As a System Grows, It Becomes More Complex

If left unchecked, the amount of entropy in systems keeps rising.

As a company grows…

“… a scaling-up of a software entity is not merely a repetition of the same elements in the larger size; it is necessarily an increase in the number of different elements. In most cases, the elements interact with each other in in some nonlinear fashion, and the complexity of the whole increases much more than linearly.”

– Frederick P. Brooks from No Silver Bullet, 1986

Why it matters: Complexity slows down execution.

How: With company growth comes an increase in:

1. The count and diversity of sub-systems, teams, software, and their nuances.
2. Interactions across all these elements.

Remember this: On January 7, 1997, at Macworld Expo, then Apple CEO Gil Amelio discussed how MacOS has evolved on an outdated architecture.