Systemic lenses require a shift in the mindset: a move away from focusing solely on specific projects, industries, or short- to mid-term returns, and toward stepping back to examine the underlying systems, the networks of relationships, and the time needed to create the conditions for those systems to flourish.

A fitting historical analogy here is the building of great cathedrals. These were monumental infrastructure projects of their time that “took lifetimes to build” with “no immediate or tangible returns on investment,” yet they served a higher purpose for the common good. Cathedrals became places where people gathered, found shared purpose, and built community – effectively functioning as infrastructure for social cohesion and meaning.

Beside being an admirable illustration of human craftsmanship, dedication and delayed “ROI,” a cathedral is a less-obvious example of a physical infrastructure: it is a network hub, a convergence point of a community, allowing for more social connections and alliances to emerge.

Modern-day equivalents of this type of infrastructure would be places like Villa Gaia Hub in Tuscany, Rotterdam Makers District, and other “hubs” (Impactopia – let’s hope so :)) focusing on providing spaces for diverse actors to convene, prototype solutions, and coordinate strategies for change.

Here we can see an overlap of physical and social infrastructure, coexisting in a symbiotic relationship: a hub (or a laboratory, or a purpose-oriented third place in a city) provides space and various resources for a community to come together. Within that environment, a culture is forming: spoken agreements and unspoken rules, emerging traditions, slang and unique terms, shared narratives, and shared dreams.

Around the world, many “systems change infrastructure projects” are taking shape – from social innovation labs and cross-sector coalitions to issue-based collaboratives in fields like energy, food, finance, and governance. What they share is an intentional focus on the whole system: they “work at a ‘whole systems’ level – convening people over a long period to tackle root issues of purpose, values and power,” they “grow communities” with new leadership and solutions, and they “leverage large scale change” by influencing policies, investments, and cultural narratives. This is the social infrastructure that makes system-wide change possible.

Just as the nervous system enables an organism to perceive, process, and act through a web of interconnected nodes, a network of system-change hubs allows a society or movement to sense conditions, share intelligence, and coordinate adaptive action. The strength comes not from any single node but from the relational tissue – the infrastructure – that allows local insights to become collective transformation.

Presently, the biggest enabler for this is digital infrastructure: from WhatsApp group chats to align on meetups, to Google Drive for document sharing, to ClickUp for task tracking.

While most of the popular tools weren’t designed with systems thinking in mind, they provide the essential function: shared spaces for information exchange both within hubs and across networks. Purpose-built infrastructure optimized for coordination and collaboration, such as Symviosis, will amplify these capabilities exponentially.

Building and maintaining these physical, social, and digital network components requires sustained funding – revealing the critical role of financial infrastructure.