Alec Litowitz is the author of the new book The Adaptability Quotient: Rewiring Your Mind for Success in the Next Human Era. He is the founder of QStar Capital.
Q: What inspired you to write The Adaptability Quotient?
A: I never set out to write a book. I spent more than 30 years building investment firms, beginning as one of the original partners at Citadel and later founding Magnetar Capital, where success depended on making decisions when the future could not be modeled with certainty.
When I stepped away in 2022 and AI began reshaping how we think and work, I realized the same adaptive principles that had guided my career were suddenly becoming essential for everyone.
The Adaptability Quotient is my attempt to make that way of thinking explicit—a practical framework for navigating a world where change is accelerating faster than certainty.
Q: What role do you see adaptability playing in decision-making?
A: Life isn't a series of known probabilities; it's a series of changing realities. Too many people approach uncertainty as if it were simply risk, trying to optimize when the real challenge is learning, updating, and adapting as new information emerges.
AQ is the discipline of making decisions right over time rather than trying to make the perfect decision once. It's not about avoiding mistakes—it's about updating faster than the world changes around you.
Q: How do you see AI affecting human adaptability and decision-making?
A: AI is the first technology that doesn't simply process information—it participates in meaning-making. That's why I believe we're entering a Second Cognitive Revolution, where the greatest changes will occur not only in what we produce but in how we think.
Used well, AI dramatically expands our capability by widening the set of possibilities we can explore. The danger is allowing it to replace judgment rather than augment it. My rule is simple: use AI to widen the option set, but never outsource the verdict.
Q: What impact did writing this book have on you, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: Writing the book changed how I understood my own career. I thought I had spent 30 years building investment firms, but looking back I realized I had really spent 30 years studying adaptation under uncertainty.
My hope is that readers come away with a practical operating system for thinking: understanding their own biases, exploring multiple explanations before committing to one, and learning how to experiment their way through uncertainty.
The book isn't a collection of answers; it's a method for asking better questions and making better decisions in a rapidly changing world.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Everything I'm working on is an extension of the same mission: helping people become more adaptable. The book is one piece; my Early Adapters newsletter is another, where I explore these ideas in real time with a growing community.
My wife, Jennifer, and I also founded the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University because we believe one of society's greatest needs is teaching people not simply what to think, but how to think together despite disagreement.
We're also developing an AQ assessment to help individuals and organizations measure adaptability, while continuing to invest through QStar Capital in technologies—including AI, energy, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, and biotechnology—that we believe will shape the future of human capability.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Despite writing about uncertainty, I'm fundamentally optimistic. Every major technological revolution has expanded human capability, and AI will be no different. The question is whether we develop our own minds as quickly as we develop our machines.
Every technological revolution creates three groups: resistors, who try to stop change; adopters, who use new tools to do old things faster; and adapters, who rethink the game itself. History ultimately belongs to the adapters, and my hope is that The Adaptability Quotient helps more people become one of them.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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