How we got here (the long arc)

The roots are political as much as technological. Late-20th-century privatization and deregulation—iconically associated with the Reagan–Thatcher era—unbundled public utilities, outsourced essential services, and invited market logics into domains once treated as universal, regulated goods. Meanwhile, the internet matured into a ubiquitous offering, creating global protocols for identity, discovery, distribution, and payments. As public systems adopted market mechanisms and private platforms scaled into daily life, a dual movement took hold: infrastructures began to adopt platform logics (accounts, dynamic pricing, telemetry), and platforms took on infrastructural roles (so embedded in daily life that their failure disrupt public life).

Today, this convergence is no longer theoretical. Forces like digitization and artificial intelligence, sustainability targets and equity demands, the financialization of assets, and geopolitical pushes for economic resilience are accelerating it further. They are turning the mashup into the norm—not the exception—and concentrating real power in micro-level choices, particularly in how features are designed and deployed.

A simple grammar (without the jargon)

Strip away the labels, and think in verbs:

• Infrastructuring means to move, store, and/or generate resources. Think: electricity flowing through grids, buses moving through routes, reservoirs storing water, or social security numbers anchoring identity.

• Platforming means to coordinate, control, or monitor resources. It governs who gets access, on what terms, at what price, and/or with what data.

In the mashup, these verbs co-exist within the same system. At their intersection sit features—the concrete, often-overlooked decisions that carry outsized consequences. A default price, a siting rule, an eligibility pathway, a queueing mechanism. Features might seem tactical, but in practice, they are powerful levers. They are leverage points. They shape how money, energy, data, participation, and trust flow—and, in turn, they determine who benefits, who bears risk, and what “good” looks like.

The governance gap (and why design belongs here)

Most institutions are built for decision-making—choosing among familiar options under known and fixed constraints. But the mashup demands something else: choice-making—the ability to frame better choices on purpose, especially when constraints are shifting and logics conflict (think efficiency vs. equity, speed vs. resilience, private incentives vs. public value).

This is where Strategic Choice-Making comes in. It treats features as strategic levers that must align with institutional purpose and with the macro forces shaping their context. It asks leaders to keep choice-making (diverging, prototyping) and decision-making (converging, embedding) overlapping—because in systems, strategy and execution co-evolve.

What the mashup looks like in practice

Across sectors, the mashup is already visible. At the intersection of mobility,energy, real estate, and finance, electric‑vehicle charging networks blur the line between grid infrastructure and digital coordination systems—where design choices like equity-based siting, dynamic pricing, and bidirectional charging can redistribute access and revenue while stabilizing demand. In finance, digital wallets and “buy‑now‑pay‑later” services act as civic protocols; introduce alternative ID pathways and contextual credit scoring, and they begin to include previously excluded populations without predatory terms. In institutional food systems, from airlines to schools to hospitals, features such as pre-select interfaces, near-site vertical farming contracts, and waste telemetry turn procurement routines into engines for healthier diets, local employment, and lower emissions. Across all of them, the feature is the fulcrum—and the fulcrum sits squarely in the mashup.

What leaders should do differently

1. Name the verbs. Before debating vendors or solutions, ask: what resources are being moved, stored, or generated? What resources are being coordinated, managed, or monitored? Seeing both prevents single-logic solutions.

2. State the purpose out loud. “Maximize utilization” sounds strategic until it meets equity, carbon, and trust. Acknowledging the trade-offs you will accept to advance the outcomes you actually stand for.

3. Design the feature set/s, not just the product. Work in concrete levers, interfaces, defaults, eligibility, pricing, consent, or siting. Prototype bundles of features, then archetype the bundles that reliably produce the effects you want.

4. Iterating through flows. Track how resources like capital, carbon, energy, data, participation, and trust actually flow. If the flows don’t change, the system didn’t.

This is the craft the Strategic Choice-Making Model (SCMM) operationalizes: Prompt to Prototype to Archetype to Platform/Infrastructure, with a feedback loop.

The integrative bet

For decades, we framed infrastructure and platforms as opposites—slow vs. fast, universal vs. personalized, regulated vs. entrepreneurial. The mashup challenges that dichotomy. It invites us to design for both: reliable and adaptive, efficient and fair, personalized and systemic.

This is not a euphemism for compromise. It is a call to reposition strategy where it now matters most—at the micro level, where decisions about defaults, access, consent, and pricing shape the actual behavior of the system.

If we accept that our most critical daily life systems are now infrastructure–platform mashups, then the work of leadership is not merely to buy technology or write policy. It is to orchestrate flows with purpose.

The lever is the feature. The horizon is a system that works better for more of us.

Design the feature. Shift the system.