Thinking in Promises

Imagine a set of simple principles that could help you to understand how parts combine to become a whole, and how each part sees the whole from its own perspective. If such principles were any good, it shouldn’t matter whether we’re talking about humans on a team, birds in a flock, computers in a datacenter, or cogs in a Swiss watch. A theory of cooperation ought to be pretty universal, so we should be able to apply it both to technology and to the workplace.

Such principles are the subject of Promise Theory, and the focus of this insightful book. The goal of Promise Theory is to reveal the behavior of a whole from the sum of its parts, taking the point of the parts rather than the whole. In other words, it is a bottom-up, constructionist view of the world. Start Thinking in Promises and find out why this discipline works for documenting system behaviors from the bottom-up.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Promises and Impositions
Chapter 2. With a License to Intend
Chapter 3. Assessing Promises
Chapter 4. Conditional Promises—and Deceptions
Chapter 5. Engineering Cooperation
Chapter 6. Engineering Component Systems
Chapter 7. Service Engineering
Chapter 8. Knowledge and Information
Chapter 9. Systemic Promises