The Question Jonathan Asked
Not a corporate question. Not a leadership competency. Just a human one: if you had to describe what makes someone a Brilliant Human, what would you say?
Between 12 January and 22 February 2026, 105 people answered. They came from across the UK — 71% of the sample — and from the US, India, Sweden, Belgium, Singapore, Brazil, Serbia and elsewhere. The majority were aged 35 to 54. They were asked to rank, to reflect, and in many cases to share personal stories. 87% gave explicit consent for their words to be used.
The findings were not what most people expected. They were more human, more specific, and more important than that.
Finding 1: The Brilliance Hierarchy
The 105 people we asked were given six attributes and asked to rank them from most to least important in defining a Brilliant Human. The result directly contradicts what most leadership content — and most performance reviews — prioritise.
| # | Attribute | Mean rank | Placed #1 | Placed #6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kindness & empathy Top | 2.27 | 54% | 11% |
| 2 | Integrity & authenticity | 2.97 | 17% | 6% |
| 3 | Humility & self-awareness | 3.57 | 7% | 9% |
| 4 | Positivity & energy | 3.79 | 7% | 19% |
| 5 | Courage & resilience | 3.86 | 8% | 8% |
| 6 | Creativity & innovation Last | 4.54 | 8% | 48% |
The hierarchy is overwhelmingly relational and moral, not productive or performative. The top three — kindness, integrity, humility — are all about how a person treats others and holds themselves. The bottom three — positivity, courage, creativity — are about what a person produces or projects outward.
The most striking single number is the gulf between first and last. 54% of the 105 people we asked placed kindness and empathy at the very top. 48% placed creativity and innovation at the very bottom. Almost half actively pushed creativity to last place — not because they don't value it, but because when forced to choose, they don't consider it part of what makes a human genuinely brilliant.
Brilliance, the data says clearly, is a moral category. Not a productive one. For organisations that recruit for creativity, promote for results, and celebrate output above all else: this is worth sitting with.
Finding 2: The Big Paradox
This is the finding that stops rooms. It is the most strategically important thing in the research, and the one most people feel in their bones the moment they see it.
The paradox in numbers — Brilliant Humans Research, n=105
89%
say most people they know are generally good and kind
87%
agree we give more attention to negative behaviour than to positive
81%
had a small, ordinary act make their day better in the past week
55%
say they encounter more kindness than selfish behaviour in day-to-day life
Read those together. The lived experience of the 105 people we asked is overwhelmingly positive. The attentional habit of those same people is overwhelmingly negative. The world they inhabit is kind. The world they report on — the one they discuss, share, and remember — is the other one.
A cross-reference inside the dataset makes this even more precise: 22 respondents simultaneously said they encounter more positive behaviour day to day, and that a negative interaction stays with them longer than a positive one. Their world is kind. Their memory of it is not. This is the negativity bias caught in the act, inside a single piece of original research.
Negativity is in the news. In real life, we actually care and are kind to one another.
— Research respondent, Brilliant Humans Research 2026
The gap between what people experience and what they attend to is not an accident. Three forces drive it. The first is biology: human attention has a built-in negativity bias, because a missed threat was always more dangerous than a missed kindness. The second is platform economics: algorithms optimise for engagement, and outrage drives engagement far more efficiently than warmth. The third is narrative: the news cycle, social media, and water-cooler conversation all run on novelty, and bad behaviour is more novel than good. Together, these three forces systematically hide everyday brilliance from view.
Finding 3: Quiet Heroes
When asked who had the biggest positive impact on their life, the 105 people we spoke to answered with a consistency that is either quietly devastating or quietly wonderful, depending on how you look at it.
53% named a parent, family member, or partner. 26% named a friend or peer. 14% named a teacher, coach, or mentor. A leader or boss came in at 3% — the same percentage as celebrities.
Who shapes us — Brilliant Humans Research, n=105
86%
of respondents named someone unknown to the wider world as their most influential person
2
respondents out of 105 named anyone widely famous or well-known
Two people. Out of 105. Named anyone famous.
The people who genuinely shape lives — who are summoned in those later conversations where someone says "I wouldn't be where I am without them" — are overwhelmingly local, domestic, and quiet. A mother. A teacher from thirty years ago. A friend who showed up at exactly the right moment. They are not on stages, not on podcasts, not on bestseller lists.
Brilliance, the research says, is not a property of the famous. It is a property of the present.
I think (almost) everyone is, at the core, good and kind. Or they at least have the desire to be. Culture, environment, emotions can sometimes corrupt or overshadow this — but that doesn't change the true nature of humans underneath.
— Research respondent, Brilliant Humans Research 2026
Finding 4: The Gratitude Gap
The survey asked a follow-up: have you told that person — the one who shaped you most — what they actually mean to you?
23% have not. They haven't said it yet.
And 11% now never can. The person has died.
The gratitude gap — Brilliant Humans Research, n=105
23%
haven't yet told the person who shaped them most what they mean to them
11%
now never can — the person died before they had the chance to say it
This is the most quietly devastating number in the research. Not a third. Not a quarter. One in nine. And it is the engine of an entire keynote — because the logical extension of knowing this is not sorrow. It is urgency.
The gap between feeling gratitude and expressing it is, for 23% of the 105 people we asked, still open. For another 11%, it has closed permanently. Jonathan opens keynotes with this number for a reason. The talk that follows is not about guilt. It is about the specific, practical, human choice to close the gap before it becomes too late.
Finding 5: The Algorithm Verdict
The survey put a direct statement to respondents: "Modern technology platforms and algorithms reward the positive qualities that humans value most."
59% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Only 6% agreed. And not one person — zero out of 105 — strongly agreed.
Technology and kindness — Brilliant Humans Research, n=105
59%
disagree or strongly disagree that tech platforms reward the positive qualities humans value most
0%
strongly agreed — not one respondent out of 105
For a five-point scale that should, in most surveys, distribute with something approaching balance, this is one of the most lopsided results in the entire dataset. The verdict on what the platforms we live inside are doing to our collective attention is, from 105 people across multiple countries and industries, essentially settled.
I notice every small act of kindness. People care about each other most of the time. Unfortunately, our brain is wired in the way that more often we pass negative information to warn one another. It takes a conscious effort to talk about only good things.
— Research respondent, Brilliant Humans Research 2026
What This Means for Workplaces
Five findings. Five different angles on the same coherent story: most humans are more brilliant than the systems built around them give them credit for. And the qualities that define brilliance — kindness, integrity, humility — are the same ones that two decades of independent workplace research identifies as the foundation of high-performing teams.
Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis is unambiguous: employees who feel their managers genuinely care about them as people perform better, stay longer, and generate better outcomes. Google's Project Aristotle found that the single strongest predictor of team effectiveness was psychological safety — the sense that it is safe to speak up, try things, and fail without humiliation. Amy Edmondson's Harvard research identifies the specific leader behaviours that create it: curiosity over criticism, attentiveness over instruction, acknowledgement over performance pressure.
Every one of those behaviours maps directly onto the qualities the 105 people we asked ranked first when describing a Brilliant Human.
This is not a case for being softer. It is a case for taking seriously what the data — both Jonathan's original research and twenty years of independent workplace evidence — has been saying consistently: the qualities we call soft are the ones that drive the hardest outcomes. And most organisations have quietly built their cultures around the wrong signal.
83% of the acts that made someone's day better in the past week cost the giver nothing at all. Only attention. Only time. Only a moment of being seen. The activation energy for human brilliance is, the research says, essentially zero. The question is whether we notice it, name it, and give it the weight it deserves.