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I first noticed it during a web redesign project. The client kept referring to their content management system as “just how we work.” Not a tool they used, but the environment they inhabited. Somewhere along the line, their CMS had transformed from software they operated into the territory where work happened.
This shift - from tool to territory, from instrument to infrastructure - isn’t unique to software. It’s a pattern that repeats across systems, and it reveals something crucial about how organizations lose the ability to imagine alternative ways of working.
Consider how email evolved in organizations. It began as a tool for sending digital messages - faster than memos, more convenient than phone calls. But watch what happened next. Email became how work gets assigned. How decisions get documented. How institutional memory gets preserved (or lost). How authority gets expressed. Email stopped being a communication tool and became the environment where organizational life happens.
This transformation happens so gradually that we rarely notice it. By the time we do, the system isn’t just how we work - it’s how we think about work itself. The tool has become the territory.
This pattern reveals something deeper about how systems shape behavior. When a system becomes infrastructure:
First, it becomes invisible. We stop seeing it as a choice and start seeing it as just “how things are.”
Second, it starts generating its own problems. Email creates email management problems that can only be solved with more email tools.
Third, it begins to resist change. Try suggesting that an organization abandon email. The response isn’t just practical resistance - it’s conceptual paralysis. “But how would we work?”
This is how systems trap us. Not through active constraints but through passive assumption. The territory they create becomes the only landscape we can imagine.
I see this in every organization I work with. Their systems started as solutions to specific problems. But somewhere along the line, those systems stopped being tools they used and became the environment they inhabited. The map became the territory.
Understanding this pattern isn’t just theoretical - it’s practical. When we recognize how systems become infrastructure, we can:
The goal isn’t to prevent systems from becoming infrastructure - that’s probably impossible. The goal is to remain conscious of the transformation so we can make better choices about what kind of territory we want to inhabit.
Because ultimately, these aren’t just systems we use. They’re environments we live in. And that means our choices about them are really choices about what kind of world we want to work in.
The most powerful thing about systems isn’t how they constrain us - it’s how they shape what we think is possible.