Transactional Analysis

By Jade Garratt

Have you ever found yourself reacting to something a colleague said as if you were a child being told off by their parents, even though you’re both adults and peers? Or ever said something to a teammate that you thought was a casual, lighthearted remark and been surprised when it triggered anger or condemnation?

When we work with the messiness and complexity of people and relationships, we often need awareness of how we are relating to each other, as well as what we say. Transactional Analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and modality of psychotherapy that can help us explore these dynamics as we aim to build healthier, psychologically safer work environments. As a caveat, TA is a vast, rich and nuanced theory with wide-ranging principles, practices and applications – we’ll only scratch the surface here, but we will draw on some of its most accessible and powerful insights. 

A (Very) Brief Introduction to Transactional Analysis (TA)

TA was developed by Eric Berne in the 1950s and 60s, with the core idea that we all have three ego states that we exist in and shift between – Parent, Adult, Child. These are not age-based but behavioural and motivational.

• Parent: the behaviours, thoughts and feelings that we learn and copy from our parents, carers or significant figures with power in our childhoods that we (often unconsciously) reenact – may be nurturing or critical and often includes rules and judgments
• Adult: often summarised as present-focused, rational, grounded, in this ego state we operate and respond appropriately in the here and now.
• Child: the behaviours, thoughts and feeling we experienced as a child replaying in the present – may be what’s called the ‘adapted’ child or ‘free’ child.

The goal isn’t to avoid or ‘transcend’ these ego states, but to become aware of which ego state we, and others, are acting from, and notice how that affects our communication. Most of the time, at work, we want to be relating to each other in Adult-to-Adult ego states – where we are grounded in the present moment, responding to what’s happening right now, and able to be our most rational selves. 

Photo By Kaboompics.com 

Core Assumptions of TA 

Transactional analysis aligns closely with our work on psychological safety as both are rooted in valuing people and their capacity to think, feel and grow. 

One of TA’s core philosophical principles is the belief that “people are OK”, sometimes expressed as “I’m OK, you’re OK.” This life position reflects a basic sense of mutual respect and worth.

• “I’m ok” means that I have a basic sense of self worth and I trust that I matter to others.
• ”You’re ok” means I see you as someone worthy of my respect. You matter to me.

This doesn’t require agreement with everything a person says or does. In fact, it means we can challenge someone’s behaviour while still holding them in positive regard. We can say, in essence, “I value you as a person, even as I raise a concern about something you’ve done.”

The various positions of “ok-ness” are often shown in Ernst’s grid (1971), also known as the “OK corral.”

Another core assumption of TA is that people can think. It’s not for us to judge the quality or capacity of their thinking, but to start from the belief that they can think – and they do. We work from the assumption that people are capable of understanding, reflection and choice.

In our psychological safety work, this aligns closely with the Local Rationality Principle – instead of assuming mistakes happen because someone didn’t think, or was too stupid to do the right thing, we consider that people do what seems reasonable to them, based on their goals, knowledge, understanding and focus of attention in that moment. In other words, their actions made sense to them at the time.

Finally, TA also holds that because we all have the capacity to think, we can make decisions, and re-think them if we wish. We can change our minds, our behaviours and ultimately our outcomes. This belief is essential whenever we’re supporting individual or team learning, growth, and development. If we don’t start from the position that people are capable of change, then let’s face it, any attempt at improvement is unlikely to succeed.

Applying TA to help teams

Alongside these philosophical assumptions and starting points, TA offers us some incredibly useful tools and approaches to work with each other more effectively. One of its central principles is the importance of open, transparent communication. At its heart, TA values and aims for clarity and honesty in both what we say and how we say it. When we’re building psychological safety, we’re creating environments where people feel safe enough to speak honestly – and where they know that will be welcomed, not punished.

So how do we use TA as a framework when fostering psychological safety?

• Feedback conversations: We use the “I’m OK, you’re OK” model in our feedback workshops to help people approach difficult conversations from a place of mutual respect. It’s easy to slip into a “one-up” mindset – “I’m OK, you’re not OK” – especially when we feel frustrated. But effective professional feedback comes from our Adult self, not the Critical Parent. Many of us know how it feels to be on the receiving end of feedback delivered from a Parent ego state, and it rarely helps us grow.
• Contracting: TA offers a broader, more human-centred idea of a contract, as not just a legal agreement, but any clear, bilateral, co-created commitment to how we’ll work together. It’s about making our expectations of each other explicit: how we’ll collaborate, give feedback, and raise concerns. In coaching, contracting is so powerful that we often find any bumps in the relationship can be resolved simply by revisiting and reworking that contract.
• Building relational awareness: Just becoming aware of ego states and ideas like “I’m OK, you’re OK” can help us be more intentional in how we show up at work. Whether we’re leaders or team members, we want to model Adult-Adult communication: grounded, respectful, and open.

This last point came to life in a recent workshop. One participant began describing mistakes a couple of their team members were making. Halfway through their story, they stopped and said, “I’ve just realised I’ve slipped into I’m ok, You’re not ok.” In that moment, they realised how their stance was clouding their ability to think and communicate clearly, and that insight changed their perspective. Instead of focusing on who was to blame, they began exploring what might be causing the mistakes, and left with a very different strategy to take back to their team.

Psychological Safety and TA

As we (hopefully!) know by now, no policy or team building activity is going to fix all our challenges around psychological safety. There are many different lenses, approaches and practices we can try, but ultimately they all come down to how we relate to one another. Transactional analysis offers a framework to understand and begin to improve those relational dynamics. 

So next time you’re in a tricky team situation, ask yourself: Am I in Parent, Adult or Child right now? And what magic might happen if I shift?

Further reading and learning:

• Ernst, F. H. (1971). The OK Corral: The Grid for Get-on-With. Transactional Analysis Journal, 1(4), 33–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/036215377100100409
• Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis: https://ericberne.com/transactional-analysis/
• TA Podcast: Seven Things You Need to Know about Transactional Analysis II
• The Local Rationality Principle 
• Team Charters
• Feedback online workshop
• Psychological Safety Doesn’t Mean Feeling Comfortable
• Psychological Safety and Privilege
• Typologies of Power
• How We Respond Matters

NEW! Human and Organisational Performance (HOP): Online Workshops

We’re super excited to announce our newest open-enrolment online workshop, on the core concepts and practices within Human and Organisational Performance (HOP).

HOP is based on the 5 principles of:

• People make mistakes
• Blame fixes nothing
• Context drives behaviour
• Learning is vital
• Response matters

In this workshop, we use those principles as a scaffold to explore the fundamentals of HOP and how to put it into practice. This workshop covers many safety-related topics, such as human error and Work-As-Imagined vs Work-As-Done, but is not specifically a health and safety workshop.

Instead this workshop is for you if you’re new to HOP and want to apply it in your context. This HOP Fundamentals session will be valuable for practitioners, managers, consultants and trainers in any field or domain. What we will all have in common is a desire to foster workplace cultures and systems where people are empowered to do their best work.

In this workshop, we explore:

• What is HOP?
• Safety I and Safety II
• Reaction, response, hindsight bias and counterfactuals
• Blame and accountability
• Types of Human Error
• Work as Done vs Work as Imagined
• Local Rationality, Production Pressure and Normalisation of Risk
• Learning from failure and success
• Further reading and resources

You’ll leave with a new perspective on how humans work, fail, learn, and solve problems, along with practical tools and techniques to try with your teams. Find out more and book online here!

Psychological Safety in Practice

Efficiency vs resilience.

Thanks so much to Teri at Strong Leaders Serve for inviting me back on her fabulous podcast to talk about the tension between efficiency and resilience. We unpacked how hyper-optimisation can lead to burnout and brittleness, and we discussed practical strategies to build adaptability into teams without sacrificing results. 

Building adaptive capacity

The late, great, Richard Cook and Adele Long published this paper (Building and revising adaptive capacity sharing for technical incident response: A case of resilience engineering) back in 2021, and it speaks very much to the above tension between efficiency and resilience.

The need for “adaptive capacity” is a fundamental tenet of Resilience Engineering, and in this paper, Cook and Long showed how an organisation deliberately built and refined a system for sharing expert capacity across overloaded on-call teams during technical incidents. They created an eight-person “support cadre” drawn from multiple teams. Automated triggers invited cadre members to join incidents that exceeded defined thresholds, while a structured pipeline, clear rotational terms, and career incentives helped recruit, train, and sustain these experts over time. Weekly review meetings and data-driven thresholds kept the process agile, ensuring that support was mobilised quickly without burning out the people it relied on.

This is a great table describing the characteristics of incidents and how they contribute to effective learning:

Beyond better incident resolution, this approach fostered greater shared language and timely communication – key aspects of psychological safety. 

Sorry, the paper isn’t open access, but last week we shared some ways to access academic papers if you don’t have institutional access.

The Lucy Letby Case

The case of Lucy Letby comes up often in our workshops, and is a stark illustration of the need to foster greater psychological safety in healthcare, particularly in maternity units, where we do a lot of work.

This investigation into the Lucy Letby case shows how a decades-old neonatology paper was used to secure convictions for the murder of infants, only for its author and an highly qualified international panel to challenge that evidence. A crucial point here is that not only is it important to address potential miscarriages of justice, but if systemic failures ultimately led to deaths, then (potentially wrongly) convicting an individual and placing the blame on them, ultimately masks the foundational causes – likely resulting in further deaths in the future, not fewer. 

“The convictions are unsafe and should be overturned as soon as possible,” Dr Shoo Lee and his panel concluded.

“Constructive Discharge” 

This paper is good (not great, just good), but what really drew me to it was how it uses Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue,” to illustrate how individuals (like Sue) develop resilience when forced to by toxic leaders who “manage out” employees (in the paper, they use the term “constructive discharge.”) This is characterised by behaviours including intentional micromanagement, exclusion, abusive supervision and arbitrary gatekeeping. 

The authors follow with a few recommendations to foster psychological safety, which include things like providing ethical training for leaders (one has to wonder whether managers who “constructively discharge” people are really in any doubt about the ethical aspect of it, however!), social contracts and team charters. 

Listen to Johnny Cash play “A Boy Named Sue”, live at San Quentin in 1969.

This week’s poem:

The Leader, by Roger McGough

I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee I’m the leader
I’m the leader

OK what shall we do?