Every chapter of this book makes claims it does not finish, and points forward to the chapter that finishes them. While it was being written, each chapter carried a running ledger of those debts at its head. That scaffolding has been taken out of the chapters, where it sat above the opening scene and told you what you were about to feel. It is collected here instead, so that a reader who wants to check whether the book paid what it promised can do it in one place, and in one pass.
Read the middle column as the debt and the right-hand column as the settlement.
| Promise | Opened | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| The pattern is permanent, and decades old | Ch 1 | Ch 2 |
| Hidden work is better, because assessment is delayed | Ch 1 | Ch 1; mechanism, Ch 6 |
| The hollowing-out set the stage | Ch 2 | Ch 3 |
| Every mechanism is individually reasonable | Ch 2 | Part II, closing Ch 6 |
| Maria’s rival programme: eighteen months, two consultancies | Ch 1 | Ch 5 |
| The buried increment is worth something | Ch 5 | Ch 6 |
| Companies tried to domesticate the underground, and failed | Ch 2 | Ch 7 |
| Protection is itself a programme, and programmes decay | Ch 7 | Ch 7, again Ch 9 |
| Why nobody has fixed it | Ch 1 | Ch 7–9 |
| Escalation of commitment arrives with its warning attached | Ch 2 | Ch 8 |
| Careers are the third currency | Ch 5 | Ch 8 |
| The three-currency convergence | Ch 2 | Ch 5, closing Ch 8 |
| Surfacing can destroy the thing surfaced — the curtain | Ch 1 | Ch 10 |
| The observation principle | Ch 6 | Named Ch 10, spent Ch 11 |
| The hunt backfires | Foreword | Ch 11 |
| The legitimate reasons to look | Ch 10 | Ch 12 |
| Two conditions, not one decision | Ch 10 | Ch 12 |
| What an executive actually grants | Ch 11 | Ch 12 |
| Does AI break the pattern | Ch 2 | Ch 13 |
| The choice Chapter 1 opened with | Ch 1 | Closed, Ch 13 |
Three faults were found in the per-chapter ledgers while they were being consolidated, and are corrected above. The three-currency convergence was marked as closing in Chapter 8 and then as still accruing in Chapter 9. Protection is itself a programme was opened in Chapter 7 and never closed anywhere. And the domestication attempts fail, opened under that name in Chapter 3, came back in Chapter 7 under another. Twelve copies of a nearly identical list is twelve places for a debt to go missing, which is a reasonable argument for keeping one.