---
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description: "Chapter Thirteen of The Heart of Enterprise opens with a general statement: “Cohesiveness is the primary characteristic of organization” (HOE 1979: 335). The…"
url: "https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/part-02-the-viable-system-model/ch13-cohesion-across-recursions/ch13-cohesion-across-recursions-content"
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# content

## 13.1 Planning as the "glue"
Chapter Thirteen of *The Heart of Enterprise* opens with a general statement: "*Cohesiveness* is the primary characteristic of organization" (HOE 1979: 335). The Law of Cohesion, which Beer derives in the same chapter, is the last of what Beer calls "all eight propositions that I have enunciated in this book" (HOE 1979: 356). The count fits the four principles of organization, the three axioms and the law; that grouping is my reading, since Beer does not list the eight there (see the list in chapter 3). He does not reach it from the variety equations alone. He reaches it through an analysis of planning, and that route shows what the law is about.
Beer justifies the opening statement from the purpose of organization as he developed it earlier in the book. Organization exists to contain the proliferation of variety that would arise from the unrestricted interaction of the elements of a system. But in breaking that interaction down, "the process of organizing itself creates a problem of fragmentation which only its capacity to provide cohesion can offset" (HOE 1979: 335). Any model of organization must therefore show how its parts hold together; it must be possible "to identify the 'glue' whereby the parts that the model postulates hang together" (ibid.).
In the conventional model, Beer answers, the glue is dependency. The hierarchical paradigm, "by its delegation of authority and demand for an antithetic accountability, uses the resulting chain of dependencies as its 'glue'" (HOE 1979: 335). Even horizontal links between units at the same level rest on a common cross-over point higher up, so that in the long run there is "no other 'glue' than dependency" (ibid.).
The viable system model cannot use this glue, because its logic is recursive rather than hierarchical (chapter 6). A recursive logic is a process, so "its managerial embodiment must be a process too, rather than any such static bonding as dependency. It seems that this process is none other than PLANNING" (HOE 1979: 336). Beer knows the claim is unusual: "Many a treatise has been written about planning; but I do not know of any that contends that it is actually the 'glue' of organizational cohesion" (HOE 1979: 336).
The claim depends on Beer's own concept of planning. In the overview of the book he writes that planning "needs to be seen as a continuous, managerial, process of decision, whereby allocations of investment are made now, so that the future may be different"; and since more information is available at every moment, "it is necessary that plans should always abort before their time is due. In cybernetic terms, plans should be *continuously* adaptive to fresh information" (HOE 1979: 276). Chapter 19 follows this concept in detail. Here it is enough that planning in this sense is a continuous traffic of intentions between the levels of the system, and that this traffic is the glue that holds the recursions together.
## 13.2 The law
Beer derives the law from the complete model of the planning process (HOE Figure 61, "The definitive model of the planning process that provides closure (and therefore cohesive 'glue') between two recursions of the viable system", HOE 1979: 353). The figure's caption already names the glue. Before stating the law Beer prepares it with an observation about System Five, which must detect instability in the Three–Four loop but cannot absorb the full variety of that interaction. The resolution lies in the Conant–Ashby theorem: "Every regulator contains a model of whatever is regulated. This *model* must have requisite variety" (HOE 1979: 352). System Five therefore holds models of Systems Three and Four, and from its stored experience of their balance it develops a "policy ethos" that returns to the whole system through feedback loops. Beer stresses that "these feedbacks are not instructions" (HOE 1979: 354).
The derivation itself takes five numbered steps (HOE 1979: 354). In summary: (i) the variety of the metasystem of Recursion x is also the variety of the System One management box that it constitutes in the next higher Recursion w; (ii) by the First Principle of Organization, the variety of a System One management box tends to equal that of its operation and environment; (iii) by the First Axiom of Management, vertical and horizontal variety balance at System Three; (iv) hence the variety disposed by all the metasystems of Recursion x equals the System One variety accessible to System Three of Recursion w; (v) because the mapping is isomorphic, the same relation holds for any other recursive pair, such as x and y.
The result follows on the next page: "Thus, using Recursion *x* as focus, we may state **The Law of Cohesion for Multiple Recursions of the Viable System:** The System One variety accessible to System Three of Recursion *x* = the variety disposed by the sum of the metasystems of Recursion *y*" (HOE 1979: 355). The appendix version adds "for every recursive pair" (HOE 1979: 567).
Put plainly, what the management of one level can see and influence of its operational units must match what the managements of those units themselves dispose of. If the higher System Three has access to less variety than the lower metasystems generate, it loses the ability to hold them within the whole. If it takes more, it absorbs variety that belongs to the lower level. The law specifies the balance point between the two recursions, not a direction of control.
Beer adds a qualification that applies to the law and to all the axioms. The equalities are written as equalities "to make clear the notion of balance", but in practice they "require some *extra* variety, which is called redundancy, to deal with noise in the system" (HOE 1979: 355). He then supposes that cohesiveness, as the law defines it, could be measured by an index C, and states that "we should find that" dC/dt > 0, the index rising over time: "It is this fact that makes the viable system not only cohesive, but *self-organizing*" (HOE 1979: 355). He does not develop the point, and attributes the underlying idea to Heinz von Foerster, explained to him by Gordon Pask (ibid.).
Beer calls the law "perhaps the most significant" of the discoveries in the book (HOE 1979: 275), and he explains the name. The three Axioms of Management belong to Recursion x, the four Principles of Organization were developed on its horizontal axis, but "when we come to the embedment of Recursion *z* in *w*, of *w* in *v*, and so on indefinitely, the concept of cohesion becomes outstandingly important. That is why it is dignified as a Law" (HOE 1979: 356). The choice of three terms, axiom, principle and law, "was decided upon as a matter of expository convenience" (ibid.).
## 13.3 Cohesion and autonomy
The law formalizes a balance that Beer had set out much earlier in the book, described in chapter 5.3 of this text: "the contention was that autonomy should be passed to System One, and the command axis minimally used, consistently with maintaining *cohesion* of the viable system: it must not fly apart" (HOE 1979: 351). At that point the variety equation for cohesion between recursions "was not obviously in sight", because the recursive logic had not yet been developed (ibid.). Beer also says why cohesion deserves this attention: "To understand cohesion well in cybernetic terms is most important, because it governs the question of **identity** in the viable system, and because its practical application is potentially valuable" (HOE 1979: 351).
The search began in his own practice. As director of System Four in an international corporation Beer discovered that the chairman of a large division "was secretly moving to *sell* his division. Autonomy is one thing, but..." (HOE 1979: 351). Behind the law stands the question this episode raised: how much independence a subsidiary can have before it ceases to belong to the whole.
Beer states the relation to the First Axiom explicitly. The law "is an implicit consequence of the First Axiom" (HOE 1979: 355). The First Axiom "is explicitly concerned with cohesion inside any one viable system. That is to say, it is addressed to the inexorable operation of Ashby's Law within a single level of recursion" (ibid.). The Law of Cohesion extends the same balance to the relation between levels. Beer says that it "was logically entailed all along", but that it would have been awkward to state before the full recursive model had been given (ibid.).
In a later paper Beer applies the law to takeovers. Subsidiaries that are taken over are always assured that their autonomy will be respected. Beer calls this "poppycock", because a study of the embedment of the new System One "in terms of the Law of Cohesion \[...\] will reveal how the interconnectivity between the subsystems of the two recursions inevitably takes up variety from the new subsidiary. In the VSM, 'autonomy' is a precisely defined term, and it does *not* mean zero interference" (TBYT 2009, "The Viable System Model": 149). The law also cuts the other way: "if the taking-over company makes the mistake of leaving intact all the new subsidiary's variety (or of handing over too much variety to an old subsidiary), this company is very likely to be the subject of a reverse takeover bid" (ibid.). Both failures depart from the same balance, one by taking too much variety, the other by taking too little.
## 13.4 The mechanism and the limit
Two later passages in HOE connect the law with other parts of the model. The first concerns the algedonic signal (chapter 12). After postulating that algedonic signals alone break through the levels of recursion, Beer writes: "In the Law of Cohesiveness we found the variety equation that stops the enterprise from blowing apart. Now we have its mechanism" (HOE 1979: 407). The law states the required balance, and the inter-recursive algedonic channel is how an imbalance becomes known where it can be corrected.
The second concerns autopoiesis (chapter 15). Asking how much of a system's effort may properly go into maintaining itself, Beer rejects a numerical constant and proposes a structural one: "The proportion of total time that needs to be devoted to maintaining necessary autopoiesis is exactly the time required to maintain System One — which is the viable system at the next level of recursion — whatever that may be. Numerically, the proportionality will vary, because purposes vary; and therefore the law of cohesion will generate different relative varieties in different cases" (HOE 1979: 411). Here the Law of Cohesion sets the limit of legitimate self-maintenance. Effort beyond what cohesion across the recursions requires is, in Beer's terms, pathological, and he uses this criterion to define "The Establishment" (HOE 1979: 412; see chapter 15.4).
With these two passages the law takes its place in Beer's argument as the variety condition that keeps a nest of viable systems together without reducing it to a hierarchy of dependencies. Planning supplies the glue as a process, the algedonic signal raises the alarm when the balance fails, and the autopoiesis argument measures how much metasystemic effort the balance justifies. Chapter 15 takes up what happens when that measure is exceeded.

## References

- **HOE** — Beer, Stafford (1979). *The Heart of Enterprise*. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
- **TBYT** — Beer, Stafford (2009). *Think Before You Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing*. Edited by David Whittaker. Charlbury: Wavestone Press.