What is AIC Mapping?

After decades of tackling some of the greatest issues of our time—poverty, energy, conflict over—natural resources, abuse of power and corruption—I have come to understood that these issues become problems because they affect everybody. We cannot solve them unless everybody does their part.

The Maps take advantage of what we have learned about the natural systems relationships between purpose, power and leadership. and how they affect the functioning of organizations of all sizes in all parts of the world. Because of the origin of these patterns in nature we are able to trace the same relationship in ourselves.

We are able to create the same transformational effects in individual that we have in organizations. While this is wonderful in itself it is exponentially more wonderful because that is exactly what it will take to address the major issues of our time. Each of us has to do our part in being responsible for ourselves, we have learn how to cooperate better with others to leverage our power, and we have to do this together in a way that serves the common good.

The Maps help us to do this by revealing how our purpose naturally creates three powers that help us focus on thesse three areas. Control helps us focus on our own activities, influence on working with others and appreciation on the common good. The Maps answer the key questions:

What is my purpose?
How does that create power?
How does my leadership relate to purpose and power?

How Does Mapping Work?

The Maps use advances in social systems sciences, neuroscience, and complexity and color theories to help us with such questions. They tap into the subconscious image we have of ourselves and our relationships with our world. Derived from the millions of years of our genetic evolution, the thousands of years of our cultural development and our whole life experience, our life image provides us with a subconscious guide to our survival and well-being.

We are able to map information from this image by tapping into the state of our nervous system. The role of our nervous system is to track and provide us with information about what is going on inside of us and what is happening outside. We read this information, at one level, through our senses and, at other levels, through our subconscious motives, emotions and instincts. In practice, our preference for color proves an extremely effective way of reading these relationships.

We can use the AIC pattern of power relationships to chart and interpret individual, group, organizational and cultural patterns of purpose, power and leadership. The Maps give recommendations on how to use the most natural ways of improving leadership by makingthe least possible changes to our patterns of of power use.

For more on why and how the process works read How Does AIC Mapping Work?