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Business News/ Companies / Build bridges for infrastructure
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Build bridges for infrastructure

To create the conditions that support innovation, leaders need to build connections across companies, industries and sectors

Photo: Port of Miami TunnelPremium
Photo: Port of Miami Tunnel

There is one best way to get big projects done. It has nothing to do with the technical side, and everything to do with people and relationships. Systemic problems that affect everyone, but are beyond the ability of any one person to solve require collaboration skills. To renew and reinvent our aging transportation infrastructure, we must turn our attention to coalition-building. Classic leadership lessons apply.

To create the conditions that support innovation, leaders need to build connections across companies, industries and sectors.

Developing and deploying new technology requires building a supportive ecosystem surrounding it. Sales of electric cars are limited without batteries and charging stations, but how much of this could one entrepreneur, even billionaire Elon Musk of Tesla, fund and disseminate himself?

Consider new software for cars. Over a billion cars currently are on the road worldwide and a billion mobile devices use Android software, but these converging means of transportation and communication are barely connected. Enter a coalition. The Open Automotive Alliance started in January 2014 with Google and General Motors as founding members; other technology companies and auto competitors soon joined. The goal is to create a common platform, “an open ecosystem for the open road", the alliance website proclaims. With a similar goal, the US Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center constructed a business-government-education coalition, bringing in the Michigan DOT, eight major auto makers to work, and University of Michigan researchers for a pilot project on adding sensors and network connections to improve auto safety.

These coalitions should be broad and inclusive. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), a system that gets buses moving faster through city streets on platforms separated from cars, is familiar to residents of Paris, Beijing, Mexico City and Sao Paulo, but just beginning to be constructed in American cities. To get BRT under way in Chicago involved work across city departments, which would have to coordinate fixing water pipes with changing road surfaces, and levels of government, which would coordinate funding. It involved signing up over 30 large employers, civic organizations, and specialized labour and ethnic organizations. It involved countless listening sessions in neighbourhoods to hear objections. The attention to coalition-building paid off; dissenters were eventually drowned out by the overwhelming support.

Projects that officials and business leaders desire can be stymied by a lack of grass-roots support—one explanation for why it took 20 years for Houston to get a light-rail transit system after the initial plan got a yes vote. Those left out of that early process delayed the project for years.

It’s only by joining forces across sectors that projects will get the necessary resources and expertise. Public-private partnerships, or PPPs, are often invoked as a solution to America’s infrastructure woes. In the P3 model, private financing fills holes in public budgets, and profit-oriented engineers and builders find efficiencies while government officials ensure that the public is well served.

This model produced a big success in Miami. The Port of Miami Tunnel was completed roughly on time and under budget, thanks to the Miami-Dade County’s financing partner Meridiam, and the group it formed to build and operate the tunnel. The tunnel connects Miami’s island-bound port with the interstate and solves several problems at once, including increasing port capacity in anticipation of larger ships from the Panama Canal expansion and rerouting trucks away from downtown. Since it opened in July 2014, 80% of cargo trucks have left downtown, freeing city streets from a major source of congestion and enabling residential development. Engineering innovations lowered the cost. Sensors ensure state-of-the-art safety.

Years of coalition-building finally secured approval for the initially controversial tunnel. Once approved as a PPP, the private company leaders engaged the broader public. They reached out to workers via job fairs, involved the Spanish-speaking community, and gave seminars to teach local firms how to win contracts. The company sponsored a school programme for National Engineering Week and a tunnel exhibit for the neighbouring Miami Children’s Museum. Girl Scout troops competed to name the enormous tunnel-boring machine; the winner was Harriet, after Harriet Tubman of Underground Railroad fame.

It takes more than a village to raise an infrastructure project.

Isolated industry villages must turn into cross-sector, multi-stakeholder coalitions. Successful coalition-building combines a common goal with something for everybody. Under a big tent, there can be room for special interests to get something they care about—jobs, neighbourhood improvements, the first crack at a technology innovation, or a favourable environment for doing business.

Of course, it is not enough to convene people only once to ask for their support, nor can leaders assume that just because something has been said, it has been heard and agreed to. Frequent communication and reminders of the vision keep coalition members engaged throughout often-arduous processes with numerous ups and downs. When projects accomplish many things at once (like the Miami tunnel did), coalition-building is easier.

Renewing and reinventing infrastructure involves construction of the physical kind, but often the most important construction is human: constructing coalitions of stakeholders to envision, support and manage projects from inception to completion.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s latest book is MOVE: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead. She is a professor at Harvard Business School, and chair and director of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative.

©2015 Harvard Business Review. All rights reserved.

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Published: 23 Sep 2015, 12:44 AM IST
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