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 viewpoint 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.