Page 34 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

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Fundamentals of Collaboration

Grant H. Brenner

Introduction

Disasters are occurrences of variable time course, which are sufficiently
different from the usual and expected course of events such that they sig-
nificantly disrupt individual and collective function past the point of stress
tolerance. The usual processes that are in place, and which people and orga-
nizations take for granted, start to show dysfunction ranging from mild to
moderate to total breakdown. Furthermore, the disruption of usual indi-
vidual and collective functioning itself becomes part of the disaster. This
makes a difficult situation worse than it needs to be, creating “spin-off”
crises from the inciting event, which reciprocally worsen response to the
original event (Stacey, 2001). If poorly handled, disasters risk falling into a
repetitive, self-amplifying cycle, loosely analogous to a person who keeps
walking on a sprained ankle, not only keeping it from healing, but reinjur-
ing it in the process, perhaps rippling out to other consequences as well.
This brief overview presents principles that may help to mitigate a poten-
tial avalanche of destructive aftershocks of disaster. Importantly, this chap-
ter also addresses the issue of preparedness in between disasters, advocating
the wisdom of expending scarce resources preventively, in the interest of
maintaining resilient networks when there is no looming threat demanding
them. It is imperative that on all levels, from the individual to the family
to the workplace and other organizations to the societal and governmental
levels, that we have developed effective collaboration when disaster strikes.
What we learn from disaster collaboration will pay off in other unexpected
areas as well. Being able to communicate, develop relationships and aware-
ness of patterns of relatedness with others, recognize and verbalize our own

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