The Road to Abilene

In 1974, a management professor named Jerry Harvey published a story about his in-laws.

It was a July afternoon in Coleman, Texas, population 5,607. One hundred and four degrees, according to the thermometer at the Rexall. West Texas topsoil blowing fine through the house. But the afternoon was tolerable — pleasant, even. A fan on the back porch. Cold lemonade. And dominoes, a game that asks nothing of a man in that heat but to mumble shuffle ‘em and move his arm.

Then Harvey’s father-in-law said: let’s get in the car and drive to Abilene and have dinner at the cafeteria.

Abilene was fifty-three miles away. The car was a 1958 Buick with no air conditioning.

Harvey thought this was madness. Before he could say so, his wife said it sounded wonderful — and asked him what he thought. Finding himself apparently alone, he said it sounded good to him too. He added that he hoped his mother-in-law wanted to go. Of course she wanted to go, she said. She hadn’t been to Abilene in a long time.

So they went. The dust cemented itself to their skin with their own sweat. The cafeteria food was the kind you make antacid commercials about. Four hours. A hundred and six miles. They arrived home finished and sat back down on the porch under the fan.

To be polite, somebody said it had been a great trip.

The mother-in-law said no. Not really. She’d have rather stayed home. She only went because the other three were so worked up about going.

Harvey said he hadn’t wanted to go either. He’d gone to keep everyone else happy.

His wife said the same. She’d only gone because it was so hot and the rest of them seemed to want it.

And then the father-in-law — the man who proposed the trip, the author of the whole afternoon — said he had never wanted to go to Abilene in his life. He’d only suggested it because he thought the other three looked bored.

Four people sat on a porch in Coleman, Texas, having just driven a hundred and six miles through a dust storm to eat food none of them wanted, in a direction none of them had chosen, at nobody’s request.

Harvey called it the Abilene Paradox, and the argument he built on it is the reason it lasted. Organizations, he said, do not fail because people disagree. They fail because people agree — silently, separately, everyone in the car reading everyone else’s silence as enthusiasm. The problem is not the management of conflict. It is the management of agreement.

He was clear-eyed about the stakes, too. Some organizations take a side trip, he wrote. Others take terminal journeys to Abilene — when Dallas or Houston or Tokyo was where they actually wanted to go.

For thirty years it was standard curriculum. I was taught it at General Motors. Every executive I came up with was taught it. It has the shape of a joke and the sting of a confession, and it works because everyone in the room recognizes the drive they are on right now.

I want to tell you what I never noticed for thirty years.

The road had houses on it

Harvey drove fifty-three miles across West Texas. There were people living along that road.

He never mentions them. He had no reason to — it wasn’t his subject. But the curriculum never mentioned them either. Nobody in thirty years of teaching this thing ever stopped to ask what the trip cost the people the car drove past. And I never asked. I sat in those rooms and I nodded at the joke and I went back to work.

The Abilene Paradox has four people in a car and a moral architecture built entirely out of their unspoken preferences. It is a masterpiece of self-criticism — and it trained two generations of executives to interrogate the silence of the passengers and never once the silence of the fenceline. Our most honest management parable still only counts the people with seats.

The dateline

On July 9, 2026, WIRED published an investigation by Evan Simon of Floodlight. It concerns Omaira Garcia, an Air Force veteran, who bought a small ranch with her husband after more than a year of looking. Their piece of heaven in the country. Their kids loved it.

She learned that OpenAI was building its flagship Stargate data center directly beside her property only after the construction had started — when the dust began to engulf her house. Today a natural-gas power plant sits roughly five hundred yards from her home. She can see the exhaust stacks from her kitchen window. At night, she says, the light is like being inside a stadium.

She tried to sell. She did not get a single offer. A realtor suggested she turn the house into an Airbnb for the data center’s workers.

“We’re trapped here,” she said.

Her neighbor Paul Daniel is eighty-one. His family has lived in that area for more than two hundred years; he has lived in his own house for forty-four. Nobody told him either. He made a sign out of a plank — one word and an arrow, pointing toward the entrance — and put it on the road leading into the site.

The word is HELL. The arrow points to Stargate.

The ranch is in Abilene, Texas.

Fifty-three miles from Coleman.

The permit is the paradox, written into law

Normally, if you intend to build a major new source of air pollution, you need a major air permit: environmental review, public notice, a comment period, a chance for the people who breathe the air to say something about it before it exists.

Stargate’s developers didn’t use it. In 2024 they secured their on-site power through minor permits — “permits by rule” and standard permits — the instruments ordinarily used for dry cleaners, gas stations, auto body shops. Small things that happen a lot, as one former EPA air enforcement chief put it. No environmental study. No public notice. No comment period. Granted fast and quietly.

Stop on that list, because this is where I stop bein