The odds are good that you are reading these words on a mobile device made by Apple, Google, or Samsung. The odds are even better that your device contains a chip made by TSMC—Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

If you are of a certain vintage, you might think of that little silicon miracle as a CPU, or central processing unit, but the brain of your phone or laptop these days is now referred to as an SoC, a “system on a chip,” because it includes not only the CPU—several of them, actually—but also a video processor, memory, and other components. There’s a lot going on in there.

Numbers Large and Small

For now, let’s focus on Apple devices, since those are obviously the superior products. :-) 

The latest iPhones use Apple’s A-series SoC. If you disassembled your phone (not advised), you would find that the actual chip is about nine by twelve millimeters in size, roughly the area of your fingernail.

In the latest versions, that tiny package contains around twenty billion individual transistors. It is capable of thirty-five trillion operations per second.

The individual circuit components etched on the SoC can be as small as three nanometers—that's three one-millionths of a millimeter. Designers must consider quantum effects, the scale is so small.

Points of Reference

What do these numbers even mean?

Well, if you scaled those three nanometer features up to one millimeter, just a little more than the thickness of a credit card, the SoC would no longer be the size of your fingernail.

It would be the size of Key West, Florida, about 4.5 square miles, or nearly three thousand acres.

Now, consider the TSMC factory required to make one. Starting with a wafer of silicon, it requires over a thousand individual process steps to build an SoC, all done by extraordinarily sophisticated machines.

The work is done in an environment a thousand times more clean than a hospital operating room.

Sites for these factories—”chip fabs”—must be selected for their seismic stability, among many other factors. The cost to build one can reach forty billion dollars.

And we haven’t even considered the steps required to turn raw silica sand mined from the earth into that pristine silicon wafer.

SoCs and the factories that make them are among the most complicated systems humans have ever created.

But they are not complex.

Complex vs. Complicated

Complex is a label we reserve for a very different kind of system.

Despite the mind-bending intricacy of SoCs and the processes used to construct them, cause and effect relationships can be analyzed and understood in even these most complicated systems.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Understanding a complicated system might be quite difficult and time-consuming. It might demand the highest levels of expertise and experience.

Decades, if not centuries, of research were required to figure out the quantum physics needed to keep electrons where they are supposed to be in today’s nanoscale designs.

But once understood, the behavior of electrons in an SoC and silicon wafers through the chip fabrication process is predictable. Success is reproducible.

That is the nature of a complicated system, even at the extremes.

This is not the case in a complex system.

Complexity Is Different

Complex systems behave very differently. This should matter to you, because groups of people—teams, companies, families, and societies—are complex, not complicated.

To understand why human systems behave so differently from even the most sophisticated machines, we must consider three key properties: emergence, nonlinearity, and interdependence.

You have seen all of these in action, even if you didn't know their names.

Emergence

Complex systems have emergent properties and behaviors. They cannot be understood by analyzing the parts in isolation.

Recall my intentionally provocative statement about the superiority of Apple products. For some of you, it might have elicited an emotional reaction, either positive or negative, depending on your preferences.

Brand loyalty is an example of emergent behavior. Although it may seem obvious in retrospect, brand loyalty emerges from the relationships between Apple, its products, its customers, and its competitors.

Given one individual human, no amount of expert analysis could predict that people would so strongly identify with a brand that they would get a tattoo of the company’s logo.

(Yes, people do that. Yes, I am writing this on a MacBook. No, I do not have an Apple tattoo. I own a Windows PC, too.)

Emergent behavior is everywhere: Birds flock. Slime molds solve mazes. Tornados descend from storm clouds. Consciousness emerges from squishy gray lumps of neurons.

Nonlinearity

You have heard of the butterfly effect. This is a classic example of the nonlinear behavior typical of complex systems, where a very small input can result in a very large output.

A driver tapping their brakes causes a massive traffic jam. A social media post goes viral and causes a stock market crash. A poorly-timed comment to a teammate under stress causes an irreconcilable blow-up.

We struggle to understand complex systems partly because nonlinear is nonintuitive.

If you could fold a piece of paper forty-two times, how thick would it be? Ten miles? A hundred?

Nope—it would reach the moon with a thickness of about 240,000 miles. That’s nonlinear behavior.

Interdependence

In complex systems, nothing occurs in isolation. What I do affects my teammate, and how my teammate responds affects me. Observing your employee’s behavior changes their behavior.

Complex systems are composed of not just two, but often many individual elements, so keeping track of cause and effect quickly becomes impossible.

Importantly, the behavior of even a small team is profoundly influenced by interdependence, because no individual team member is an island.

We like to say that all of us carry our groups around with us. We are influenced by our families, our friends, our coworkers, and our communities.

When you interact with your boss, your direct report, your coworker, or your customer, you are really interacting with all of those groups, too, even though they are not in the room.

A Different Approach

Emergence, nonlinearity, and interdependence make group dynamics and systems involving people truly complex.

Understanding these distinctions isn't just theoretical. Recognizing complexity is essential for anyone working with human systems, because the solutions we apply to complicated problems—the kind we are comfortable with—will not work.

Where To Start

There is much more to say about the importance of working well with complexity, but to get started, one of the best tools we know is the Cynefin Framework.

The Cynefin Framework illustrates why focusing on analysis is a mistake when solving complex problems, and why we instead need to use our best judgement to take action, observe what happens, and then respond with the next right action.

If you’d like to learn more, sign up for a free account on retexo.com to get our 22-page PDF guide to the Cynefin Framework. We hope you find this mental model as useful as we do!

Until next time,

Greg