A IC is a highly developed and integrated approach to organizing that can be applied to anything from a fifteen minute meeting between two people to large scale international programs of development involving millions of people. Appreciation, Influence and Control are the terms used to describe the three universal power relationships found in any system. Influence describes our relationship to parts of the whole system which we do not control.
Control describes the relationship of the individual part of the system to itself.
The primary feature of the AIC approach is that it allows organizers to identify, call upon and use all the power available to them to achieve their purposes. By personality, organizational function or culture we tend to overuse one of these power relationships and under-value the others. Although the AIC process is built on the collective wisdom of many cultures and draws heavily on insight from modern sciences, application of AIC is very simple. Accumulative wisdom is built into the process itself. Long training and complex explanations are not necessary in order to use the AIC approach.