This paper explores how Human-Centric Functional Modeling might provide a method of systems thinking that in combination with models of Artificial General Intelligence and General Collective Intelligence developed using the approach, creates the opportunity to exponentially increase impact on targeted outcomes of collective activities, including research in a wide variety of disciplines as well as activities involved in addressing the various existential challenges facing mankind. Whether exponentially increasing the speed and scale of progress in research disciplines such as physics or medicine, or whether exponentially increasing capacity to solve existential challenges such as poverty or climate change, this paper explores why gaining the capacity to reliably solve such challenges might require this exponential increase in general problem-solving ability, why this exponential increase in ability might be reliably achievable through this approach, and why solving our most existential challenges might be reliably unachievable otherwise.