[1] Brooks argues that "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."
Brooks argues that this means shrinking all the accidental activities to zero will not give the same order-of-magnitude improvement as attempting to decrease essential complexity.
While Brooks insists that there is no one silver bullet, he believes that a series of innovations attacking essential complexity could lead to significant improvements.
One technology that had made significant improvement in the area of accidental complexity was the invention of high-level programming languages, such as Ada.
The article, and Brooks's later reflections on it, "'No Silver Bullet' Refired", can be found in the anniversary edition of The Mythical Man-Month.