I just took a 'Strength' away from a lot of people
Including, maybe, you. Over 1,000 responses forced my hand.
One of the eight competencies the Humor Intelligence Assessment measures is Consideration.
It’s the skill of noticing how something lands and whether it actually fits the moment, the thing that keeps a well-meant joke from turning into a trip to HR. For about one in five professionals who take the assessment, Consideration is their single strongest competency.
Last week, I had to aim that same competency at my own work. What it showed me was... uncomfortable.
Over 1,000 people have now taken the assessment. That’s enough responses to stop guessing and start looking at what the instrument is actually doing. So I looked.
Under the original scoring, a “Strength” was anything 70 or above. That seems reasonable on paper. After all, there are three tiers and 70 is over two-thirds of the maximum score. Then again, a 70% in school is a C- (in the US), slightly below average, which isn’t a strength at all.
In practice, it meant 57% of people walked away with a Strength label on their overall humor score. On Appreciation, the friendliest competency to score well on, it was 75%. Three out of every four people qualified as a Strength.
But that’s not what a strength is. A Strength that 75% of people earn is a participation trophy with better formatting.
So I considered my own assessment
Parsing through the 1,000 entries, the honest question became whether the tier labels were representative of what the data was actually showing. The answer was no. The cutoffs needed to change.
The tricky part was not overcorrecting. It would have been easy to set the bar so high almost nobody cleared it. But a Strength doesn’t mean you’ve perfected the skill. It means it’s something you can rely on and build from.
Challenge used to be 0-39 → now 0-50
Opportunity used to be 40-69 → now 51-80
Strength used to be 70-100 → now 81-100
Under the new system, about 25% of people land in Strength on their overall score, roughly the top quartile. That feels closer to what a strength should be.
On Consideration, 30.1% of people now land in the Strength tier, above an 80. High enough to mean something, common enough to be real.
None of this is because v1 was wrong. The v1 cutoffs were our best guess before we had data, made in partnership with the researchers at the University of Northern Colorado who validated the original design. Now there’s data, and a good instrument is supposed to move when the evidence says it should.
If you got bumped a tier
So if you already took the assessment and you’ve gone from “Strength” to “Opportunity,” it doesn’t mean you’ve gotten less funny... though if you’re a Spurs fan (basketball or “football”), I understand if recent events drove away your humor.
It just means you’ve got a little more practice to do before you can readily rely on your humor. And if you haven’t taken the assessment yet, this is a decent moment to. The eight competencies haven’t changed, only the line that separates “reliable” from “still building.”
You’ll get an honest read on where you actually stand, which is the whole reason we created the humory thing.
Mostly, though, I’d love to hear your reaction to this. Where would you have drawn the line? If you took it under the old tiers and the change shifts how you think about your result, tell me. Reply to this email, I read every one.
Wit regards,
Andrew
P.S. If you bought the deep-dive report, I’m regenerating it under the new tiers and I’ll email you directly when yours is ready. Same eight competencies, more honest lines in the sand.