Dis-integration

29th March 2018
This is a core concept in AMBIT: Working with your NETWORKS (especially the practical aspects of Addressing Dis-integration) is one of the Core Features of AMBIT.

This is a video taken from a training for AMBIT Local Trainers in 2014:


There is another (earlier) Video introduction to disintegration if you want, too.

In any system which contains:
  • separate minds
  • different organisational constraints
  • different organisational goals
  • different theoretical models
  • different practical interventions
  • different levels of training and different professional groups
  • the possibility of misunderstandings...
...it is easy for tasks and arrangements that are developed out of the best of intentions to pull in opposite directions, or inadvertently to undermine each other.

AMBIT takes a position that only very rarely are these dis-integrations ever purposeful (it is very rare to think of any worker in any agency going to work one day and saying to him or herself "I am going to really work at disintegrating the care around my client Jonny today!") but that given the complexities of diaries, separate budgets, different institutional agendas, and diverse explanatory models it is quite impressive if such networks actually manage to coordinate themselves at all.

Re-shaping expectations

In this way, we suggest that teams and workers need to "re-callibrate" their expectations so that they expect disintegration, and then proactively intervene to reduce its impact upon client care - rather than expecting integrated care and then too often being subject to disappointment and despair when things "don't work out as they should have."

There are DOMAINS and LEVELS of dis-integration that explain this process in more depth.
There is guidance on Learning about Addressing Dis-integration to support the AMBIT training
Dis-integrativeProcesses and Dis-integratedInterventions are described, so as to support rapid identification and the designing of interventions to address them.
Mostly, these "interventions" are what we call "Connecting Conversations", and the Dis-integration grid is a tool for identifying these.

Sculpting Dis-integration

See Sculpting a network for more detail on this - one of many Training exercises in the manual.