Influence Ecology
What does our name mean?
From the Influence Ecology Distinctionary
“Influence Ecology ” is an abstract concept for the reciprocal, co-constitutive relationship inherent in an organism/environment; a specific and specialized transaction built for immersive consequence.
We are organisms within the environments we influence and are in turn influenced by the environments we cannot escape. This is the very meaning of ecology. Our individual and species survival is always and will continue to depend on our ability to transact powerfully and effectively within the existing, offered and constructed environments in which we arise. Our unique curriculum offers ‘educational environments’ purposefully and strategically constructed with the sole purpose of providing student immersion in the specialized knowledge and deliberate practice of Transactional Competence™.
Influence Ecology is the corporate name and identity of the enterprise co-founded in 2009 by John Patterson and Kirkland Tibbels. It is the leading business education in Transactional Competence™ and exists to help people live ambitious and satisfying lives. Those who transact powerfully, thrive.™
Our aim: By 2025, Influence Ecology is publically recognized as the modern architect of the philosophy of transactionalism.
The name, “Influence Ecology” was created in 2009 by Co-Founder John Patterson and is distinguished in a 2015 article submitted for publication to the Texas A&M School of Architecture, where he earned his degree in Environmental Design; the applied arts and sciences dealing with creating the human-designed environment.
Business Philosophy Inspired by Environmental Design
Ojai, California – November 7, 2015 – Former student cites TAMU School of Architecture studies as a founding influence in the success of expanding global business philosophy.
The global business curriculum known as Influence Ecology was co-founded by 1985 Aggie Alum John Patterson to explore the biological, linguistic and transactional nature of our human condition. Patterson has often cited his degree in Environmental Design from Texas A&M University as a foundational influence, stating, “My degree was my first foray into the human-environment relationship, and I thrived in it.”
Environmental Design initially exposed him to the evolving interplay between people, what we build and why, forging an intellectual pathway to his curriculum’s foundational philosophy. His studies after graduation showed him that human beings are inherently, and always, transacting to satisfy a variety of unavoidable conditions that exist within the environments that constitute our whole life; by whole he means “inseparable from all else.”
The Influence Ecology curriculum approaches its educational methodology as cited:
“We are organisms within the environments we influence and are in turn influenced by the environments we cannot escape. This is the very meaning of ecology. Our individual and species survival has always and will continue to depend on our ability to transact powerfully and effectively within the existing, offered and constructed environments in which we arise. Our unique curriculum offers ‘educational environments’ purposefully and strategically constructed with the sole purpose of providing student immersion in the specialized knowledge and deliberate practice of Transactional Competence™.”
“Our methodology makes it difficult for students not to confront their own naiveté, conceit and indifference to the ‘transactional whole’,” says Patterson. “They find that they have grown carelessly unaware of the interdependent relationship that they, as biological organisms, have with everything and everyone else. They discover that they begin to thrive when they honor their inter-reliant place in the world, and discontinue the illusion of being an overlord of it.”
From 2012-2015, the average increase in reported income for participants, across all industries and cultures, during the first six months was 51% over their anticipated income. “They simply get more competent at offering valuable help to others,” he says, “they learn how to respect and transact successfully with people of differing views.”
He continues, “Our approach offers a integration of philosophical views historically seen at odds with each other. We recognize these distinct views [Subjectivism, Objectivism, for example] as part of a whole system.”
Influence Ecology deploys a transactional behavior model; co-founder and chairman Kirkland Tibbels, having studied over 160 different approaches to personality and behavior, codified a model that demonstrates how humankind demonstrates attributes, not only expressed by differing philosophical views, but as specific transactional behaviors that require one another.
This is the first time – that the co-founders have yet to find historically – that any such philosophical undertaking has occurred and the transactional approach is “designed to correct the fragmentation of experience, on whatever level it may occur,”[1] “to see together…much that is talked about conventionally as if it were composed of irreconcilable separates.”[2]
As Patterson explains, “Transaction often gets a bad rap as a ‘tit for tat’ or insensitive approach to conducting exchange; however, Transactionalism instead fosters a co-constitutive, reciprocal approach to the mutuality of our co-existence. In our view, nothing could be more important as our solutions, environment, and resources are pressed to exhaustion.”
“I often pay homage to my professors Jerry Maffei, Rodney Hill, and Paulo Barucchieri who taught me a great deal about the potency of environment and ‘place’,” says Patterson. “As with any great teacher, their lessons were not just about architecture, they were about our whole life.”
[1] George R. Geiger, John Dewey in Perspective. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1964, p. 78.
[2] John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known. Boston: Beacon Press, 1949, p. 69.
