Our mission to enhance people's capacity to participate. In a culture of participation, people feel their ideas are being heard, they discover common interests, create real solutions and as they do, they extend and deepen the collective knowledge base of the group. People in participatory cultures think and act together, knowing that they are making a difference.

We want to enable people to participate in the development of their own situations. We want to make it easy for groups to think, plan and make decisions together. We want to help groups get results and improve effectiveness. We want people to make the kind of positive contributions that will lead to healthier communities and workplaces. We want people to be able to play facilitative leadership roles.

We will always do our best to ensure that every person has an opportunity to hear others and express their ideas. The wisdom of each person in the group makes the mix richer and the group gets the wisest results when everyone's wisdom is included. The whole is, indeed, greater than the sum of the parts.

We focus in three major areas

• Training in group facilitation and leadership methods
• Facilitating community and organizational development
• Resources for facilitative leaders

Our core business is to provide facilitation and training services to organizations with a commitment to participation. We facilitate consistent, high-quality, action-oriented programs for hundreds of organizations and communities every year. We provide the following services:

• Facilitation - to build plans and solutions that everyone is committed to
• Training - to build internal facilitation capacity
• Curriculum Design - custom designed training plans you can use
• Process Design - to create the most effective process to get the results you want.
• Coaching - to give your internal facilitators an opportunity to take advantage of our many years of experience.

We use methods that draw out the best thinking of the group. These methods provide facilitators with:

• a structured method that recognizes all contributions.
• methods to help the group deal with a large amount of data in a short period of time.
• methods that pool participants contributions into larger, more information rich patterns.
• methods that allow you to successfully deal with polarization, conflict and diversity.

As a result, our approach is practical, realistic and humane. At ICA, we turn diversity, disagreement, and change into assets to be embraced, not merely "problems" to be "managed". When you use ICA services, you get more than just good decisions from your group; you gain the commitment of the participants; that critical element leading to success. We call these methods Technologies of Participation or ToP™