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). 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., 2019; Helmrich et al., 2021), but infrastructure organizations interpret the operating environments and establish how infrastructure function within them (Chester et al., 2020a). 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, 1990; Chester et al., 2020a). 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).

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, 2015; Chester and Allenby, 2018; Markolf et al., 2020). 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., 2019, 2020a,b; Helmrich and Chester, 2020). 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., 1997). 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, 1991; Papachroni et al., 2016). 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., 2020b; Underwood et al., 2020), such as aging infrastructure and emerging technology (Arbesman, 2017; Chester and Allenby, 2018), terrorist attacks, cyber warfare (Ogie, 2017; Paté-Cornell et al., 2018), and pandemics (Carvalhaes et al., 2020).

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, 1979; Kooiman, 1993; Dubois and Fattore, 2009; Faguet, 2014; Chester et al., 2020a). 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, 2007; 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, 2007; 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, 1979; Adler, 2001; Zhou, 2013; Chaffin et al., 2014; Martela, 2019; Chester et al., 2020a) 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., 2020a). 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:

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.

Infrastructure institutions were established when external conditions were more stable than experienced today (Chester et al., 2020a), and it is critical to evaluate the agility of infrastructure institutions, organizations, and governance, in order to maintain services in increasing instability (Little, 2004; Salet et al., 2013; Omer et al., 2014; Chester and Allenby, 2018; Sovacool et al., 2018). However, engineered infrastructure resilience literature tends to prioritize physical infrastructure (Omer et al., 2014; Gim et al., 2019; Chester et al., 2020a), undermining the importance of decision-making toward emphasizing technological reliability (La Porte and Consolini, 2001; 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, 1983; Sovacool et al., 2018; Gim et al., 2019; Chester et al., 2020a). 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, 2014; Ansell and Lindvall, 2021). 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, 1977; Friedlander, 1995a,b, 1996; La Porte, 1996; Zhou, 2013; Chester et al., 2020a). 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, 2019). As infrastructure systems mature, they are encountering lock-in, an inability or resistance to change due to past decisions (Corvellec et al., 2013; Markolf et al., 2018; Chester and Allenby, 2019); 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, 1995a,b, 1996; Chester et al., 2020a). There are five components within this structure (Mintzberg, 1979):

The divisionalized form relies on quality control of standardized outputs rather than direct supervision to monitor the operating core (Mintzberg, 1979); in terms of infrastructure systems, the goal of a standardized output is providing individuals with the same access to reliable, high-quality services (e.g., potable water, reliable electricity, accessible, and safe travel) with socially-accepted controlled and uncontrolled failures (e.g., combined sewer overflows, rolling blackouts, traffic congestion during rush hours). A divisionalized organizational structure is most appropriate when organizations diversify, where the organization can manage additional products or address emerging needs through individual departments. This configuration permits some adaptive capacity since divisions can be added or subtracted within the organization as needed (Mintzberg, 1979; Zhou, 2013). However, departmentalization is not synonymous with governance decentralization, which is oftentimes promoted for infrastructure resilience (Helmrich et al., 2021). This is because the divisionalized form still maintains a vertical hierarchy—or chain of command—with little dispersal of decision-making power, since the divisions are closely managed by “headquarters.” If a division were unable to maintain services, the headquarters could intervene. Additional critiques of divisionalized form have surfaced, including the prominence of risk-adversity and uneven power dynamics that derail innovation and limit holistic thinking (Adler, 2001; Cleaver and Whaley, 2018; Martela, 2019; Chester et al., 2020a). Highlighting a failed example of such hierarchical oversight, Flint, Michigan had been experiencing an economic crisis that caused emergency managers (state-level employees, re: headquarters) to intervene. The appointed, unelected emergency managers were not familiar with local contexts but were tasked with autocratic decision-making across a wide array of city affairs to balance budgets (Pauli, 2019). To stabilize water expenditures and obtain partial authority of the resource, Flint's water supply would be shifted from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to Karegnondi Water Authority, both sourced from Lake Huron. DWSD announced they would be terminating service prior to the completion of the new pipeline project, and the Flint River was chosen as an interim water source despite concerns. Ultimately, financial constraints, political pressure, failure of bureaucracy, and environmental injustice led to a contamination of the city's drinking water (Butler et al., 2016; Masten et al., 2016; Pieper et al., 2017; Pauli, 2019). Ineffective leadership by the emergency managers restricted Flint's ability to respond to the emergent disturbance, accentuating how institutional lock-in limits adaptive capacity.

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, 2019). The establishment of formal governance may perpetuate lock-in through legacy rules and regulations, performance measures, and norms if the processes are inflexible. An adherence to exploitative behaviors helps organizations avoid overextending resources by ignoring noise in the environment; therefore, organizations must balance stability through exploitative behaviors and responsiveness with explorative behaviors while pursing ongoing change. Second, financing is crucial, and infrastructure growth has been constrained in the past by federal financial decisions such as ending large grant programs, changing funding priorities, and managing increasing debt (Miller, 2000; Deslatte and Swann, 2019). However, the impacts of financial stress are not always predictable in the processes of change or subsequent outcomes (Deslatte and Swann, 2019; Garcia et al., 2019). Third, and intertwined with funding opportunities, infrastructure systems are beholden to political and public interests, which may prioritize different outcomes or processes (Miller, 2000; Marshall and Alexandra, 2016; Garcia et al., 2019). The factors presented here highlight a few examples of institutional lock-in an organization faces, which keep infrastructure on one path and restrict their ability to change at pace with their environments. Public service organizations are encountering increasing pressures to meet ambiguous objectives with high levels of risk aversion and unclear metrics of success (Deslatte and Swann, 2019).

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, 1996; Chester and Allenby, 2018; Iwaniec et al., 2019). The study of ‘large technical systems' explores contestation, a state of non-concurrence within an organization where authority may be challenged (Sovacool et al., 2018). Contestation, oftentimes driven by drift and crisis, creates vulnerability through tension within an organization, leading to an opportunity to enhance adaptive capacity (Hughes, 1983; Summerton, 1994; Sovacool et al., 2018). A system operating in a falsely perceived environment of stability, rather than a complex one, experiences drift (Hacker et al., 2015). In drift, existing governance may undergo conversion, where leadership may be directly or indirectly challenged (e.g., strategic apex reevaluating organizational goals or operating core increasing precautions, respectively) in response to evolving conditions (Streeck and Thelen, 2005; Hacker et al., 2015; Sovacool et al., 2018). The divisionalized form prevalent in infrastructure organizational structures creates fragmented responses when addressing external complexity. Conversely, a system operating in a chaotic environment may encounter crisis, a rapid and/or publicized transition of network and/or leadership such as seen with extreme weather events. This transition may or may not be intentional (Sovacool et al., 2018; Iwaniec et al., 2019). These instances of instability—stresses driving drift or shocks initiating crisis—may lead to repositioning and survival (Geels and Schot, 2007; Sovacool et al., 2018) or decoupling and failure (Chester and Allenby, 2018; Chester et al., 2019). The integrative leadership framework proposed identifies three thrusts (collaboration, learning, and leadership) to address the tension of navigating through periods of stability and instability. The remainder of this section applies the framework to infrastructure systems in a broad context. Further contextualizing leadership capabilities to specific infrastructure organizations is a critical endeavor toward addressing resilience in infrastructure institutions, which will ideally lead to more resilient infrastructure networks.

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, 2000; Edwards, 2017; Saha and Ibrahima, 2020). In other words, the goods and services that infrastructure provide are intended to be accessible to everyone, and most of the time, the government will oversee the development and management of the systems. Water and transportation sectors provide conventional examples, but even the power sector, while often privately-owned (e.g., renewable energy), must abide by regulations to ensure the organization keeps public interest (e.g., social inclusion, sustainability Osborne and Brown, 2005) at the forefront of their mission. Public service organizations face higher pressures from political environments than private organizations, making this a fundamental tension to their operation (Osborne and Brown, 2005). Infrastructure systems experience significantly less pressure to change due to their natural monopoly model (i.e., lack of competition), which partially results from governmental oversight, economies of scale, and the challenge of pricing the value of public services (Miller, 2000). This drift can make infrastructure systems more prone to indulge in exploitative behaviors. Further, the high pressure to maintain services combined with a lack of resources and/or ability to experiment (Miller, 2000; Osborne and Brown, 2005), suppresses explorative behaviors.

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., 2005; Biggs et al., 2012; Park et al., 2013; Chaffin et al., 2014; Deslatte and Swann, 2019; Gim et al., 2019). Infrastructure organizations collaborate with numerous diverse stakeholders, including other infrastructure managers within their sector, infrastructure managers of other sectors, state and federal agencies, private industries, academic institutions, non-profits (Rashman et al., 2009; Muñoz-Erickson, 2014; Gim et al., 2019). These stakeholders are identified based on their relevant knowledge and investment in the issue at hand, indicating that collaborators should change to address different disturbances (Weber and Khademian, 2008; Head and Alford, 2013). These relationships may be interconnected, dependent, or interdependent between individuals of varying authority or entire organizations (Weber and Khademian, 2008; Muñoz-Erickson, 2014). Resilience theories in SES encourage collaboration through polycentricity, or governance through decentralization of power (Folke et al., 2005; Biggs et al., 2012; Chaffin et al., 2014). Social-ecological systems theory is valuable in the framing of infrastructure resilience (Markolf et al., 2018; Helmrich et al., 2021). Further, relationships may be formal or informal. Informal relationships are widely prevalent in infrastructure projects, and they create mutual dependencies and trust amongst personnel (van Gestel et al., 2008; Rashman et al., 2009; Head and Alford, 2013). Collaboration, therefore, highlights the importance of teams and teamwork within organizations. Addressing instability requires teams that are collectively oriented through shared mental models and leadership, mutually supportive, monitoring performance, communicative and trusting, and adaptive (Baker et al., 2006). The more increasingly non-linear relationships become, the more complex the system. While complexity is in part synonymous with unpredictability, complex organizations are necessary to help navigate increasingly complex environments (Folke et al., 2005; Boisot and Mckelvey, 2011; Head and Alford, 2013). When there are numerous collaborators sharing (and creating) knowledge, learning becomes increasingly fruitful (Rashman et al., 2009; Park et al., 2013).

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, 2020). Notably, most of these are not required for development. It is also important for infrastructure organizations to understand the institutional pressures that reinforce particular actions (e.g., vested interests, knowledge asymmetry, mental models, cultural perceptions). By learning of the forces influencing the system as well as who and who does not hold power over those forces, infrastructure managers may be able to identify trigger points where the cycle may be broken (Marshall and Alexandra, 2016). Ideally, this would allow infrastructure managers to encourage adaptation and transformation more frequently—rather than, primarily, after crisis events (Huitema and Meijerink, 2010; Marshall and Alexandra, 2016; Iwaniec et al., 2019). This highlights the need for “policy entrepreneurs”—individuals internal or external to the infrastructure system who develop new ideas, create a network of support, and identify windows of opportunity for implementation (Huitema and Meijerink, 2010). To further identify trigger points for change, or windows of opportunity, infrastructure managers should monitor evolving risks (embedded in both stresses and shocks, known and unknown) throughout the infrastructure life cycle (Park et al., 2013; Woods, 2015).

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., 2013). Leadership and organizational change literature acknowledges that unifying organizational mission and values (qualitative metrics) may guide leaders in their decision-making as well as establish motivation for learning (Little, 2004; Rashman et al., 2009; Taylor and Helfat, 2009; Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2017). In regards to infrastructure organizations, value is oftentimes placed on efficient use of public resources, transparency, and democratic legitimacy, but there are competing values of sustainability, economic development, and environmental quality (van Gestel et al., 2008; Rashman et al., 2009). Values can change, or have fluctuating priority, over the lifetime of infrastructure; they can also change based on political environments (van Gestel et al., 2008). This volatility highlights the importance of flexible leadership and a change-oriented organizational culture that embraces uncertainty (Folke et al., 2005; van Gestel et al., 2008; Rashman et al., 2009; Chester and Allenby, 2018). Risk analysis is an important tool that allows infrastructure managers to perceive opportunities and threats and contributes toward learning.

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, 2013; Chester et al., 2019; Yu et al., 2020). Infrastructure managers can promote experimentation by investing in research and development, which requires an organizational culture shift and reallocation of resources (La Porte and Consolini, 1991; Chester et al., 2019, 2020a; Gilrein et al., 2019). Errors can be embraced as tools for learning and decision-making within infrastructure systems, as long as managers are communicative and transparent with stakeholders and the surrounding community about the experimentation (La Porte and Consolini, 1991; La Porte, 1996). Experimentation—typically defined as small and deliberate changes to infrastructure technologies—requires “learning-focused management approaches” and a degree of failure acceptance from infrastructure organizations, financers and insurers, and the public (Biggs et al., 2012; Chester et al., 2019; Deslatte and Swann, 2019; Yu et al., 2020). Safe-to-fail infrastructure provides an opportunity to embrace experimentation, with the approach accounting for various types of failure (social, ecological, technological) during the design process (Park et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2019; Yu et al., 2020). The risks are then prioritized to minimize harm, and stakeholders are educated on expected failure pathways and the potential of unexpected failures (Kim et al., 2019). Another approached proposed in SES literature is adaptive governance, where the interactions across multiple levels of power (individual to organization to institution) act collectively toward achieving a desired state (Folke et al., 2005; Chaffin et al., 2014). The choice of state can be revisited to ensure the system is responding to emerging conditions (Chaffin et al., 2014; Cleaver and Whaley, 2018). Working across social, ecological, and technological dimensions highlights the advantage of collaboration in experimentation (Garud et al., 2011; Head and Alford, 2013; Gilrein et al., 2019); the boundary spanning, presented in both of these approaches, challenges infrastructure organizations to invest in products and services that are tangentially related to their mission (e.g., a transportation department funding research on roadside photovoltaics Aupperlee, 2018; Clines, 2018; Gilrein et al., 2019). Ideally, learning leads to sustained innovation, where value-adds are continuously identified and incorporated into the organization's formal governance (Garud et al., 2011). Innovation challenges the formal governance (i.e., bureaucratic nature) of public service organizations (Newell et al., 2003; Osborne and Brown, 2005; Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018).

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, 2007; Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018). Meanwhile, informal governance consists of implicit norms based on relationships and trust; informal governance presents high entry barriers due to the contextualized nature (Boesen, 2007; Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018). Infrastructure leadership is not currently established in a manner that is favorable toward advancing resilience within its organizations. Specifically, divisionalized form restricts the ability of personnel to collaborate and learn due to overemphasis on exploitative behaviors (Rashman et al., 2009; Zhou, 2013; Chester et al., 2021). Upon review of the five components of divisionalized form (operating core, strategic apex, middle line, technostructure, and staff), each component description exemplifies an exploitative behavior. No position is explicitly responsible for exploratory initiatives, and only the strategic apex holds explorative power with the ability to add and remove divisions (Mintzberg, 1979). Literature on public service and infrastructure organizations identifies organizational decentralization as a tool to promote collaboration, learning, and, importantly, adaptability for resilience (Finger and Brand, 1999; Rashman et al., 2009; Head and Alford, 2013; Zhou, 2013; Chester et al., 2020a).

Decentralized organizations are capable of meeting complexity with complexity because they encourage non-linear relationships which emerge unpredictable endeavors (Lichtenstein and Ashmos Plowman, 2009; Boisot and Mckelvey, 2011). Decentralized organizational structures emphasize the significance of informal relationships. It is crucial that personnel are included in the “process of change” (i.e., a bottom-up approach) as their commitment can increase the success of infrastructure repositioning (Perry and Ingraham, 1990; Osborne and Brown, 2005), highlighting another key point: infrastructure organizations will need to continuously reposition to adjust to changing environments (Siggelkow and Levinthal, 2003; Head and Alford, 2013). Yet, there is a tradeoff. Organizations must also eliminate noise from decision-making to avoid overextending resources. Recalling temporary decentralization, this approach to governance may provide guidance, particularly within increasingly distributed infrastructure networks which are characterized by networks with coupled producer and consumer relationships that lead to coordinated responses (Helmrich et al., 2021). This configuration has the potential to respond with more variety than centralized systems, while utilizing beneficial qualities of each. For instance, emergency response protocols will allow infrastructure managers to make more autonomous decisions during disasters. For example, a water treatment plant operator prevented a cyberattack where aggressors were attempting to tamper with sodium hydroxide concentrations (Chappell, 2021). This does, notably, add complexity to the governance system (La Porte and Consolini, 1991; Boisot and Mckelvey, 2011). Despite this, fluidity in organizational structure has been advocated as a tool within high reliability organizations, as well as resilient to meet demands in periods of stability and instability (Grabowski and Roberts, 2019).

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, 2006; Rashman et al., 2009); however, the need to provide specific services may cause risk adversity and an avoidance of failure, restricting flexibility and innovation (Newman and Chaharbaghi, 2000; Rashman et al., 2009). Infrastructure systems must change at pace with the environments in which they operate (Hollnagel et al., 2006). Unintentional and reductionistic approaches toward flexible leadership will not ensure reliable infrastructure services into the future (Lemer, 1996; Chester and Allenby, 2018; Iwaniec et al., 2019). Operational and strategic planning of resilient infrastructure must confront the influence of formal and informal governance, and they must be inclusive when considering stakeholders who hold power over infrastructure networks. For instance, referring back to distributed systems, this configuration has created space for external stakeholders to exert unregulated authority over infrastructure. Individuals are routed through transportation networks via navigation applications hosted by Google, Waze, Apple, etc. These rerouting options, while providing real-time alternatives (re: flexibility and agility), channel vehicles through roads that were potentially not designed for high levels of traffic (e.g., shortcuts through residential neighborhoods). 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. The integrative leadership framework highlights opportunities and challenges within infrastructure organizations and related stakeholders for more intentional fostering of collaboration and explorative behaviors while providing insights to how an organization may invest in its formal and informal governance to produce enabling leaders and institutional resilience.

To increase capacity for explorative behaviors in infrastructure organizations, there needs to be a cultural shift from exploitative behaviors (Chester et al., 2020a). It is clear that organizations need to change, and there several capabilities that support longevity in instable environments. The challenge is identifying pathways to transition organizations between exploitative and explorative behaviors, as seen with enabling leadership. These pathways must be dynamic to navigate future uncertainty. Infrastructure managers must realize the “change” in organizational change will never be complete, meaning that all decisions and projects will be revisited. This acknowledgment is crucial to avoid inaction attributed to uncertainty, a topic readily explored in the field of deep uncertainty (Courtney et al., 1997; Walker et al., 2013). Instead, infrastructure managers, organizations, and institutions must learn to lead through the flux of instability. The proposed integrative leadership framework provides insight on leadership capabilities that organizations can invest in now to begin this transition (i.e., adaptation). Infrastructure organizations will also need to undergo transformational change to avoid path dependencies and reverting to a baseline of exploitative behavior. There are tools to help organizations address complexity and deep uncertainty such as horizon scanning and scenario planning. Infrastructure organizations may also find guidance from high reliability organizations, which promote strategies to minimize failures: learning, decentralization of power, incentivizing employee behavior, functional redundancy, and balancing tradeoffs of reliability and efficiency (Roberts, 1990; Roberts and Bea, 2001). Infrastructure organizations will need to educate and empower their personnel by creating environments in which their employees can partake in explorative behaviors. The environments in which infrastructure operate are changing rapidly. Technologies surrounding infrastructure are rapidly changing. Infrastructure organizations and institutions must also be able to respond rapidly change to advance infrastructure resilience.

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., 2006; Pelling et al., 2015; Woods, 2015). It is essential that infrastructure organizations are able to adjust at pace with the changes of the environments in which they operate (Hollnagel et al., 2006). The current institutional practices surrounding infrastructure (e.g., lack of competition, risk-adversity) do not place pressure on infrastructure systems to change, but organizations must adjust to avoid becoming obsolete. The integrative leadership framework presented demonstrates an immediately applicable deployment of leadership capabilities that emerge enabling leadership; however, in alignment with (Uhl-Bien and Marion, 2009), organizational and institutional transformations still need to occur to ensure longevity. In order to enhance resilience, organizations must acknowledge they are operating in complex—rather than complicated—environments so that they may properly assess the tradeoffs for transitioning their leadership structures. Therefore, the takeaway should not be that investment in leadership capabilities will independently create resilient infrastructure organizations, but that they may provide a pathway toward retooling institutions to operate effectively in flux between states of stability and instability.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

This work was in part supported by two grants, the United States National Science Foundation SRN-1444755 and GCR-1934933.

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.

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.