Why we can't have nice things

Wishcasting Adaptive Challenges as Technical Challenges

I took a trip to New York City this week with my wife and with the three kids. We had dinner with our NYC family, saw Oh Mary!, were blown away by a couple of gallery shows (William Kentridge and Jack Whitten) and caught a late night show of Ladysmith Black Mambazo at the Blue Note Jazz Club. We took Amtrak and I did most of my writing for this blog on the 4-hour train ride there and back. It got me thinking…

What Do We Really Want?

I’d like to dig a little deeper into the discussion of aesthetics and ideologies of visions of the transportation future that I started last week. I think there’s an appetite on both the left and right for advancing technologies that transform the “real” world, technologies that tangibly close the gap between the present and an imagined future. This is not to dismiss the progress we have made over the past 20 years in areas like ridesharing, real time transit information, and electronic tolling systems. But as I argued in my last post, much of this progress is based on adaptations of information and communications technologies and lacks a degree of visibility. So why has progress been so slow in the “real” world? And, what is the progressive vision for our transportation future?

To start with the latter question, I’d argue that the general outlines of the progressive vision for transportation is pretty clear, although it hasn’t always been clearly communicated by political leaders. Generally speaking, progressives want to make our transportation safer, more accessible, and more sustainable by reducing our dependence on automobiles. Despite its aesthetic appeal to punk Gen X’ers like me the anarchist frankenbike parade is not the emblematic project of this progressive vision, rather it’s a national high speed rail network. Witness this viral tweet posted just a few days after the Biden Administration took office.

Five years and $1-trillion dollar infrastructure bill later and if anything this dream feels further away than ever. The chief culprit of course is the fiasco that is the California High Speed Rail Project, whose timeline for completion of the first segment between Bakersfield and Merced has dragged out into the 2030s and whose cost estimates have grown from $33 billion to $128 billion. There is no shortage of analyses of what has gone wrong with this project but it’s clear that the power of the collective imagination hasn’t translated into political will, funding, or institutional capacity to make those dreams a reality.

What this example makes clear to me is that our problems are not a matter of having insufficiently advanced technology. Japan has had high speed rail since the 1960s! China has built nearly 25,000 miles of high-speed rail in just the past two decades. Similarly you can’t fault Americans for being skeptical that transit might ever serve as a viable alternative to private automobile travel. Transit in the US is generally inconvenient, infrequent, unreliable, and aesthetically unappealing (just ask Secretary Duffy!) But a trip to Europe or Asia quickly demonstrates that it is entirely within the realm of human capability to build and run a convenient, clean, and reliable transit system.

William Gibson once observed that the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed. So why do US policy makers continually come back to innovation as the solution to our transportation woes?

The Challenge of Adapting Our Transportation System

In his work on Adaptive Leadership, Ron Heifetz argues that the most common leadership failure is to treat an adaptive challenge as if it were a technical challenge. A technical challenge is a challenge with known solutions that can be resolved through the application of authoritative expertise and through a system’s current structures and processes. An adaptive challenge on the other hand requires going beyond authoritative expertise to mobilize discovery, and change stakeholder’s priorities, beliefs, and habits.

The challenges we face in transportation today are primarily adaptive challenges. We are trying to adapt an existing system, institutions, and norms to meet the challenges of a changing world where climate change is accelerating, inequality is on the rise, and the costs of automobility to society have become increasingly clear.

So why do our leaders consistently gravitate toward technical solutions to clearly adaptive challenges? At root, I think it’s a form of wishful thinking. Technical solutions rely on authority and control. They promise to fix things without forcing us to change. Adaptive challenges on the other hand require sustained attention, persuasion, difficult conversations, and the acceptance of tradeoffs and the reality of loss.

In the U.S., where institutional trust is low and polarization is high, this creates a dangerous dynamic. We bypass the challenges of adaptive leadership in favor of magical thinking. We chase Jetsons-like futures instead of building bus lanes. We look to private actors for vision because our public agencies have been hollowed out. And when the public sector fails to deliver, we trust it even less.

One way to understand authoritarianism is an attempt to wish away the complexity and difficulty of adaptive challenges. Authoritarian regimes seek to bypass the slow participatory process required to address adaptive challenges by insisting that the challenge is purely technical and can only be solved through authority. Coordination is replaced with command. Legitimacy is replaced with force or spectacle.

In a complex society such as ours, the greatest challenges we face are adaptive. To address adaptive challenges we need adaptive leadership and adaptive organizations. We need leaders willing to invest time and political capital to sustain attention, negotiate tradeoffs, and persuade people and institutions to work together towards a shared vision. We need to invest in institutional capacity and we need to create institutions that have the independence and long-term vision to provide sustained leadership to address adaptive challenges.

While I hope to continue to discuss personal issues of transition in leadership. I also plan to spend time in subsequent posts providing some more constructive examples of what adaptive leadership in transportation might look like and suggest how we might build the adaptive capacity of institutions especially in the wake of the current administration’s torching of federal capacity.