The Fractal Model of Relationships evolved from Jo Vanderkloot’s lifelong work with families experiencing extreme breakdown—families so fragile they became stuck in their unhealthy patterns of functioning. She originally decided to become a family therapist to better understand her own seriously challenged family. Her first job after obtaining her degree in social work took her to the crisis room in a neighborhood ambulatory care clinic in the South Bronx, NY, when that community was among the most devastated in the country.

The combination of Jo’s experiences growing up, her training in family therapy, and her work in the South Bronx came together over the years in the form of a method for working with especially chaotic and difficult families that has proven to be very successful. This article describes her approach with the hope that other therapists, or leaders working with larger groups, will find it helpful when confronting breakdown in their work. But what do we mean by that?

Breakdown

When a machine breaks, one or more parts stop moving in sync, and their normal relationships end. As a result, the machine can’t function until it gets repaired.

In a superficially similar way, a family gets stuck when its members can no longer interact normally with each other because they’re overwhelmed by insurmountable problems. When that happens, over time their behaviors become so rigid and prescribed, it’s impossible for them to effectively solve problems. At this point, they require intervention.

All families experience difficult challenges: some can handle them because their members interconnect in healthy ways, which makes them resilient. They’re authentic and largely transparent in their dealings with each other and communicate effectively. Their strong relationships are the foundation for their deep commitment to each other and to the family as a whole, enabling them to relate well also to people outside the family.

However, an accumulation of challenges over generations, or a sudden onslaught of them, can send any family into a tailspin of deterioration leading to breakdown. Sometimes, when a family is stuck in such a state, current problematic behaviors can be traced to a serious problem in a past generation. If the individuals involved at that earlier time failed to deal successfully with it, it would linger as an unresolved presence in the family. Those earlier individuals would begin to model unhealthy behaviors to their children, and these would be passed down to succeeding generations, becoming more intense with each one. The process is like a snowball rolling down a hill: each generation gathers more difficult problems and loses the ability to deal with them as the family moves through time.

The initial problem could be incest, addictions, chronic illness, violence, criminal activity, or something else of equal severity. Ensuing behaviors are often designed to sweep the problem into oblivion. It’s never mentioned—members dance around it, and their children learn without being told not to ask questions and to monitor what they say. These reactive behaviors get passed down in a more generic form: the next generation’s children unconsciously learn to tiptoe around and keep secrets in general, even though they have no knowledge of the original problem.

In spite of being unaware of what wreaked havoc in an earlier generation, some of the family members who come later will experience physical and/or mental complications such as illnesses and failures that can even mimic the original problem. These complications result from the stress that continues to mount in the family.

The families we’re talking about share one commonality: despite differing details in their lives, they all have the same rigid structure, which is so acute that even when difficult events occur that are usually not a huge problem, their members’ physical and mental symptoms intensify greatly. A therapist will be needed to help current family members identify the patterns of behavior reoccurring through past generations that are linked to their present-day situation.

Family members react to the challenges that keep happening by behaving the way they learned: they keep secrets, they don’t question, and they’re very careful about what they say. This leads to family dynamics in which communication is absent, misleading, and/or insulting. In such families, members have little trust in each other and struggle to cooperate. All of this creates fragmentation. Unless the family gets help, it may ultimately die out. The Fractal Model of Relationships can provide the help such families need.

What’s in a Name?

The name of this approach deserves some explanation. Why a fractal? As defined by AI, “a fractal is a complex, self-similar geometric pattern where the same basic shape repeats infinitely at different scales, creating intricate designs found everywhere from coastlines and snowflakes to broccoli and lightning.” Fractals are found in nature and can also be generated by a computer program in the form of graphic designs.

Through our work, we came to understand that human behavior can be a fractal, expressing similarly in families and larger and still larger groups. We realized that the breakdown we saw in families was a pattern repeating in workplaces and communities, in national situations, and in the way nations interact with each other. Humans are humans, and their behavior is similar wherever they are. And because human behavior is a fractal, the method for healing complex behaviors must also be similar at all levels of scale.

What does it mean that this is a model? It means that it serves as a template. We outline steps to take and give examples of how Jo uses this process in family therapy and how we used it working together in larger settings. It serves as a set of guidelines for therapists to use with families and for group leaders to use in workplaces and communities. They can overlay the model onto specific situations they’re dealing with.

This model focuses on relationships of all kinds; it’s designed to help people become more trusting and open to others in their group—to heal relationships frozen by the rigidity found in situations affected by high levels of breakdown.

What is true about this model but not reflected in its name is that it is a systems approach. That means that it looks at a family or larger group as a system composed of interacting, intercommunicating parts (people), in which the actions of each person affect all the other people and the system as a whole. Using systems thinking, once you know the identity of the parts, you focus on their relationships and interactions. Process is as important, if not more so, than the identity or nature of any of the parts. This approach assumes that a system is always changing, which is why the focus has to be on the process, the interactions, and the intercommunications. Living systems are always changing.

Using the Fractal Model of Relationships with Chaotic Families

Below, we will be describing the steps Jo takes when assessing a new family seeking to engage in therapy with her, and then as she unpacks their family history with them to identify significant patterns of behavior—a process that can free them from being stuck. But we must say up front that part of Jo’s approach is instinctive. It comes out of who she is and how her own life evolved, and it’s fueled by her passionate commitment to succeed in helping her patients. This is tricky, difficult work—a clear challenge with each new family that she can’t resist. This is why patients she worked with years and years ago often stay in touch to let her know how that work changed their lives.

Assessing New Patients and Beginning the Therapeutic Journey. Often it will be a couple who makes the first appointment. Jo first notes how they present. Some couples begin by explaining their different perspectives calmly; in response, Jo will validate that each has a different perspective and that she will work with both. While couples like this have serious disagreements, they aren’t overtly at each other’s throats.

Jo tries to understand the context of her patients’ presenting problem. That would include information about all family members’ interrelationships and their work and school situations, along with ties to the community. The function of this exploration is to reveal the pattern of interactions over time. This approach differs from individual therapy, which usually searches for intrapsychic issues and formulates a diagnosis, which guides the treatment.

Other couples are fully combative even as they utter their first words—they are angry and blaming. Families like theirs are extremely intense. In response, Jo asks the couple how their parents and grandparents related to each other. Almost all say those relationships were terrible. She then helps them explore where and when their families became rigidified and asks them, “If this has been going on in that many generations, why are you blaming each other?” She is validating what they’re feeling but establishing that fault does not lie with either one of them. This is always a novel concept. Then she begins to do an in-depth exploration of the relationships in each of their families to determine the pattern of difficulty.

In both types of couples, unfolding behaviors are often quite ugly. The possibility of actual violence is real. Depending on the stage of devolution the family is in, that possibility could be either near-term or more distant. Jo learned when working in the crisis room in the South Bronx that she had to jump in quickly to disarm a situation and disrupt any forces building in that direction. Her tone was always measured and firm, but calm and reassuring, and her comments were very direct. She had to open patients’ minds immediately to the possibility that their reality could, in fact, change for the better, and she would help that to happen. Hope is a powerful therapeutic tool.

As she continued to work with these challenging families, Jo learned that the risk of doing this work with them and with increasingly larger groups is that the danger grows exponentially as their rigidity increases. She learned not to head into the resistance: the system is too fragile, and doing so can make it explode. Instead, she learned to view the resistance as vital information.

In the midst of the brokenness of the South Bronx community, given the chaos and instability Jo grew up with, she instinctively knew at a glance what was needed with a new patient or family. One patient was a strong young man, about 6’5,” wearing a leather vest and pants with bullets slipped into little holes all over. He was anxiously pacing back and forth in the waiting room yelling and intimidating everyone. When he came into her office, she said, “Look, I have no idea why you’re here, but if you want help, you need to know you’re scaring the shit out of everybody.” He started sobbing. It turned out his girlfriend was dying of cancer, and he was going to jail the next day and needed to find help for her. By taking charge right away, she permitted him to give in to his vulnerability.

It is essential that a therapist accept all behaviors without judgment and blame, no matter how threatening. This attitude has to be modeled, because family members will need to get past blame to unlock the rigid family structure. If anyone finds the skunk at the picnic, the picnic will be over. When they can change that structure, the behaviors will change, so the focus has to be on the structure as well as on the behaviors. This can be difficult for a therapist. Similarly, they must not take personally any attacks coming their way from family members; they need to understand that this is information about how the family functions, or doesn’t.

Early in the process, Jo tells family members there will be back-and-forth behaviors and starts and stops, as each person struggles to change. At some point, there will be a huge blowup, partly fueled by family members’ fear that they can never change. When that subsides, they will be able to behave in new ways consistently. Couples have told Jo that they were glad she said this to them before she really knew them. That made them understand that this eruption was part of the process and not an indication they were failing.

Determining Family Type. As Jo worked with difficult families over the years, typically depicting several generations in a genogram (see www.chaosinstitute.org/tools), she realized that families can be grouped in three sets. The first type of family is “healthy.” These are the resilient families we described above. Members have supportive relationships with others in the family and outside it. Unfortunately, few families fit this mold in the present time of chaos and complexity.

The second type is in the process of becoming more complex. Communication is not broken, but it could be better. Some stress-related symptoms are beginning to appear, such as addictions and health problems, but the family is functioning and holding together while trying to deal with their challenges.

The third type includes the families we’ve been talking about—they are chaotic, stuck, and rigid. A family that was healthy generations earlier may become increasingly complex and then descend into chaos over time if, along the way, its members encounter problems they’re not equipped to handle.

Roles. As type 3 families become increasingly knotted together in the face of more and more unsolvable problems, the traits that make each member unique and interesting begin to flatten, and their role in family dynamics becomes more important.

All roles in type 3 families have the same purpose, but they come at it differently. One person may be the screamer, another the bully, yet another the people-pleaser or enabler. There may also be a chief manipulator, and there can be others. These roles will become apparent as a therapist is able to discern more and more about the family’s dynamics. All roles interact together to maintain the rigidity, and the rigidity’s function is to keep the family intact. If anyone tries to leave, everyone else will rope them back in—leaving is unconsciously forbidden, because it will rip a hole in their structure.

Those roles insure that behavior will be scripted and reliable, and so less apt to threaten the rigidity. Family members aren’t aware of any of this. They’re caught up in the fear, anxiety, and confusion they all share. They don’t think about the roles they’re all playing and probably wouldn’t be able to define theirs if someone asked. They may not fully understand that they aren’t allowed to be their authentic selves, although most feel a general sense of restriction. Without understanding the dynamics they’re caught up in, they can’t step outside them: they can’t deviate from the limits of their roles and the scripts they follow. They also can’t violate family taboos, ask forbidden questions, or challenge authority. This is what makes it impossible for these families to change their dynamics alone: a skilled family therapist is needed to guide them through the process of loosening the invisible chains.

A family’s type determines how Jo will work with them.

Identifying Behavioral Patterns. Whether working with a complex or chaotic family (type 2 or 3), it is important for Jo to guide her patients in looking for patterns of difficult interactions among family members that repeat across generations. This is key to a successful intervention because it defuses blame. When at least key family members can see that these patterns originated in the past, they realize that blaming members of the current generation makes no sense. It’s what they have all learned just by being in their family.

What are some examples of such patterns? One may be that important family members in each generation run away somehow when faced with difficult situations, abandoning the family and turning their back on responsibilities. This could either take the form of physically leaving or dropping the ball. One mother we knew would suddenly leave her children in their father’s care and disappear without notice for days. Once she leapt out of the car while they were stopped at a light in New York City. She came home days later with no explanation. Children intuit that they should not ask questions about a parent’s behavior. They’re afraid to. Parents may also repeatedly forget to provide lunch money for their children, forget to pick them up from sports trips, or miss appointments with their child’s teachers. The specific form of “running away,” or “being absent,” might vary in different generations, but the general pattern will be there and it will have the same harmful effects on everyone in the family: destabilizing them, eroding trust, and creating anxieties and guilt (since children, especially, will begin to think they must be the cause of their parent’s behavior).

Another pattern may be that in each generation a person in a specific role may contract a chronic illness at a certain age. Or, in some families, a member in each generation will have several children, one of whom will become addicted and fail in career attempts, while another will be wildly successful. Often members’ ages when significant events happen across generations will be part of a pattern, like the age when a parent dies or the age of family members when they become ill. Patterns like these reveal important information when seen in the context of the problems the family is currently facing.

When Jo thinks she has identified a salient pattern running through the generations in a family, she shares that information with the members. If she’s correct, they’ll light up in recognition, showing it hit home in a visceral way and completely made sense. They feel relief because they know they’re making progress, even though the work is hard. If that doesn’t happen, Jo knows her identification is wrong; it isn’t that the family members are resisting. Then she continues to ask questions to surface more meaningful information until the real pattern emerges. Using the Fractal Model of Relationships enables a therapist to predict the results of any movements away from the pattern: who will move away and how it will affect them.

Discovering a Pattern’s Function. Patterns can emerge when Jo is exploring a family’s history using a genogram. When that happens, she helps family members discover what the function of that behavior has been throughout the several generations. Knowing the function will help the family understand what led it down the spiral into rigidity. The repeated behaviors across time may be messy or embarrassing. Understanding their function helps family members realize that these behaviors were not simply what they appear to be.

She teaches her patients that all behavior makes sense in the context in which it appears. Again, she is defusing blame. Ugly behavior in a family may originate from the most honorable motives, and it often does. Its purpose may be to distract family members from the threat of conflict or in some other way be aimed at keeping the family intact.

Moving Ahead Carefully After the Pattern Is Revealed. As people are beginning to change, what is the evidence they’re making progress? When Jo identifies the important patterns in a family, she not only pays attention to the members’ verbal responses, she also looks for other evidence. And she carefully considers whether anyone is being put at risk by what she’s doing.

Also, as we mentioned, she is not wedded to her pattern identification. It has to be tested by the responses of family members when it’s introduced to them. She watches for any acting out, new illnesses or worsening chronic illness, or for someone leaving or making threats. This is all information. To the contrary, does she sense relief? Some openings? She doesn’t blame the family if her idea isn’t working. Their behaviors show whether she’s on the right path or not.

Jo’s goal is always to help the members become able to relate to each other more openly and freely without disturbing the family’s homeostatic balance. When openness and freedom are prohibited, change must be introduced slowly and incrementally, and Jo pays careful attention to all reactions at every step of the way.

Working with Different Members of the Family. A therapist has differing amounts and types of leverage with individual family members. In each family, there tends to be at least one person who is anchored to the old ways and more caught up in the rigidity. But there are others who would like to be more flexible. When accurate patterns are known, Jo will start to work especially with the member who is most amenable to trying something new. She coaches that person on how to change specific behaviors, even in subtle ways, without destabilizing the family. (Her practice is always about protecting the family rather than protecting one person. The family is the patient.)

That person must have the strength to hold the change, even while other members try hard to pull them back to the old ways. Telling the person to hold fast is one of the first things Jo does when coaching a specific person. Doing this makes them more of an observer than a participant in the system. Jo tells that person not to personalize what the others do, because they can’t help it. Personalizing it maintains the system. Jo keeps the family’s identified pattern of behavior in mind at all times while working with its members, especially when she’s coaching the member willing to begin to act differently.

When other family members try to derail any behavioral changes, they aren’t being purposefully uncooperative. They’re determined to maintain systemic consistency within the family. People usually want what’s familiar. Jo also asks the patient she is coaching to predict who will be the first family member to accept the new behavior and who will be the last. She tells them that when you change what you do, you force the others to change or feel crazy.

Introducing the initial small changes to a family’s dynamics creates a critical point in the therapeutic process. Some reactions can be dangerous in and of themselves: violence to self or others, threat of suicide or its actual occurrence, or something else as cataclysmic: suddenly there’s a threat to the pattern. At this point, the therapy may become more intense and dangerous. Expressions of extreme violence are rare, but the possibilities exist. Jo pays special attention to a family member who gives even a slight indication of being particularly vulnerable, making herself available to talk at a moment’s notice 24/7.

Interacting with the External World. After a family begins to break through their restrictions, Jo coaches them how to interact with people in the external world. She tells them to notice, when they are out and about, which families and individuals they are especially drawn to. When they meet with people from families similar to their own, they will sense their intensity and be drawn to them. If they interact with them and feel their anger rising, she cautions them to stop the interaction. They are in danger of replaying the pattern they’re trying to change.

This danger is especially true for people from incest families, which are cut off from the outside world to a large extent. An incest family has rigid boundaries between itself and the external world and no boundaries inside the house. Therefore, members need to learn how to detect boundaries and related issues. They need to know they’ll be drawn to people without boundaries. For those who have dealings with government agencies relating to housing, food, health, etc., individuals in those agencies can detect when people have no boundaries and are therefore easy targets for abuse, whether physical, financial, or sexual. People from incest families have been taught not to trust people outside their family, and that can be exacerbated if someone encroaches on what should be their boundaries. They need to know about this vulnerability and to develop the boundaries they haven’t had.

Type 3 family members, so used to being trapped in their family and failing in any attempts to change its dynamics, typically expect negative outcomes during the therapy process. Therefore, as they begin to change using the therapist’s guidance, when they have to deal with new difficult problems, they get angry and abort the process of problem-solving, thereby going back to zero. The therapist needs to tell the family this is what usually happens. Coaching has to intensify when they start going backwards, and the therapist must understand that their behavior has a purpose: it maintains the old system.

Working with Larger Groups

As we’ve said, this is a fractal model. That means the steps used in dealing with a rigid workplace or community group will be similar to those followed in doing therapy with a chaotic family so rigid it can’t solve problems on its own. The violence possible in chaotic families is just as possible in larger groups. To that point, some people may remember the phrase “going postal,” referring to shootings by disgruntled post office employees during the 1990s.

Again, the term “breakdown” describes the state of the large groups we are talking about. What does breakdown look like in a workplace? The following symptoms can happen anywhere: secrecy; fear; procrastination; suppression of complaints and ideas; attempts to control; plummeting morale; conflicting orders and information; and feelings of being invalidated, overworked, stressed out, manipulated, and patronized. (See chaosinstitute.org/resources/tools/breakdown chart.)

Do larger systems degrade to this point in the same way a family does? Basically, yes. In a larger system, generations of poor problem-solving are a major factor, with attempted errant solutions getting more bizarre as time goes on and layers of failure piling up.

Assessing the Situation. Assessment is always the first step. Leaders must consider a group’s internal problems in the context of their external environment, with a focus on relationships of all kinds. Furthermore, a nonlinear approach is necessary whenever there is chaos and complexity. In part, that means taking a 360-degree view of the situation.

Workplaces and community groups typically work within a structure built of job descriptions, policies, rules and regulations, and local, state, and federal laws. These structural elements govern behavior, but they’re mostly taken for granted and seldom rise to a high mark in people’s minds. In fact, because people in our society have been trained to pay most attention to the “parts” of their system rather than the way they interconnect, when problems arise, they will look for individuals or subgroups to blame, ignoring the structure. But because structure defines relationships, it is a key focal point when using our model. Leaders working with a group will therefore ask its members to compile all such components: the policies, job descriptions, etc. They may also request descriptions of relevant trends and best practices in the domain in which the group operates, since these can exert external pressure on it.

Assessment requires taking into account the diversity of perspectives involved, so a leader will talk with as many people as possible. Depending on the group’s size, the leader may have assistants; full representation means talking to at least one individual from each subgroup.

Determining Group Type. As with families, workplaces and community groups can be classified as type 1, 2, or 3, depending on how well or poorly they’re functioning. Here we are talking about type 3 groups, which are as imperiled as type 3 families. Determining this status would be part of the assessment.

Roles. In a workplace or other group, in addition to official roles tied to job descriptions, individuals take on informal roles such as bully, gossip, “suck-up,” manipulator, complainer or whiner, spy, etc. During the initial gathering of information, leaders can ask if there are people who assume such informal roles. That can be critically important information. The roles serve a purpose: for example, a bully will exert power over others and require their submission, and a gossip will use special information as a way to feel powerful and also as a weapon against other individuals. As in a family, these roles can typically be seen as ways to acquire the power to shut down change and maintain the homeostatic balance in the organization, in addition to personal benefits someone derives from their role. Understanding this helps dilute blame.

Identifying Behavioral Patterns. When helping a workplace or community group find a way out of their morass, leaders usually have a shorter time frame than therapists do when working with a family. After the initial conversation to gather information, the leaders pore over all the data, including descriptions of structural elements, to figure out patterns. In this process, attention to structure is critically important, especially since in most cases it’s overlooked by the people involved and it exerts a great deal of control.

When dealing with this type of group, leaders will look at the relationships among all the subgroups, asking questions like the following. Where does power reside, both officially and unofficially? How does communication flow among all the subgroups? And (if necessary), how does communication flow within key subgroups? How are resources allocated? Is that process fair? Does the structure facilitate cooperation or competition? Or, if both, where does it facilitate each? What external forces impinge on this organization, and how does that affect it? What are the pathways in which internal forces operate within the group? What are the “in-groups” and “out-groups,” and does this grouping track along lines of demographic differences like class or race? What are the reward systems, and are they fair? What are the characteristics of any subgroup that is particularly contentious? How does that subgroup relate to official and unofficial sites of power? These are sample questions. More may very well surface while exploring the information.

Agreeing to the Pattern’s Accuracy and Discovering Its Function. At this point in the process, it’s necessary to convene the larger group, whether it’s an entire company, workplace, or community group, or a representative group empowered to do this work. It’s here that the findings, the analysis and synthesis of the gathered information, is shared, along with suggestions of the identified salient patterns. One strategy for allowing this group to digest the information is to divide them into subgroups, preferably with people from different parts of the organization in each. Their task is to discuss the findings and decide whether they agree with them. After giving time for this discussion and hearing the results, if there is general agreement that the patterns are accurate, more subgroups could discuss how the pattern affects each area, or how to make changes to heal the situation (devise an action plan), or whatever seems needed. During this process, the leaders will emphasize that no individual or subgroup is to blame for what has been going wrong, and they will help the group understand how it functions as a system.

If the group disagrees with a pattern’s identity, they can be engaged in figuring out what it really is and then take part in follow-up discussions.

Moving Ahead Carefully After the Pattern Is Agreed Upon. Even when there is general agreement in a large group, there will be some dissidents, some of whom may be extremely angry. Care must be taken to hear their opinions and, where possible, include them to some extent in the final action plans. If they become identified as the new troublemakers, the process will have failed to a certain degree, especially if these people are angry enough to derail the plans.

Action plans must include strategies for getting buy-in from the official (and perhaps unofficial) sites of power especially, but also for sharing it and welcoming comments from the entire organization. Follow-up sessions may be arranged to consider incoming comments.

What is also necessary in these plans is a mechanism to assess the extent to which changes lead to improvements in the organization. Are the initial problems being healed? Are new problems being created? This mechanism may be an ongoing representative group in charge of implementation and regular reviews.

Interacting with the External World. As in a family, it is essential to consider that a changed workplace or community group may be subjected to pressures from its context to retreat into its old patterns of behavior. Leaders should help the group devise strategies to counteract these pressures. The context may include other areas of the whole organization, or other external partners with whom they deal regularly.

Example of Working with a Large Group

Many years ago, we worked with a large state university on the West Coast. It was during a peak time of racial upheaval, and those issues were polarizing the institution. The divide was between white students, along with some white faculty and staff, and Black and Hispanic students, faculty, and staff. The situation had grown serious, with aggressive behavior being shown toward some staff members, and threatening articles appearing in university newspapers. Outright violence had not yet taken place, but fear of it was pervasive. One person had been identified by many as a scapegoat for the problems. People from the two groups could no longer speak to one another, and administrators feared that the institution could lose its footing.

We were contacted by representatives who described the problem in those terms, but our thoughts immediately turned to the institution’s structure.

After talking with enough individuals about the situation while taking detailed notes, and after being given institutional documents relating to policies and other aspects of its structure and context, we were even more certain that structural issues were at play: diminishing and unreliable funding, new laws being implemented, etc.

Because this was a very large institution, we asked the administration to identify 200 people from different subgroups to participate in two days of a workshop separated by a week. We strongly stipulated that the participants must commit to attending both days, with no new people coming on the second day.

During the first day’s workshop, we asked the participants to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the institution and also what they thought were the primary issues confronting the university. A small group of people attended only a portion of this day and then left in anger. They did not return for the second session.

After that day, we organized the participants’ ideas into categories, highlighted the ways their structure shaped their behavior, and placed the situation in the context of similar problems and fears experienced by other institutions across the country.

During the second day, participants reconfronted the fears and ideas from the week before, but this time in the context of what was happening nationally and information about their structure. We asked them to form groups to brainstorm how to use the university’s strengths to heal its weaknesses.

The small, angry group that left early the first day went to the local press and shared confidential material and their biased opinions. National press picked this up. This is the type of thing we had feared and predicted, which is why we required everyone to commit to both days. While the action of this group presented a PR problem for the administration, it did not impede our work.

The participants identified many key issues during the morning of the second day, such as the fact that departments and other groups on campus had no mechanism to communicate with each other; the administration was cut off from the community; and the institution was determined to quash all conflict instead of opening up discussions and sharing information. Doing that is like locking people up in a burning building because you don’t want them to know there’s a fire.

The group began to understand that fragmentation was the critical pattern at their university. They understood that when groups lack knowledge about other groups’ perceptions and ideas, each group begins to see the others in a negative light and becomes suspicious of their motives and plans, especially in a community that is demographically diverse. They also understood how important it is for a university administration to share its knowledge of what is going on in the realm of higher education more broadly.

During the afternoon, again working in groups, the participants wrote an action plan to heal the structural problems. One key item was that a council should be formed to implement the action plan and monitor its effects. The administration accepted the action plan and carried out its suggestions.

Despite the actions of the breakaway group that went to the press, our workshops were a success. We received high marks from the participants, and the most accurate sign of our success is that the institution is thriving today.

Summing Up

In this article, we have outlined the approach we call The Fractal Model of Relationships, which is designed as a method for working with rigid, chaotic groups of all sizes. Important takeaways include the following:

• When a human system becomes chaotic enough, it becomes rigid, and at that point, it requires a specific kind of help to become unlocked.
• If that type of help is unavailable, the system will most likely continue to devolve until it ultimately dies out. Families will cease to produce children; organizations will fold.
• Rigidity is the most important pattern in all such systems.
• The Fractal Model of Relationships has proven successful in working with groups of all sizes, from families to large corporations. It succeeds because it is systemic and dynamic, adaptable to many different types of situations.

We hope we have spelled out the steps to follow in sufficient detail that practitioners of various types can use this model in their work. We provide other resources on our website, www.chaosinstitute.org, and we are available for consultation. Our website provides contact information. We wish everyone success when tackling these most difficult of situations.