Abstract
Leadership is a critical component in approaching infrastructure resilience. Leadership, the formal and informal governance within an organization, drives an infrastructure system's ability to respond to changing circumstances. Due to the instability of the Anthropocene, infrastructure managers (individuals who design, build, maintain, and decommission infrastructure) can no longer rely on assumptions of stationarity, but instead that shifts are occurring at a faster rate than institutions and infrastructure organizations are adapting. Leadership and organizational change literature provide considerable insights into the ability of organizations to navigate uncertainty and complexity, and infrastructure organizations may be able to learn from this knowledge to avoid obsolescence. Therefore, this article asks: what leadership capabilities do infrastructure organizations need to readily respond to stability and instability? An integrative leadership framework is proposed, exploring capabilities of collaboration, perception and exploration toward learning, and flexible informal and formal governance leveraged by leadership. These capabilities are driven by underlying tensions (e.g., climate change, emerging technologies) and managed through enabling leadership, a set of processes for pivoting between stability and instability. The framework is then applied to infrastructure organizations. Lack of market competition may make infrastructure organizations more open to collaboration and, therefore, learning. However, the need to provide specific services may cause risk adversity and an avoidance of failure, restricting flexibility and innovation. It is critical for infrastructure organizations to identify their strengths and weaknesses so they may develop an approach to change at pace with their external environments.
Highlights
Shifts in the environment driven by increasing complexity and uncertainty, are occurring at a faster rate than infrastructure systems are adapting (Folke et al, 2005; Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2017, 2018; Chester and Allenby, 2018; Helmrich and Chester, 2020)
Four themes and four sub-themes were selected for detailed discussion of leadership capabilities and the creation of an integrative leadership framework illustrated through a thematic map, as explored in the following subsections
Network distribution is leading to disjointed governance of infrastructure systems when authority is not explicitly considered in the design consequences or the stakeholders are not operating in coordination
Summary
Shifts in the environment driven by increasing complexity and uncertainty, are occurring at a faster rate than infrastructure systems are adapting (Folke et al, 2005; Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2017, 2018; Chester and Allenby, 2018; Helmrich and Chester, 2020). At the dawn of the Anthropocene social, ecological, and technological conditions have seen rapid growth and subsequent massive disruptions to Earth systems, indicating a new era founded in increasing instability (Steffen et al, 2015). This is exhibited in the relationships between built infrastructure and changing climatic conditions, where built infrastructure are deteriorating, and even failing, sooner than expected (Burillo et al, 2017; Underwood et al, 2017; Ayyub, 2018; Bondank et al, 2018; Nasr et al, 2019)
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