We are always transacting Flashcards
What is an ambitious adult?
Ambitious adults make plans and move strategically and tactically to satisfy their conditions of life.
They make and get invitations , offers, commitments and requests and articulate consqeuences, judgments, assessments and assertions that when accepted give them the best opportunity to satisfy the unavoidable conditions of life. They accept the constraints of their environment and do not argue with or deny the biological, linguistic and transational facticity of human life - and in fact utilise their specialised knowledge of it to produce consequential environments that have others comply.
They know their limits, liabilities and assets. Ambitious adults respond to opportunities
Fidelity
When we use a copier to copy a document, the copy is very close to the original but may lose a small degree of exactness. Copy the
copy a few times over, and there will be muddiness where there once was exactness.
Licensing an intellectual property like Transactional Competence will undoubtedly produce a muddy copy of an original work. It’s not
possible (nor do we seek to labor in as much) to forever police the fidelity of Transactional Competence in practice. In fact, we fully
expect that it will evolve as each Consultant trains another and another in the coming decades—and it will evolve as those who use it
in practice contribute back to the entire body of work (and the rest of us). That being said, we have produced an environment to
support faithfulness to the rigors and fidelity of this framework.
Transactional Competence™ offers a knowledge and behavior framework designed to guide individuals, teams, and
enterprises toward prosperous transactions that can scale. Implementing Transactional Competence means training and
developing ourselves, teams, and companies to be fitter and fitter to engage in successful and efficient exchanges. This
framework easily reframes our interpersonal, social, and economic pursuits toward productive cooperation.
Given the stakes, we have included training, certification exams, enablement training, and licensing agreements in an effort
to make any copy as close to the original as possible. That being said, we prefer the entire world to have access to this
approach even if the copy is a little muddy. Scaling exactness may be possible in the tech sector; scaling knowledge-based
frameworks has to knowingly include room for some muddiness. As we march forward, we’ll continue to find new ways to honor the
original intentions of this work—and that which evolves because of it.
IUC Certification Exam
To that end, this training ends with a certification exam.
This course ends with a certification exam that must be passed (85%) to be a certified IUC.
Testing will include principles, concepts, and an understanding of our practices, procedures, and ecosystem.
Remember, you’ll need to be able to direct others toward their learning environment (LMS), tools, website, and store.
Once started, the exam is on a three-hour timer.
You must complete the exam within 10 days following the IUC Training.
If you do not pass the certification exam on the second attempt, you can retake the exam for USD 250.
you are always transacting
Chances are that today you used electricity, turned on water taps, and ate food you didn’t grow. Any attempt to live outside the
known marketplace is laborious (if in doubt, watch the video How to Make a $1500 Sandwich in Only 6 Months) and produces a
deficiency known as independence poverty—when all your time is used up laboring to do everything yourself and you shackle
yourself with what you alone can do or produce (by the way, this applies to individuals, companies, and nations). We are each
involved in transactions with tens of millions of people we’ll never meet. Our day-to-day lives are a series of non-stop exchanges
with our spouses, families, colleagues, and customers.
Each of these transactions is a reciprocal (mutual), co-constitutive (we evolve together) exchange.
Unless you live on a remote island alone, you are always transacting. However, even if you find yourself on a deserted island, you’ll
still be transacting with the ecosystem for survival. Think about the limited resources on your island; use too much, and you’re dead.
Use all the trees, you’re dead. Eat all the animals, you’re dead. This leads us to consider our transaction with the natural world
(hint, you’d be dead without your microbiome, or oxygen, or atmosphere). For example, the human microbiome is the genetic
material of all the microbes—bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and viruses—that live on and inside our bodies in a reciprocal, mutually
beneficial transaction. The number of genes in all the microbes in your microbiome is 200 times the number of genes in your human
genome; as much as 2.3 kilograms (five pounds) of your body weight.
Transactions occur naturally in physics, with complex adaptive systems (evolution) and at every level from the molecular to the cosmological
A transaction is not merely the point of sale
Most people only ever think of a transaction as the point-of-sale, some cold tit-for-tat exchange. It is typically imagined as the point
where we tender money for services, sign a contract, or accept/decline/counter an offer. It is what most people draw to illustrate a
transaction. However, we also accept/decline/counter Invitations or Presentations, don’t we? What about judgments, opinions, or
even facts?
Although it may not seem obvious at first, the truth is, we accept/decline/counter at dozens of exchanges that eventually leads to a
point-of-sale (and dozens after it). Part of what we may be missing (that transactionally competent people don’t) is that when we
skip, dismiss, or are blind to a step, we often fail—we don’t understand why things ran off the rails. Every conversation, negotiation,
discussion, debate, meeting, judgment, rally, or commitment is a series of exchanges where you and I accept/decline/counter what
is offered by another. Every corporation, small business, or new start-up is built as a series of exchanges where you and I
accept/decline/counter what is offered.
Transactions are inescapable, ubiquitious, and fundamental to our survival. Those who transact powerfully, thrive.
Transactionalism gets a bad rap
The term “transactional” is typically used today as a synonym for quid-pro-quo, which is to spectacularly miss the point.
Quid pro quo is a Latin phrase used in English to mean an exchange of goods or services, in which one transfer is contingent upon
the other: “a favor for a favor.” Phrases with similar meanings include: “give and take,” “tit for tat,” “you scratch my back, and I’ll
scratch yours,” and “one hand washes the other.”
Transactions are often maligned as contractual (or even immoral) exchanges devoid of care—that to label someone
transactional is to call them an economic opportunist; a term related to the subversion of morality to profit.
This notion of transaction is often expressed inaccurately as a “carrot and stick” or “tit-for-tat”, “indifferent” and “insensitive”
approach. It permeates through most mainstream media, as well as business and management schooling. It is also being preached
throughout motivational and Current-driven training and instruction. It is seen as a highly consequential approach to activity and one
that does not take into account the wants and needs of others.
It is an attempt to bifurcate transaction from the principle of transformation which is often offered and positioned as a “superior”
and moral approach to leadership, management, and generally dealing with others. Where transformation is posited as a sincere
and life-changing win-win, caring, and wholistic approach to dealing with people, transaction is relegated to a measured,
consequential event that rewards success and punishes failure.
This is an inter-actional, mechanistic, and incomplete understanding of both transformation and especially transaction.
Transactions transform both involved (we change each other)
When you and I agree to something, be it dinner plans or nuclear negotiations, we both get transformed in the process. Life is now a
little (or a lot) different. We reorganize our future, restructure the actions we take, and alter our behaviors.
In this relationship, both become united for the moment in a mutual transition or “transaction.” It is a process in which both are reciprocally transformed. That is to say, the nature of the change each undergoes is affected by the presence
and influence of the other… A transaction, then is a creative act, engaged in by one who, by virtue of his participation in
the act—of which he is always an aspect, never an entity—together with the other participants, be they human or otherwise
environmental, becomes in the process modified. [2]
We change each other
Transactions are transformative as we are not separate entities (objects), but aspects (part of) of whole systems. Said another way,
our transactions mutually change and reorganize both of us as we are not acting in isolation. In western cultures, we have a
tendency to misidentify ourselves as independent rather than as part of whole systems. We can see the transformative nature of
transactions in a marriage or a pandemic. In a marriage, both take part in a series of continuous exchanges which shape how we
live and behave. It doesn’t take much time before both act, think, and dress more alike. The Covid-19 pandemic made us vividly
aware that we are a global community. While our habits and history are to think of ourselves as fragmented, separate, and isolated…
The transactional approach is “designed to correct the fragmentation of experience, on whatever level it may occur,” and as
the right “to see together…much that is talked about conventionally as if it were composed of irreconcilable separates.”
What does a transaction look like?
Can u draw a transaction? Influential U[/caption]
If asked to draw a transaction, you’ll likely sketch two stick figures shaking hands while exchanging money for something.
Most people think of a transaction in just that way – as a simple exchange. For example, exchanging your pen for my money. But
that doesn’t take into account some important questions like – how did we arrive at this moment where we exchanged your pen for
my money? There is more to it isn’t there? Why do I need a pen? How did you determine the price? Why that pen and not her
pencil? How did I know you had a pen for sale? How did we come to terms? Why did we decide to meet here to do this, and what
happens after this moment? Is selling the next pen going to help you meet your aims? AND on and on and on.
Your abridged interpretation of transaction may be the root of all your problems; it’s why you struggle with career, money, people,
and the reason satisfaction is always just beyond your reach.
“With this in mind – what would you add to your picture of a transaction? How might you draw a transaction that does include those
things?”
What does a transaction look like?
Inquiry: What MUST be included in a complete transaction?
The inquiry will produce things like:
Contract—commitments, agreements
Invite—marketing, sell, promote, broadcast
Present—sales, demonstrations, samples
Fulfill—exchange, deliver, enact
Assess—process, review, rate
Measure—satisfaction, feedback, rating
Complete—finish, certify, declaration of satisfaction
Invent/Reinvent—idea, create, innovate, build, make
