The Foundational Discipline
for Navigating Transactions.

Most professionals learn what TQ is. Fundamentals of Transactional Intelligence is where you learn how to use it — rigorously, in sequence, in the transactions that matter most. The spine of the methodology is the Thirteen Steps for Navigating Transactions™.

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Studied in Sequence.
Built Around the Thirteen Steps.

Most professionals who encounter Transactional Intelligence do so through a book, an assessment, an associate, or a working session. Those entry points are designed to give you visibility — enough to recognize what you’ve been missing. They are not designed to make you fluent.

Fundamentals of Transactional Intelligence is the foundational discipline. At its center is the Thirteen Steps for Navigating Transactions — a codified discipline that governs how practitioners design and move through any consequential exchange. The Thirteen Steps are not a framework to memorize. They are a structure to work: transaction by transaction, exchange by exchange, in the situations that are already in motion in your professional life.

The surrounding methodology — the Transaction Cycle™, the Narratives of the Transaction Cycle™, the four types of Personality in Transaction™, the Infinity Loops™, and the Conditions of Life™ — builds the practitioner’s ability to use the Thirteen Steps with precision.

The Methodology.

FOT moves through six areas of the methodology, with the Thirteen Steps for Navigating Transactions as the structural spine throughout. Each layer is studied in the order it becomes relevant to a practitioner moving through a real transaction.

What You Study	What It Gives You
Thirteen Steps for Navigating Transactions	The spine of the methodology. A codified discipline you use to design and move through any consequential transaction — from first contact to completion.
The Transaction Cycle	Eight sequential exchanges. The map of every complete transaction — so you always know where yours actually is.
Narratives of the Transaction Cycle	The eight specific stories — one per exchange — that must be accepted by all parties before your transaction can advance.
Personality in Transaction	Four characteristic ways of moving through the cycle — yours included — each with a home exchange, a natural asset, and a named breakdown pattern.
The Infinity Loops	Four personality-specific breakdown patterns — structurally located, observable, and reversible once you can name yours.
Conditions of Life	Fifteen fundamental domains of human experience — the motivational landscape behind what every party in your transactions actually wants.

The Thirteen Steps for Navigating Transactions.

The Thirteen Steps for Navigating Transactions is the codified practitioner discipline at the center of FOT. It is what distinguishes the methodology from a conceptual introduction to TQ. Where the Transaction Cycle gives you the map and Personality in Transaction gives you the diagnostic, the Thirteen Steps give you the navigational discipline — the structured approach a practitioner uses to design and move through any consequential exchange.

Practitioners across more than twenty countries have applied the Thirteen Steps in enterprise sales, organizational leadership, private equity, legal negotiation, healthcare, government, and personal life. The situations are different. The discipline is the same. The Thirteen Steps govern how a practitioner enters a transaction, identifies where it is in the cycle, prepares for each exchange, and moves forward — deliberately, with full awareness of what the transaction requires at each stage.

You will learn and integrate the Thirteen Steps throughout FOT — not as a one-time exercise, but as the recurring structure you apply to every real transaction you bring into the methodology. Over time, they stop being a checklist and become the natural shape of how you approach any consequential exchange.

The practitioner who has worked the Thirteen Steps does not borrow techniques. They see a different layer — and what they do follows from what they see.

How It Works.

FOT is a structured sequence, not a self-paced course. Each stage of the curriculum builds on the one before it. The pacing is deliberate — designed to give practitioners time to apply each layer of the methodology in the transactions they are already running, before the next layer is introduced.

Structured curriculum sequence — studied in order, not sampled at will
Application exercises tied directly to live transactions in your work
Cohort virtual sessions with practitioners moving through the same material
Faculty support throughout — practitioners who have done this work

Who This Is For.

FOT is not for someone who wants to sample the methodology. It is for practitioners who have seen enough to know they want to move further — and who are prepared to bring real work to the process.

The practitioner who benefits most from FOT is already operating at a high level professionally. They are not struggling. They are running into the ceiling of what instinct and experience alone can produce. The pattern keeps recurring — the transaction that should have closed, the team that should have aligned, the relationship that eroded without a clear cause. They know the ceiling is structural. They want the map.

A team stands around a conference table at the end of a meeting, heads down, the decision still unmade

Built by Kirkland Tibbels and John Patterson.

Kirkland Tibbels

Co-Founder & Chairman, Influential U®

Kirkland holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, and is engaged in ongoing doctoral research on the philosophical foundations of transactionalism. The methodology of Transactional Intelligence is his. He has spent his professional life making it teachable.

John Patterson

Co-Founder & CEO, Influential U®

John is the primary practitioner voice of the methodology — the person who brought TQ into rooms with professionals across more than twenty countries and watched it change how they work. As CEO of Influential U®, he leads its delivery and development.

Together, Kirkland and John have delivered the Fundamentals of Transactional Intelligence curriculum to practitioners in enterprise technology, financial services, healthcare, legal, education, and government — rooms like the ones you already work in.