We believe soft skills deserve better than guesswork.
For decades, training has started with content. We start with people — their emotions, connections, and motivations — backed by science.
The problem
The reason many soft skills programming implementations don’t work out isn’t that they’re badly designed or unimportant. It’s that they’re almost never tailored to the people who are actually going to receive them.
When the content doesn’t match the audience, even a thoughtful workshop quickly starts to feel pandering. People sit through sessions that don’t speak to their real challenges, while the skills they do need go untouched.
To see how this plays out in real organisations, open the accordions below.
Good programs, wrong rooms
Imagine a room full of seasoned analysts who spend their days navigating complex cross-functional projects. They’re asked to attend a session called “Speaking Up in Meetings 101.” The facilitator is skilled, the slides are polished, and the examples are fine—but the group has been presenting to senior leadership for years.
Their real tension is about conflicting priorities, unclear decision rights, and pressure from above. The mismatch sends a quiet message: “We didn’t really think about you when we booked this.”
This pattern repeats across industries. Strong programs are deployed to the wrong people at the wrong time, with no shared framework for deciding who actually needs what. Even good content starts to feel like a box-ticking exercise instead of serious support.
Leaders see the gap, but not the path
At the same time, senior leaders are genuinely worried about a growing skills gap—especially in the wake of COVID-19 and rapid changes in how we work. Surveys around the world now show that the vast majority of executives expect significant skills gaps in their workforce over the next few years.
McKinsey Global Survey One McKinsey study found that 87% of executives say they either already have skills gaps or expect to have them soon. Leaders can see the problem clearly; what’s missing is a precise way to understand which skills are lacking, for whom, and where to start.
What skills are those? Well, the 2024 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report found that 91% of organizations say “human skills” are more important than ever, and that 75% of L&D leaders say closing soft skill gaps is their top priority.
Meanwhile, Deloitte’s 2024 Human Capital Trends Report goes further, noting that the greatest skills shortages are in communication, leadership and emotional intelligence, not technical skills.
The double-bind for executives
Post-COVID, this pressure has intensified. Senior leaders are told that human skills are critical for resilience, innovation, and retention—and they’re not wrong. But when they “do something” about soft skills, they’re often forced to rely on blunt tools: company-wide workshops, generic curricula, and one-size-fits-all initiatives that look good on a slide deck.
These initiatives are meant to protect the organization (and the people signing off on them): they show that leadership is taking the skills gap seriously. But because they’re not grounded in real data about who needs what, employees roll their eyes, managers don’t see meaningful change, and the investment quietly backfires. Everyone is exhausted, and nothing really moves.
Underneath all of this is a simple missing piece: a shared, evidence-based way to understand the emotional, social, and motivational skills that drive human behaviour — so that training can start with who is in the room, not just what content is available.
The journey
Adaptimist exists because one researcher refused to accept that soft skills were just “nice to have.” When A. Geoffrey Crane (the “A” stands for “Albert”, not a random selection from a pool of undifferentiated Geoffrey Cranes) first encountered the material, their value was obvious. It was like someone had finally turned the lights on in a room he’d been stumbling through for years.
So he did what anyone would do in his position: he went looking for courses, books, and frameworks that treated these skills with the seriousness they deserved. What he found instead was a patchwork of models that didn’t quite connect, and very little guidance on how to bring any of it to real people in a way that would actually land.
His supervisor, Dr. Jim Parker, finally told him:
“If you want this, you’re going to have to build it.
There’s nothing out there in the form that you’re after.”
It was both permission and a punishment.
To learn more about how that punishment unfolded, click the accordions below.
When good intentions fall flat
Geoff’s early attempts to share this work were full of enthusiasm and careful preparation—and almost always met with a collective sigh. The content was strong, but without a way to tailor it to the people in the room, it rarely hit the way he hoped.
A few years in, he had the chance to present his ideas at a workshop in the UK. It should have been a breakthrough moment. Instead, hardly anyone signed up.
The problem wasn’t the material; it was that he didn’t yet know how to embed it into the realities, pressures, and language of the people he wanted to serve. Without that connection, even the best content looks optional.
The culture we swim in
There’s a cultural story underneath all of this. We tend to act as if emotions and soft skills are things you learn on the playground or in school, and then simply carry into adult life. We rarely treat them as serious, ongoing work for grown-ups.
At one event, a participant came up to Geoff in tears because something he said had touched her. When he gently suggested, “I could put a workshop together around this if it would help,” the tears dried up immediately. The conversation ended. Simply naming the possibility of structured work turned a private emotional moment into something that felt like a demand to “put up or shut up.”
People were hungry for this kind of understanding, but the way soft skills were framed, delivered, and embedded into organisations wasn’t working.
A decade of building
What followed was more than a decade of searching, testing, building, failing, rebuilding, and slowly uncovering a structure no one had mapped before.
Piece by piece, tools emerged: an assessment, reports, training methods, curricula, theory, apps—all aimed at answering a single question: How do we make this work feel precise, respectful, and worth people’s time?
It didn’t come from a grand plan. It came from frustration, curiosity, and the quiet belief that maybe there’s something here worth doing properly—for the people in the room, not just the slides on the projector.
The turning point
Before academia, Geoff spent years leading global technology operations from Tokyo to Singapore. On paper, it was success: global banks, trading floors, complex systems, long hours, big responsibility.
When that career collapsed during the financial crisis, he returned to Canada without a network, direction, or identity. The people who knew his work were on the other side of the world. In Toronto, he was just another résumé from “somewhere else.”
Losing network meant there was no one to open doors or even confirm who he was. Losing direction meant there was no obvious next step, just a series of short-term jobs that never quite fit. Losing identity meant the story he had built his life around simply stopped being true. The gap between who he had been and how he was seen shrank down into shame, anxiety, and a very real question of how to start again.
Rebuilding from almost nothing forced a realization:
Soft skills are quite literally the difference between thriving and falling apart.
Connection, communication, motivation, resilience — these were no longer academic curiosities. They were survival skills. Finding the courage to ask for help. Learning how to explain what he could do. Staying in motion when nothing seemed to land.
During the hardest years, his dog Harold was his constant companion — the creature who kept him grounded when everything else fell apart. Walks, routines, and the simple act of being needed by another living thing were often the difference between spiralling and staying present.
That experience shaped the foundation of Adaptimist: not as a theory, but as a way for people to build lives that feel meaningful and connected, even when the old story has come apart and the new one hasn’t fully formed yet.
The breakthrough
Today, that unfinished sketch has become a growing ecosystem of products, assets and people:
(validated measure)
For the first time, it’s possible to build soft skills development around evidence, not intuition.
The shift
Somewhere along the way, this stopped being Geoff’s private obsession.
As the tools became more refined, people began engaging with them in unexpected ways. Coaches experimented with them in their practice. Researchers incorporated elements into studies. Organizations explored how data-informed soft skills development could reshape their programs.
Those early signs revealed something powerful:
This work becomes more meaningful when it belongs to the people who use it.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of those people: someone who cares about how humans show up—including yourself. Adaptimist is still small, but the tools are designed to be picked up, adapted, and woven into the work you’re already doing.
In your own life
Using the language of emotion, connection, and motivation to notice your patterns, name what’s happening more clearly, and make choices that feel a little more intentional.
In your work with others
Drawing on these ideas to ask better questions, frame conversations more gently, and shape sessions or meetings around what people actually need, not just what a slide deck says.
In what you build
Folding the tools into courses, programs, research, or community work you’re already creating—so that personal intelligence becomes part of the infrastructure, not an afterthought.
This isn’t something you have to follow “the right way.” It’s a set of ideas and tools you’re invited to make your own, in ways that fit your context and your people.
If that happens—if enough people quietly pick this up and integrate it into their own worlds—the ideas, tools, and experiences we build together will be far greater than anything one person could create alone.
The invitation
If you see yourself in this — as a coach, researcher, educator, organization, or simply someone who loves understanding people — you are already part of it.
There are so many ways to get involved:
- explore the apps,
- take the MIPI Short,
- connect as a lighthouse partner,
- run a study,
- bring this into your work.
This ecosystem grows through collaboration, curiosity, and conversation.
Adaptimist isn’t finished — and that’s the exciting part.
There is still space to shape what comes next, to influence the tools we build,
and to help define how personal intelligence grows in the world.
What we are making belongs to the people who use it. Including you.
The people and research behind the work
Adaptimist is led by A. Geoffrey Crane, a researcher and educator at Trent University whose work explores emotion, behaviour, and personal intelligence. His academic background brings the scientific grounding that underpins the models and measurement approach.
Geoff also develops Adaptimist independently as a way to translate this research into practical tools that people can actually use. While his scholarship informs the thinking, the products and platform are developed outside the university setting.
He is currently completing his PhD and leading the development of a data-driven soft skills platform supported by external grant funding and community partnerships.
