capital in 2019 because she “just wasn’t happy” and wanted to focus on developing a business built around group coaching and leadership development. The Covid pandemic put an end to in-person workshops and Tran switched to a remote practice. Today, she works with CEOs of tech and biotech companies. Tran is also looking at ways that AI tools could be harnessed to make high-level coaching accessible to more people.

“My work is to help people reach their greatest potential,” said Tran, noting that the idea of “AQ” arose from working with long-term clients across multiple disciplines and thinking about what made some more successful than others. “The only thing that they had in common was their willingness to change,” she said.

Although “AQ” is aimed at a business audience, Tran makes it clear that the skills translate into daily life and shares some of the ways she has needed to adapt to sudden shifts in her own life. The vulnerability is refreshing and Norfolk readers will enjoy her description of the Hub. Tran started the book in June 2024, when her oldest daughter was six months old. “I had a feeling that it needed to happen,” Tran said. “People are really going to need help in navigating uncertainty.”