The structural science of human commitment.
Every promise has three parties: the one who makes it, the one who receives it, and the one who bears the consequences. The third party is almost never at the table. The third party always pays when the structure fails.
The PROMISE Foundation studies why promises hold or break — across construction, governance, treaties, marriages, and every other place humans make commitments to each other. The work is grounded in fifty years of construction and procurement of federal, state and local projects and fifteen years of running industrial production lines. The framework was named in February 2026. The evidence has been accumulating since 1975.
Three ways in
The Research Support Facility at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory was procured using this framework in 2007. It came in on budget, on schedule, and was completed as the largest net-zero office building in the United States. The Design-Build Institute of America's Federal Sector Best Practices (2023) cites the RSF as a lessons-learned reference for federal agencies and formalizes the Owner Advisor role that the RSF procurement helped establish.