Let Us Integrate Self-Organization and Stakeholders into the Development of Infrastructure Projects, Because We Need More Creativity and Satisfying Solutions

Abstract

AbstractDeveloping public infrastructure projects is a crucial but challenging process, as these projects face various, sometimes conflicting, stakeholder expectations. In order to find good solutions in this challenging environment, we argue, that on the one hand, stakeholders should be involved in the development of public infrastructure projects for increasing the likelihood of good solutions and stakeholder satisfaction. On the other hand, we need a lot of creativity for creating, shaping, and negotiating good solutions. By drawing upon our initial understanding of self-organization and upon the relevance of self-organization, e.g., regarding agile project management, we discussed whether it is worth examining the integration of self-organization in the development of public infrastructure projects with stakeholders. Based on factors that increase the likelihood of creative and good solutions as well as on definitions of self-organization, we concluded that self-organization can support the required creativity. Based on literature concerning self-organization and governance and coordination of self-organization, we discussed how to integrate self-organization into the development of public infrastructure projects, outlined two possible applications and shared suggestions for further research.KeywordsCreativityInfrastructure projectProject developmentSelf-organizationStakeholder integration