In this op-ed, Indeed country director of APAC Marcelo Andrade says that a lot of the hype around AI reminds him of NFT mania. Andrade believes the industry should focus on a new kind of intelligence (rather than IQ or EQ) called Relational Intelligence (RQ).
A few weeks ago I was having a beer with my mate Lucio Ribeiro. Somehow we ended up taking the piss out of NFTs.
Remember NFTs? That magical period when otherwise intelligent adults convinced themselves that cartoon apes were going to redefine civilisation. Serious people. Experienced people. Paying serious money for digital pictures of monkeys wearing hats.
We were laughing about it and then I said, you know what, same thing is happening with AI. Not AI itself, AI is real and I use it every day. But the behaviour around it. The fear. The performance. The people running around with their hair on fire trying to have the right opinion before they’ve figured out if they have any opinion at all.
I told him I was tired of people so busy justifying their existence they’d forgotten what their existence was actually for.
He said, alright, so what actually matters then?
Relational Intelligence, I said.
He looked at me the way you look at someone who’s had one too many. What the hell is that?
It’s time for a third ‘intelligence’
Here’s what I keep seeing everywhere I go.
Smart people. Talented people. People with genuinely good ideas. Completely stuck. Not because they lack capability. Because they’re too busy performing capability to actually use it.
Too busy proving they belong in the room to do anything useful in it.
And the symptoms are always the same. Different logos on the wall. Different job titles on the business cards. Slightly different fonts on the PowerPoint. Same dysfunctional behaviour on slide one.
I hate PowerPoint by the way. Not because of what it is. Because of what people do with it. Forty seven slides of someone slowly justifying their own existence whilst a business problem quietly dies on the agenda.
But that’s a different article. The point is this.
We’ve spent years measuring two kinds of intelligence and quietly assuming that between them they covered everything.
IQ got you the job. Your craft, your thinking, your ability to build an argument that survived a difficult room. Still matters. Becoming less differentiating every single year.
EQ kept you employed. It stopped you sending that email. You know exactly the one. Written at 11:47pm after a meeting that should have been a text, absolutely convinced everyone else was the problem. EQ is the voice that says sleep on it. Still essential. Still not enough.
And then there’s the one nobody measures, the one that actually decides whether anything moves, the ability to walk into a room where everyone is guarded and political and quietly terrified of looking stupid, and somehow get them to trust you enough to move in the same direction anyway. That’s RQ. Relational Intelligence.
Not networking. Not charm. Not collecting LinkedIn connections like Pokémon cards. The real thing.
Three examples of the RQ deficit
Now let me tell you what it looks like when it’s missing.
Sydney. Two agency groups. Big automotive client. Good budget. Should have been straightforward. The media team thought the creatives were undisciplined cowboys. The creatives thought the media team were joyless spreadsheet merchants who wouldn’t know a good idea if it reversed over them in the car they were supposed to be selling. Every meeting was a talent show for adults. There was a car to launch but half the room was more interested in justifying its own existence.
Loads of IQ in that room. Some EQ on a good day. Zero RQ. Nobody was bad at their job. Nothing moved.
São Paulo. I walked into a pitch room as a new strategist replacing someone who had just left. Before I got there I was warned. The CEO is impossible. The creative director is territorial. The whole thing is unsalvageable. I ignored all of it. Met the people in front of me, not their reputations. Stopped needing to win the room and started needing the work to win instead.
The strategy barely changed. The relationships did. Within weeks things were moving. That’s what RQ actually looks like when someone bothers to use it.
New York. A global agency flew strategy leaders in from around the world. Business class. Five star hotel. Impressive people. Completely broken from the start because the CEO and the rest of us were working from entirely different versions of the brief. He walked in midweek expecting a pitch response to a document nobody in our room had ever seen. Three leaders needed a two hour conversation before anyone boarded a plane. That conversation never happened.
Twelve strategists. Business class. Five star hotel.
What we needed was a phone call. Loads of IQ. Reasonable EQ. Leadership with zero RQ at the top. And it cost a fortune.
Most organisational politics isn’t really politics. It’s insecurity with a corporate lanyard.
People performing expertise because they’re not confident enough to just do the work. And you cannot access RQ if you are not genuinely secure in yourself. Not performing confidence. Actually secure. The kind of person who walks in needing the work to win rather than needing to win the room.
That’s rarer than it sounds.
And before you say it, yes, I know. RQ sounds like another repackaged soft skills framework with a catchy acronym. I’ve sat in enough leadership offsites to know exactly how this goes. Someone puts it on a slide. Everyone nods. A consultant gets paid. Nothing changes. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the thing that was quietly deciding outcomes in every room I’ve just described, long before anyone gave it a name.
Many organisations are promoting the person with the best answers while quietly overlooking the person everyone already trusts. Some of the most intelligent people I’ve worked with were organisationally useless. Not because they lacked capability. Because nobody trusted them enough to follow them.
I’ve watched million dollar projects stall because trust wasn’t there. I’ve watched average ideas succeed because it was.
The relationship is the operating system. Everything else is just software running on top of it.
That was true before AI. It will be true long after whatever comes next. IQ got you the job.
EQ stopped you telling your boss to shove it.
RQ determines whether people trust you when the stakes are highest. The funny thing is, it was probably the most important one all along.
