About Influential U®

We built the methodology for the layer beneath every conversation.

Not communication. Not negotiation. The structure underneath both — the invisible layer that produces every outcome. That is what Influential U® teaches.

Where this work came from.

Influential U® was built on a single observation: professionals fail not because they lack expertise, but because they cannot see the structure running beneath every exchange they are in. They prepare. They communicate. They negotiate and lead and present. And the transaction does something to them anyway.

That gap is not a personality problem. It is a visibility problem. The invisible layer was never named. It was never taught. There is no standard methodology for it. So we built one.

Transactional Intelligence™ (TQ) is that methodology. Not a communication style. Not a personality inventory. A structured methodology for navigating the hidden layer beneath every conversation — the human exchanges that produce every outcome. TQ makes those exchanges visible, so you can move through them consciously rather than be ruled by forces you cannot see.

The people who built it.

Kirkland Tibbels — Co-Founder and Chairman

Kirkland is the originator of the TQ methodology. His academic formation — a Master's degree in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, and ongoing doctoral research on the philosophical foundations of transactionalism — gave the methodology its philosophical spine. But the methodology was not born in a library. It was built and tested across years of practitioner work with professionals in consequential exchanges.

Kirkland's contribution to Transactional Intelligence is foundational: the Transaction Cycle™, the eight exchanges, the four personality types in transaction, the Infinity Loops™, and the causal chain that connects self-awareness to transactional power. He is the architect of what practitioners study.

John Patterson — Co-Founder and CEO

John is the practitioner voice of TQ. Before Influential U®, he spent years inside enterprises and high-stakes commercial environments, watching transactions fail at the layer beneath every conversation — the layer expertise alone cannot reach. TQ gave him the vocabulary for what he had already lived.

As CEO, John drives the delivery, methodology, and reach of Influential U®'s work. He has brought TQ to practitioners across industries, functions, and contexts — from enterprise leadership teams to individual professionals navigating the most consequential transactions of their careers.

The Influential U founders, faculty, and consultants have delivered the TQ methodology to practitioners across more than twenty countries.

What Influential U® teaches.

The Transaction Cycle is a series of eight sequential exchanges that occur in every complete transaction — each with a specific narrative purpose that must be satisfied before the transaction can advance. Most professionals have never been taught the cycle exists. They operate inside it anyway, without a map.

When you can see the cycle, you stop reacting to surface events — the email that went quiet, the meeting that produced nothing, the deal that nearly closed — and start reading them as data about where the transaction actually is. You enter exchanges with a different set of questions running. You navigate. The transaction stops doing something to you.

TQ is a structured methodology for navigating the hidden layer beneath every conversation — the human exchanges that produce every outcome. TQ makes those exchanges visible, so you can move through them consciously rather than be ruled by forces you cannot see.

This is not a better version of yourself. It is a more precise understanding of what is actually happening in your exchanges — and a practical method for producing better outcomes in them.

Practitioners across more than twenty countries.

TQ has been tested in boardrooms, sales organizations, leadership teams, and individual practice across more than twenty countries. The methodology has run in enterprise technology, financial services, professional services, healthcare, and consumer industries. The practitioners who study it bring real transactions. They work them in real time. The results belong to them.

What people call "transactional" — cold, calculated, manipulative — is not the nature of transacting. It is the symptom of its absence.

High TQ is what makes exchange feel genuine, reciprocal, and human. The person in the room with the highest TQ is not the sharpest negotiator or the most aggressive closer. They are the one who can see what is actually happening in the exchange — and navigate it consciously, with skill, toward a real completion that works for both sides.

It is aspirational to want High TQ. That is what this work is for.

The field behind the methodology.

Transactional Intelligence has its own home as a field. The philosophy, the framework, and the full TQ ecosystem are mapped there — the book series, the diagnostic, the practice environment, and the organization that developed the methodology. If you want to understand the discipline itself, not just the training programs, that is where to start.

transactionalintelligence.com →