OUR COMMON WATER DESTINY:
The Importance of Collaborative Leadership in
Building a Sustainable Water Future For All
By Elisa M. Speranza
EVERY DAY WE READ STORIES
about failure. Government agencies,
companies, nonprofits organizations,
even families, all are comprised of human
beings and therefore have inherent
strengths and weaknesses. But when we
see failures, we often jump to conclusions,
seeking to assign blame. Why did this
event happen? A failure of technology? A
lack of funding? Unenforced regulations?
Bad luck? Malevolence? While such
factors often play a role, the root cause
of disruptive events is often a failure
of leadership.
If there’s one factor that is the key to
a sustainable water future for all, it’s not
technology, money, regulations, work-force
demographics, or “big data.” It’s
collaborative leadership. The bad news
is that we’re all living with failed leader-ship
of the past—lack of foresight, greed,
corruption, parochialism, negligence and
sometimes just old-fashioned stupidi-ty.
As I reflect on more than 30 years of
working in the water business, I’ve seen
many of these factors at play, but the com-mon
thread is inadequate, short-sighted,
often cowardly leadership.
The good news is that there are many
great examples of communities taking
more collaborative approaches to man-aging
water. The City of Los Angeles
has been a leader in rethinking how we
humans live with water and how we can
leverage every drop across the water cy-cle
to benefit public health, the environ-ment,
and the economy. This ambitious
and historic effort to coordinate the work
of multiple city departments and commu-nity
stakeholders to achieve a sustainable
water management system requires col-laborative
leadership.
I’m sure the L.A process has been a
messy, as it’s been elsewhere, with mul-tiple
stakeholders and often competing
interests. But I’ve found that sometimes
the way to solve a complex problem is not
to cut it up into bite-size pieces, focusing
on one aspect at a time, but to make the
problem set larger, involving more peo-ple
40 SOURCE fall 2017
and creating a scenario in which the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts,
with more winners overall, and therefore
a broader constituency for the hard, ex-pensive,
potentially disruptive work to
be done.
This was true with the Boston Harbor
Project, one of this country’s greatest en-vironmental
success stories. We reversed
decades of pollution from partially treat-ed
sewage with a collaborative approach
(and $4 billion). The operational dynamic
on our Massachusetts Water Resources
Authority team was inclusive, transpar-ent,
collaborative leadership. We invited
environmental and civic advocates, busi-ness
leaders, impacted communities, lo-cal
officials and other stakeholders to the
table and tried our best to be honest with
them, even when the truth was not what
they wanted to hear.
The US Water Alliance’s 2016 One
Water Roadmap, outlines seven princi-ples
to help guide us as we think about a
sustainable water future for all and how
our approach to leadership can make a
difference. Each demands that a water
leader—at any level of his or her organi-zation—
step back and rethink whether he
or she is making decisions in a collabora-tive
manner. Here they are:
1. A mind-set that all water has value,
from the minute it falls from the sky
or bubbles up from the ground, to
when it’s discharged or (better yet)
reused,
2. A focus on achieving multiple
benefits with any water project,
3. A systems approach, recognizing
the integrated nature of water
management,
4. Watershed-scale thinking and
action, taking into account all the
various stakeholders who impact the
watershed,
5. Right-size solutions, including
decentralized approaches,
6. Partnerships for progress, bringing
public, private and non-profit
players
together, and
7. Inclusion and
engagement of all,
including a focus on vulnerable
populations and affordable water
service.
If this all sounds overwhelming,
here’s more good news: starting right
now, today, anyone, at any level, at any
point in their career can help change the
trajectory of these seemingly intractable
challenges. It’s about empathy, trust,
communication, long-term thinking, and
expanding the boundaries of how we
approach problem-solving to make sure
we don’t leave anyone out.
“But wait,” you’re thinking, “I’m not
a leader. That’s for other people. I’m an
introvert. I’m too busy. I have a family to
take care of. My boss is an idiot. We don’t
have the money…” It’s up to you to put all
those excuses aside and take advantage of
many opportunities available to learn and
grow as leaders every day.
We’re all looking for leadership les-sons
from the crisis in Flint, MI. Academ-ics,
engineers, regulators, doctors, consul-tants,
community activists—many people
helped shine a light on that community’s
suffering and the uncomfortable but real
environmental injustice. (If you haven’t
read the Flint Task Force report, I highly
recommend it.) Flint was not a failure of
infrastructure, but a crisis brought on by
a failure of leadership, lack of empathy,
group-think, abdication of accountability,
and compounded bad decisions.
I often look for leadership examples
in sports. Take Theo Epstein, who helped
break the famous “Curse of the Bambino”
in 2004, and was ranked #1 on Fortune
magazine’s greatest leaders list (the pope
was #3). After the Boston Red Sox, when
the Chicago Cubs came for Theo’s help,
he realized he would have to grow as a
leader to replicate that success in Chicago.
That growth entailed understanding
the ways in which “character, discipline
SPEAKING OUT