---
title: "Ch 19 — Planning that has to abort"
description: "Planning is not a product but the act of decision by which managers commit resources — and because information keeps arriving, the plan has to abort…"
url: "https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/part-03-applications-and-politics/ch19-planning-that-has-to-abort"
modified: "2026-11-12T15:26:26.074Z"
language: "en"
site: "Cybernetic Futures"
---

# Ch 19 — Planning that has to abort

[Chapter content](https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/part-03-applications-and-politics/ch19-planning-that-has-to-abort/ch19-planning-that-has-to-abort-content) · Overview diagram

# Ch 19 — Planning that has to abort

**Part III — Applications and politics.** The last turn of the cohesion argument: planning as the glue, and why a plan carried out in every detail is evidence of a stupid action.

## The question
What is planning, if not the production of plans — and why does Beer insist that plans must continually abort?

## The reading
Beer attacks the standard picture: planning as an activity of professionals called planners, resulting in products called plans, implemented or not by those in authority (HOE 1979: 336). Against it he sets a single criterion — planning happens only when there is an act of decision — from which it follows that the only planners are managers, the people entitled to commit resources (HOE 1979: 337).

The consequence is a reversal of what a plan is for. Because information keeps arriving, and information is what changes us, plans must continually abort: produce a plan dated so-and-so and implemented today in every detail, and what you have is a stupid action (HOE 1979: 337). Beer's three counter-theses make the reversal explicit: planning is not an activity of professionals but an act of decision by managers empowered to commit resources to a different future; it is not an activity resulting in plans but a continuous process whose pay-off is the aborting; and the plans do not have to be implemented by those in authority, because what the authority does constitutes the plan and its realization (HOE 1979: 338).

That is where planning meets cohesion. In the planning process the manager dispenses the cohesive glue, and the institution hangs together because, and only because, plans are constantly aborting (HOE 1979: 338) — which is the practical face of the Law of Cohesion in chapter 13. Recursion then constrains the form: no uniform planning rubric can be imposed (HOE 1979: 340), plans are the embodiment of the intentions subscribed to at each level and must abort as those intentions change (HOE 1979: 342), and System Two may not issue a book of rules, since there is no need for a uniform language, only for System Two to speak all the languages of System One (HOE 1979: 344).

The same argument is made for public planning in the last Massey Lecture: our plans are not adaptive, and the institutions charged with making them grind on with their implementation long after it has become obvious to everyone affected that they are inappropriate (DF 1974, Lecture 6). The future, on that view, is something we use our freedom to determine rather than something lurking out there that will happen to us (ibid.).

## Beer locators
DF 1974, Lecture 6; HOE 1979: 336–38, 340, 342, 344.

## Status
Draft, *Pure VSM* v0.8 (2026-09-23). Beer's texts govern where the draft and they differ.

Checked: all seven quotations from *Designing Freedom* occur in Lecture 6 of the transcript, in the order the chapter implies, and the ellipsis the chapter quotes around was checked — it closes the preceding sentence, so nothing inside the quotation is omitted.

## Open points
- *Designing Freedom* is cited by lecture: the transcript has no print pagination, and whether the 1974 print carries the same four-dot ellipsis cannot be checked without the book.

## Related
[Part III — Applications and politics](https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/part-03-applications-and-politics), [Ch 18 — Institutions, metasystems and change](https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/part-03-applications-and-politics/ch18-institutions-metasystems-and-change), [Ch 13 — Cohesion across recursions](https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/part-02-the-viable-system-model/ch13-cohesion-across-recursions), [Law of Cohesion](https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/concepts/law-of-cohesion), [System Two](https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/concepts/system-two), [Variety and regulation](https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/concepts/variety-and-regulation), [The Heart of Enterprise](https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/entities/the-heart-of-enterprise).