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.
Introduction
Shifts in the environment driven by increasing complexity and uncertainty, are occurring at a faster rate than infrastructure systems are adapting (Folke et al., ; Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2017, 2018; Chester and Allenby, ; Helmrich and Chester, ). Leadership—comprised of formal and informal governance—and physical networks drive an infrastructure system's ability to respond to changing circumstances. The role of institutions is frequently overlooked in infrastructure practice and theory (Gim et al., ; Helmrich et al., ), but infrastructure organizations interpret the operating environments and establish how infrastructure function within them (Chester et al., ). Neglecting infrastructure institutions and their organizations places infrastructure at risk of obsolescence in the Anthropocene. Institutions are defined here as knowledge, rules, and norms created by society that influence infrastructure systems, while organizations are structured collections of people working toward a common goal (e.g., accessible, potable water within the drinking water sector) (North, ; Chester et al., ). 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., ; Underwood et al., 2017; Ayyub, ; Bondank et al., ; Nasr et al., ).
In the Anthropocene, infrastructure managers (i.e., individuals who design, build, maintain, and decommission infrastructure) can no longer rely on relatively stationary conditions, i.e., the assumption that the past may predict the future, which has been the foundational model of modern infrastructure (Olsen, ; Chester and Allenby, ; Markolf et al., ). For instance, it is not unreasonable to expect gradual climate change to become increasingly significant, and if this transition were to happen rapidly, infrastructure institutions would need to respond within a reasonable timeframe and at a scale of uncertainty that is largely unfamiliar, marking a radical change in how they operate (Wilbanks and Fernandez, 2014; Chester et al., , ,; Helmrich and Chester, ). Similar challenges have persisted beyond infrastructure management; the technology sector experiences a competitive environment with fast-paced technology evolution and demand changes that leads to frequent destabilization, highlighted by the stories of Xerox (Teece, 2007; Uhl-Bien and Marion, 2009) and Kodak (Courtney et al., ). The tensions between exploitation (i.e., efficiency within the status quo) and exploration (i.e., pursuing innovations and associated risks) of these technological organizations parallel tensions experienced by infrastructure managers navigating efficiency and adaptation for resilience (March, ; Papachroni et al., ). The consequences of designing infrastructure systems for efficiency are becoming increasingly evident with failures across a range of disturbances even beyond climate change (Chester et al., ; Underwood et al., 2020), such as aging infrastructure and emerging technology (Arbesman, ; Chester and Allenby, ), terrorist attacks, cyber warfare (Ogie, ; Paté-Cornell et al., ), and pandemics (Carvalhaes et al., ).
Leadership within infrastructure organizations must be able to react quickly and effectively to changing environments to maintain longevity, making it imperative to study and question how infrastructure are governed today relative to disturbances. While infrastructure literature is in the nascent stages of studying governance in the context of resilience, leadership, and organizational change literature has developed considerable insights around governance in the context of uncertainty and complexity. Governance is a system of rules, values, and norms that balances the responsibility, authority, and power of management and individuals to establish a cooperative behavior (Mintzberg, ; Kooiman, ; Dubois and Fattore, ; Faguet, ; Chester et al., ). Formal governance (i.e., rule-based) and informal governance (i.e., relation-based) provide opportunities and challenges toward institutional resilience. Commonly, formal governance is characterized by power granted through hierarchical mechanisms and/or formal rules that regulate the autonomy of individuals within an organization (Boesen, ; Uhl-Bien and Marion, 2009). Organizational structures and contractual agreements exemplify hierarchical mechanisms, and these governance tools create an expectation of an individual's role within the organization. Concurrently, whether in tension or congruence, informal governance manifests within organizations, where power is established through social relationships amongst individuals through mutual trust, appreciation, and respect (Boesen, ; Uhl-Bien and Marion, 2009). In terms of formal governance, many infrastructure organizations rely heavily on hierarchical bureaucracies, this vertical dispersion of power (e.g., direct oversight) has managed conditions of stability with some adaptive capacity; however, this organizational structure appears problematic moving forward, ultimately restricting flexibility by perpetuating standardization, reducing collaboration, and diminishing the value of exploration (Mintzberg, ; Adler, ; Zhou, 2013; Chaffin et al., ; Martela, ; Chester et al., ) as explored in the following section.
Infrastructure organizations will need to better manage cooperative pursuits of efficiency and adaptation across periods of stability and instability. The ability of leaders to navigate the complexity between exploitation and exploration is referred to as “enabling leadership” (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007; Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2017, 2018), which may be embedded in existing governance systems through acknowledging and bridging conflict as well as promoting and connecting innovation within the existing processes (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018). In order to achieve this, infrastructure organizations must assess and modify their processes of leadership when reconciling disturbances (Chester et al., ). It has been difficult to replicate resilient organizations because, oftentimes, organizations that display adaptive capacity are not fully aware of what behaviors enabled them to do so (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018). As such, this article addresses:
1) What are the leadership capabilities that organizations need to respond to rapidly changing conditions (i.e., shifts between stability and instability)?
2) How do the identified leadership capabilities translate to infrastructure systems?
The work is structured as follows. In Section Governance of Infrastructure Systems, infrastructure system governance is explored in relation to increasingly complex environments. In Section Leadership Capabilities for Navigating Stability and Instability, leadership and organizational change literature are synthesized into an integrative leadership framework. This framework is then applied in to Infrastructure Section Contextualization of Leadership Capabilities to infrastructure and public service organizations to describe the importance of these leadership capabilities in infrastructure practice. Section Discussion discusses the process of adjusting leadership so that organizations may respond at pace to emerging disturbances from a US-centric lens, and Section Conclusion concludes with a brief summary.
Governance of Infrastructure Systems
Infrastructure institutions were established when external conditions were more stable than experienced today (Chester et al., ), and it is critical to evaluate the agility of infrastructure institutions, organizations, and governance, in order to maintain services in increasing instability (Little, ; Salet et al., 2013; Omer et al., ; Chester and Allenby, ; Sovacool et al., 2018). However, engineered infrastructure resilience literature tends to prioritize physical infrastructure (Omer et al., ; Gim et al., ; Chester et al., ), undermining the importance of decision-making toward emphasizing technological reliability (La Porte and Consolini, ; Schulman and Roe, 2016). This is further problematic since infrastructure systems are sociotechnical systems, and thus both the social (e.g., governance) and technological components need to operate, adapt, and transform in conjunction—or at least in parallel—to navigate the enterprise in the face of change (Hughes, ; Sovacool et al., 2018; Gim et al., ; Chester et al., ). Public infrastructure systems were organized as centralized structures because movements toward industrialization and urbanization during the nineteenth and twentieth century provided an opportunity to utilize economies of scale to meet increasing demand for services (Faguet, ; Ansell and Lindvall, ). A hierarchical and departmentalized organizational structure was established across infrastructure systems to simplify complicated problems by capitalizing on specialized expertise, while maintaining cost-effective coordination through a chain of command (Chandler, ; Friedlander, ,, ; La Porte, ; Zhou, 2013; Chester et al., ). These organizations are expected to maintain services without failure as the environments in which they operate become increasingly complex—a dynamic explored in high reliability organizations (Roberts, 1990; Grabowski and Roberts, ). As infrastructure systems mature, they are encountering lock-in, an inability or resistance to change due to past decisions (Corvellec et al., ; Markolf et al., ; Chester and Allenby, ); lock-in partially occurs because infrastructure systems become highly specialized to their environments.
Formal governance influences an organization's ability (or inability) to adapt by creating rules that control roles, responsibilities, and relationships (re: informal governance) amongst employees. This structure determines who holds decision-making power and the process of workflow for an organization. While few studies have classified organizational structures of infrastructure systems, the divisionalized form (Figure 1) is seemingly prevalent (Friedlander, ,, ; Chester et al., ). There are five components within this structure (Mintzberg, ):
Figure 1
Operating Core—employees performing the routine tasks.
Strategic Apex—employees aligning the organization toward a mission.
Middle Line—employees navigating communications between the operating core and strategic apex.
Technostructure—employees standardizing workflows.
Staff—employees providing indirect services.
The divisionalized form relies on quality control of standardized outputs rather than direct supervision to monitor the operating core (Mintzberg,
Institutional lock-in contributes to the slow pace of change seen within infrastructure systems. First, there are consistent processes of change within organizations that occur within formal and informal governance, but lack of support for explorative behaviors can make it difficult for ongoing change to establish itself (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Deslatte and Swann,
Leadership Capabilities for Navigating Stability and Instability
Methods
Leadership practices rooted in the past are not compatible with emerging volatile environments (Marion and Uhl-Bien,
Collaborating: Creating a Variety of Knowledge Through Formal and Informal Networking
Organizations operating in complexity must develop a variety of knowledge to respond to changes in the environment. Collaboration creates a space for a heterogeneous organizational culture, and opportunities for collaboration are increased when formal and informal relationship building (i.e., networking) are abundant (Teece, 2007; Havermans et al.,
Secondly, resilient organizations should encourage non-linear and interdependent relationships to promote transdisciplinary teamwork across all levels (Schneider, 2002; Lichtenstein and Ashmos Plowman,
Learning: Perceiving and Exploring the Environment to Generate Innovation
Learning is “both a product of knowledge and [the knowledge] source,” where knowledge is not only shared but created and stored (Daviter,
Leaders who are perceptive and explorative are in optimal positions to learn. Perceptive leaders are able to identify opportunities and challenges in advance of a disturbance and actively understand the implications and prepare a coordinated response (Teece, 2007; Jansen et al.,
Innovation occurs when efforts of perception and exploration present an opportunity for a value-add to the organization, and if innovation is successful, allows an organization to evolve. The integration of an innovation into an organization is risky as the concept must be sponsored and adopted within the organization—institutionally, and possibly physically—before there is a return on investment (Galbraith,
Leadership: Enhancing Adaptive Capacity Through Flexible Formal and Informal Governance
The environments in which an organization operate are dynamic; therefore, leadership must be flexible to new ideas, responsive to shifts, and embrace uncertainty. Formal governance within organizations oftentimes seeks to routinize tasks for efficiency, but this creates a vulnerable position in the Anthropocene (March,
Leadership capabilities for complexity emphasize the capabilities to shift between exploitative and explorative behaviors (Hooijberg,
Enabling Leadership: Navigating Conflict and Contestation of Drift and Crisis
Organizations can embrace the growing complexity and deep uncertainty of their external environments to leverage productive organizational change. An organization can embrace the potential of conflict, contestation, and controversy (i.e., tension) of complex systems to catalyze leadership capabilities including collaboration, learning, and flexibility toward creating enabling leadership (Lichtenstein and Ashmos Plowman,
Given the emphasis on exploitative practices within organizations writ large, and particularly in hierarchical organizational structures, leadership should focus on integrating adaptive behaviors at multiple scales such as at the person, team, and organization (Gibson and Birkinshaw,
Integrative Leadership Framework
The following integrative leadership framework (Figure 2) proposes capabilities that may prepare organizations to navigate periods of stability and instability. Tension is an underlying characteristic of complex systems and drives each of the presented capabilities. Tension can form from internal or external stress, where organizations may experience drift as they continue to operate in routines created for a different environment, or shocks, where an organization must act immediately to a crisis. Leadership must acknowledge tension as an opportunity of productivity rather than an obstacle. Enabling leadership emerges from tension and the identified leadership capabilities, but also provides a reinforcing feedback that continues to strengthen an organization's ability to respond to stability and instability across scales (e.g., operating core to the strategic apex, individuals to the organization) (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2017). It is crucial to acknowledge that leaders cannot control the outcomes but can merely guide an organization through tension, and leadership's influences may not always be predictable (Marion and Uhl-Bien,
Figure 2

Integrative Leadership Framework: Organizations face tension from stresses and shocks and must be able to respond quickly and effectively to the changing dynamics (i.e., enabling leadership). The purple circles represent emerging capabilities in leadership and organizational change literature, with the fine print words indicating characteristics of the capability. The darkening arrows indicate growing momentum toward a virtuous cycle, where all arrows would eventually be saturated. Notably, it is the efforts of integrating all the themes that enables conflict navigation and, ultimately, resilience.
Enabling leadership may also be fostered through the identified capabilities, providing organizations a degree of permanence not found when enabling leadership is driven by tension. Starting with collaboration, this leadership capability identifies the individuals in the working environment and how they interact. The inclusion of diverse stakeholders within and beyond the organization increases the number of opportunities and threats an organization will be able to perceive. If relationships between these stakeholders are non-linear and interdependent, more individuals have the opportunity to become leaders (re: flexible informal governance), further enhancing the ability of an organization to learn. This bottom-up approach also demonstrates the interdependence of informal and formal governance. This interdependence has not always been recognized, but it is critical in developing an organization's leadership (Weber and Khademian, 2008; Uhl-Bien and Marion, 2009). The formal governance structure must be supportive of emergent leaders, including personnel not necessarily assigned a leadership role. Leadership should nurture a culture of learning—including perception and exploration capabilities—to enable innovation. Once an opportunity is identified, an innovation still has a tumultuous path toward implementation within the formal governance structures. Innovation provides impetus for organizations to adapt. As discussed, generally organizations are prone to follow a routine and repositioning is a difficult and costly endeavor (Galbraith,
Contextualization of Leadership Capabilities to Infrastructure
Infrastructure managers must reevaluate the assumptions of the operating environment, acknowledge the internal and external complexity of infrastructure systems, and actively navigate between tensions of efficiency and resilience; else, infrastructure systems may become obdurate and, potentially obsolete (Lemer,
Leadership and organizational change literature revealed capabilities that boost longevity of organizations. While infrastructure systems exist in dynamic environments, they do not face the same pressures as the private organizations examined (Rashman et al., 2009). Instead, infrastructure systems exist as public service organizations providing services that need to meet public expectations (Rashman et al., 2009), with approximately 85% of (non-military) infrastructure assets being managed at a state or local level (Miller,
Collaboration, the first thrust in the integrative leadership framework, is a skill practiced by infrastructure organizations (e.g., co-production, benchmarking, private-public partnerships) and has been recognized as a critical tool for resilience in infrastructure and social-ecological systems (SES) literature (Folke et al.,
Learning, the second major thrust of the integrative leadership framework, requires infrastructure managers to gather new knowledge from theory and practice and integrate the knowledge into practice. Learning, within public service organizations, has been defined by Rashman et al. as “a process of individual and shared thought and action, involving cognitive, social, behavioral, and technical elements” (2009). They further identify four organizational learning processes: individual perspective, shared understanding, diffusion, and embedding in organization. Learning requires a level of risk-taking to identify opportunities and threats (i.e., perception) and motivate exploration and experimentation. Infrastructure managers must assess risk of potential developments. There are a number of decision-making methods available to infrastructure managers: conventional (e.g., cost-benefit analysis, cost effectiveness analysis, risk assessment), environmental (e.g., life cycle analysis, environmental impact assessment), social (e.g., social impact assessment), deep uncertainty (e.g., real option analysis, robust decision making, info-gap analysis, adaptation pathways) (Helmrich and Chester,
Another challenge of risk analysis is the integration of qualitative knowledge into decision-making processes, as infrastructure assessments tend to focus on quantitative metrics (Park et al.,
When learning reveals a potential value-add for an organization, the opportunity to innovate arises; however, infrastructure systems struggle to deviate from the status quo (i.e., lock-in) and experiment with new ideas (Head and Alford,
Leadership, the final major thrust of the integrative leadership framework, is comprised of formal and informal governance, both of which hold valuable roles in agile infrastructure organizations. To reiterate, formal governance is defined as structured, explicit rules and regulations that require ample governance to circulate and enforce, but maintain low barriers to entry due to standardization (Boesen,
Decentralized organizations are capable of meeting complexity with complexity because they encourage non-linear relationships which emerge unpredictable endeavors (Lichtenstein and Ashmos Plowman,
Discussion
Infrastructure institutions within the United States are often considered too critical to fail; however, this framing is preventing organizations from adapting and transforming to meet the complexity and deep uncertainty of the Anthropocene. While the leadership and organizational change literature assessed largely focused on private organizations, the emergent leadership capabilities have shown applicability and alignment with infrastructure. The lack of market competition may make public service organizations more open to collaboration and, subsequently, collective learning (Hartley and Benington,
To increase capacity for explorative behaviors in infrastructure organizations, there needs to be a cultural shift from exploitative behaviors (Chester et al.,
Conclusion
The institutions that govern infrastructure—including their bureaucratic structures, leadership culture, administrative structure, rules, and norms—play a critical role in creating the capacities necessary to adapt and transform to known and unknown disturbances at pace with changing conditions (Hollnagel et al.,
Funding
This work was in part supported by two grants, the United States National Science Foundation SRN-1444755 and GCR-1934933.
Publisher's Note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Statements
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.
Author contributions
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.
Acknowledgments
This work is based on a dissertation chapter in Alternative Design Approaches for Advancing Infrastructure Resilience by Helmrich (
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Summary
Keywords
governance, leadership, complexity, infrastructure, resilience
Citation
Helmrich A and Chester M (2022) Navigating Exploitative and Explorative Leadership in Support of Infrastructure Resilience. Front. Sustain. Cities 4:791474. doi: 10.3389/frsc.2022.791474
Received
08 October 2021
Accepted
24 January 2022
Published
17 February 2022
Volume
4 - 2022
Edited by
Jonatan A. Lassa, Charles Darwin University, Australia
Reviewed by
Jason Alexandra, RMIT University, Australia; Rob DeLeo, Bentley University, United States
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*Correspondence: Alysha Helmrich ahelmric@asu.edu
This article was submitted to Governance and Cities, a section of the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities
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