Thinking in Promises

Foreword

Throughout much of human history, our technological achievement was driven by the quest for certainty and precision. Chaos in all its forms had to be defeated by the clockwork-like precision of the machines we built. We altered the course of flow of rivers. We achieved space flight. We created hierarchical societal structures with protocols and processes. But despite the mathematical precision, we never managed to achieve the robustness and efficiency of natural processes.

Our human intuition tells us that precise understanding of the underlying processes and consistency of their execution are key to well-functioning systems. This belief gives us a seemingly practical mental framework where all conditions affecting such systems are known and understood, or, at least, can be approximated or anticipated in some way. We further quantize the behaviors into sets of well-understood rules and actions and combine them in hierarchically organized global knowledge. A system of consistency hierarchies.

This approach led us to industrialization, but it also gave us an equivalent of industrialized micromanagement. Our control and automation systems turned into the equivalent of sequenced linear execution plans, where each step is a precise action—certain, predictable, and consistent. Any significant inconsistency leads to local and often cascading failure, at times, with global consequences—all with little or no ability to reconverge.

Our cultural preference for understanding the ...