Page 40 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Fundamentals of Collaboration 9

“break,” meaning that it ends up in icky clumps surrounded by watery
liquid, rather than as a smooth batter ready for baking. Then, there is no
choice but to throw it out and start over (or go to the local bakery).
In an analogous way, “breaking” can occur in individuals (where it
may be seen in various normal and pathological responses to stress and
trauma) and in groups and organizations, where it may be seen in the kind
of miscommunication and functional breakdown described above. This
situation, of course, is antithetical to collaboration. The only way fragmen-
tation is useful is when it is recognized as a signal that there is a problem
and responded to differently either before it happens or while it is happen-
ing. That is to say, when we can either learn from past experience and take
preventive action or reflect on experience as it is happening and respond
“on the fly” in a fluid and flexibly effective manner, or at least intend to do
so. This state of fluid poise has been termed fliessgleichgewicht (“flowing
balance”; von Bertalanffy in Capra, 1997).

Level of Complexity: A Simple Framework for
Understanding Complex Processes

No conceptual framework is applicable as a cookie-cutter approach for
every situation. Anything presented in theory has to be viewed in context
and pragmatically adapted by the user to changing situations and for his
or her own needs and style. However, because disasters represent situa-
tions in which the individual and groups are strained in terms of cogni-
tive function (Covello, Chapter 4), emotional and spiritual impact, and
functional and behavioral impact, it is all the more difficult to be thought-
ful about and focused toward achieving ongoing collaboration during
disasters. As such, I will sketch out a useful conceptual framework for the
reader as she or he considers the intricacies of disaster collaboration, as it
interacts with the particular interdisciplinary issues facing spiritual care
and mental health providers working together.
The basic framework I would like to propose is of a dynamic systems
approach (Smith & Thelen, 1996), though it is not necessary to have a
technical background to use this frame. Armed with such an approach,
multiple levels of organization are considered simultaneously. By multiple
levels, I mean, in order from smallest to largest, a range of scale going
from biological to individual to pairs of people to small groups of people
(such as families and work teams) to organizations of varying sizes (such
as the ones for which we work or with which we volunteer) to societal and