The TQ Series

Ask a capable professional why a deal stalled, a partnership drifted, or a team kept working hard and kept falling short, and you'll hear about timing, resources, the wrong people in the room. Ask them what was actually agreed to, and you get a pause. That pause is the reason this book exists.

Underneath nearly every conversation runs a second layer — the exchange that actually produces the outcome. Most professionals have never been taught to see it. They've been taught expertise instead: more credentials, deeper knowledge, sharper skills. Expertise earns you the room. What happens once you're in it is decided somewhere else. High TQ names that layer and makes it navigable.

Transactional Intelligence® (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 navigate them consciously.

Developed by Kirkland Tibbels and John Patterson and refined since 2009 with thousands of practitioners in more than twenty countries across six continents, TQ is distinct from IQ and EQ: where those live in you, TQ lives in the conversation between you. It is observable and learnable.

Inside, you'll learn:

• The Transaction Cycle™ — the structure a consequential exchange follows, and the precise points where most get stalled;
• Personality in Transaction™ — how you tend to move in professional exchanges, and what your pattern reliably costs you;
• Infinity Loops™ — the repeating breakdowns that keep capable people circling the same outcome for years without naming it.
• High TQ and Low TQ — the difference between an exchange made visible and an exchange running blind, and how to move from one to the other.

As AI commoditizes knowledge, human exchange becomes the differentiator. For executives, founders, HR and organizational development leaders, salespeople, coaches, consultants, and anyone whose results depend on other people saying yes — and meaning it.