Concepts of time-oriented organizing: Rhythmicity, Entrainment, Punctuality
To make good use of the structure of time, and to apply the science of flow to work systems, three concepts appear to matter most
In this article, I build on two great books to analyze and discuss the importance of three key concepts of time-oriented organizing. The three concepts – Rhythmicity, Entrainment and Punctuality – are all equally vital to organizations large and small – regardless if your work is in services or industry, agriculture, in software development or tech, in the public sector or a not-for-profit organization.
If you first want to learn more about the foundations of Time orientation, then I recommend to look inside my article on making time the boss, to read about Time orientation as an opportunity to revitalize Lean, or to dive into my 2025 research paper on Time-Oriented Work Systems.
Let’s begin with the concept of Rhythm.
1. Rhythmicity: All times are not the same
There are many well-known rhythms to go by, in organizations. Days, months, seasons, years: They all have been encoded in our lives so systematically that we are often largely unaware of their influences on our work, and on the way we organize collaborative interactions.
All rhythms are not the same, though. For work and organizations, monthly rhythms are of great importance for compliance processes such as accounting and bookkeeping (think monthly closing). Monthly rhythms are terrible zeitgebers (“time-givers”, pace agents) for internal value creation, though: Work requires much tighter rhythms to provide appropriate tempos. Weekly rhythms, on the other hand, may seem intuitive for meetings and coordination (“Let’s just meet every Monday, from now on”), but meetings can all too easily be transformed into committees, pointless jours fixes and resource-swallowing pastime. In short: In work and organizations, monthly and weekly rhythms are way over-valued. Their excessive use for setting meeting cycles is testament to organizations’ command-and-control nature - not an indication of effective organizing.
The longer the time span of feedback, or the longer it takes to learn the outcomes of decisions, the further into the future people need to look in their work - or give up on future-orientation altogether. Temporal depths are influenced by the speed with which relevant environment provides feedback about actions and decisions - making this feedback-giving of the environment the zeitgeber, in office, or knowledge work. An example: When the fiscal year is imprinted upon other rhythms, like the rhythms of the business cycles, turning them annualized, then an almost complete loss of feedback, transparency, and social coherence may be the consequence. This decay of feedback from process is visible in most corporations, and it is one of the main reasons why the rhythms of annual planning and budgeting, quarterly cost management rituals, monthly coordination or even weekly jours fixes are deadly, as zeitgebers for business and value creation.
Daily rhythms, by contrast, have their own value: they are intimately related to our planet’s most powerful and pervasive zeitgeber: the daily cycles of light and dark, day and night. There is a reason why we call normal work day-to-day business or daily business. The daily cycle is the key cornerstone of work, as it is, and always has been, the blueprint for effective scheduling of work. In his grandiose book The Human Organization of Time, researcher Allen C. Bluedorn elaborates on this notion: “Schedules are rhythmic templates, and rhythms are one way times differ. Indeed, recurring schedules might well be defined as templates for rhythm because they prescribe behavior in terms of patterned repetition. Just as the place for behaviors such as the arrival times [of nurses or prison guards] similarly provides a template for performing work [in a hospital or a prison]. Through daily repetition, the schedule imparts a rhythm to the lives of individual workers as well as to the organization as a whole. To some extent any schedule will import a kind of protorhythm to the day’s activities, but when the schedule is repeated day after day, a genuine rhythm emerges, a repetitive pattern of behavior.”
2. Entrainment: Get into the groove. All together, now
Rhythmicity is not enough, though. In a work system, regardless of what it is about - manufacturing, services, software development or nursing, for instance - you also need entrainment to get to flow. Entrainment is about rhythmic phenomena and about the possibility that their rhythms may converge.
Entrainment, in other words, is crucial for process flow. The Toyota Production System (TPS), for example, which Toyota began introducing in full from the 1950s onwards, produces entrainment thorough a simple principle, which mandates that all steps in a production line have to converge on a joint rhythm, using the slowest process step (the one with the longest duration) as the drumbeat. If you have a process step that takes 55 seconds, one that takes 60 seconds, one that takes 75 seconds and another one that takes 70 seconds, then 75 seconds, or the longest duration among the four, will be your drum beat. Without this concept, uninterrupted flow will be impossible to create. The idea that rhythmic patterns come into alignment and then behave in a parallel, intertwined fashion describes the essence of entrainment. The state of entrainment that Toyota’s flow system brings about might also be referred to as temporal coordination among teams and individuals. It puts all other necessary coordination on a solid footing.
Sure, responsiveness between members of a team matters, too. A study from the 1990s indicated that flight crew’s performance increased, the faster they were able to prioritize tasks and distribute activities among themselves after a non-routine event. The effectiveness of flight crews was positively correlated with faster speed for these tow key activities: prioritizing tasks and distributing activities, suggesting that the environment in which flight crews operate required this activities for effective results. But back to the concept of entrainment.
Flow arises when rhythmic patterns come to oscillate together. Generally speaking, what matters for entrainment to occur is that one rhythm is more powerful and captures the other rhythm. The less powerful rhythm is captured and adjusts to the rhythm of the more powerful – the two rhythms end up being synchronized. This happens naturally in physics and biology.
In organizations of all kinds, entrainment should be observed and produced consciously, and be recognized as an organizing principle that allows for organizational flow. An example: For a hospital, the public transport schedules might act as an entrainer, or as the behavior oscillation that captures the rhythm of the hospital’s shift schedule. It may also happen the other way around: The hospital shifts entraining on the public transport schedules. Both are options, and we should be dealing consciously with their respective advantages and disadvantages.
Entrainment does not necessarily mean, however, that entrained, rhythmic patterns will coincide or overlap exactly. It means that the patterns will maintain a consistent relationship with each other - one rhythm might consistently lag or lead the other. Little wonder that entrainment was at first described as “odd sympathy” by Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, the inventor of the pendulum clock, who discovered the phenomenon, in 1666.
In entrainment, the zeitgeber is the entraining force – the rhythm that catches another rhythm. Allen Bluedorn writes:“An everyday example of a zeitgeber occurs literally every day: The two-phase cycle of lightness and darkness that has been repeated so many billions of times throughout the earth’s history. Throughout this four-and-one-half-billion-or-more-year history, untold physical, biological and social rhythms have become entrained to this fundamental cycle.” This insight is the foundation of the scientific field of chronobiology, and today’s understanding of circadian rhythms, which are observable in all living beings, humans included.
3. Punctuality: Help, we’re reliably on time!
How much is it worth to be on time?, you may wonder. It may be worth an awful lot, according to W. Edwards Deming, who was adamant that the real cost of bad quality and lack of punctuality, with all its consequences internally and in the marketplace is unknown and unknowable. Consequently, it can be a hard-to-beat competitive advantage to be “always speedy & never late”. As can be to “produce orders as quickly as others deliver from stock.” Both these taglines have been used by consulting clients of Ernst Weichselbaum’s.
Speed, we learn from Ernst Weichselbaum, is worth very little without punctuality. Now, it’s good to remember that punctuality is socially defined, hence a wide range of variation exists as to what it means to be “on time.” I remember that during my first job, which was in Buenos Aires, in Quality Management at Xerox during the 1990s, I struggled with fellow Argentinos considering it okay and normal to arrive at a meeting 60 minutes after the official starting-time. Argentinians certainly had a different notion of punctuality than Germans, back then. Clearly perceptions of what punctuality means may diverge, culturally. Still, in any culture, a company that can compete on swiftness and punctuality will likely become a zeitgeber for other businesses – competitors, clients and partners alike. The Toyota case has proven as much: By involving and integrating the entire supplier network into its Just-in-Time system, moving backwards in value creation through the supply chain, starting in the 1970s or so, Toyota was able to reap massive cost improvements, through improvement of flow among the entire ecosystem, entraining its business rhythms on a wide range of companies and partnerships.
In the last few centuries, being on time has become something entirely different. Allen Bluedorn invites us to imagine the Rome of two thousand years ago.: “With the exception of a few relatively unambiguous moments such as dawn, noon, and dusk, twenty-first-century-style appointments – “Let’s meet for a cup of coffee at 10:15!” – were literally inconceivable, because times with that precision were unmeasurable in everyday life. But that would change radically after the invention and rapid diffusion of mechanical clocks in Europe during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.” Until the 16th century, luckily or consequently, prayer times in both Judaism and Islam, were “bands rather than points”, and as such, time-pieces were not required to identify the times for the prayers.
It was Christianity’s monastic practice that developed a concern with time, its measurement, and with punctuality well over a thousand years before work reality in European towns and cities triggered a step-change. Beginning in England, the industrial revolution provided a broader cultural foundation for increased emphasis on punctuality, also driving the invention of the mechanical watch, a device that gave impetus to increasingly precise demands for being on time. Allen Bluedorn reminds us that “not being innate in the human condition, these demands required instruction to develop an increasingly precise and strict temporal discipline,” And: “Each major advance in technology’s ability to measure time precisely was attended concomitantly by the resentment and resistance of many, and especially by those upon whom the new time discipline was being imposed.” But that’s a topic for another article.
In the meanwhile, our expectations around swiftness and punctuality keep evolving. There is a Danish furniture company whose furniture designs I fancy. They are not cheap, but they represent a take on contemporary Scandinavian design I find appealing. I never bought anything there, however, and for a simple reason. Every time I inquire there about delivery times, people in the store will tell me that delivery will take “around 10 to 12 weeks, maybe more”. Knowing that producing furniture might require a week or two, and that shipment from neighboring Denmark to Germany might take yet another week, I cannot bring myself to purchase anything from that company. When a company merrily talks of a three-month long delivery time after my purchase, it is implicit that there may well be substantial delays, to. And who wants to wait three months or more for an industrially manufactured sofa or table? Not me, for sure. Instead of going through extended temporal despair, I’d better check out Ikea once again.
Blaha Office, a producer of office furniture from Austria that I have visited a couple of times and that transformed itself to time-oriented, supported by Ernst Weichselbaum, is able of deliver every order within 9 days – 99,6% of the time. When time orientation was adopted, costs went down by 25%, and liquidity became much stronger. That’s what I call swift and reliable value creation.
Capacity must swing
Punctuality means time-boxing, combined with systemic rigor. Applied consistently to value creation (as in product or service delivery), punctuality and rigorous time-boxing leads to concepts that Ernst Weichselbaum (1944-2024) pioneered and articulated from the 1980s onwards: In the Weichselbaum System named after him, delivery time is consistently fixed, while capacity swings (instead of letting delivery time oscillate. Deemed illusory by most who, like me, were taught conventional logic of capacity-oriented business administration, the resulting system for time orientation is able to liberate productivity gains that aren’t incremental, but can be astounding, as over a hundred of businesses that Ernst Weichselbaum worked with have proven. Sadly, such contemporary, time-based business philosophy is still rarely put to practice.
In a time-oriented system, not only is capacity allowed and expected to swing. Capacity should swing deliberately, if such a system is to prevail long-term - in high season and in lows, in boom and crisis. Swinging capacity is a resource, not a problem. In time orientation, capacity is designed as a system – it is not a fixture to be respected and “to be used flexibly.”, or something to be worked around. When capacity is understood as the lever to flow, then centralized coordination can cease, 96% of scheduling become dispensable, and self-steering teams unfold.
Beware the zeitgebers
Zeitgebers are so important that, historically, people have often been willing to pay money for zeitgeber information. Almanacs are a good example: Readers went to the almanac’s timetables to discover the most appropriate time for doing some task. The Almanac for Farmers & City Folk 2001 presented a table that specified the days of each month in 2001 that were considered to be the most “favorite” for specific activities, which included days of each month for dental work, most favorable days to cut hair, harvest fruit, and conduct business affairs. You might think that such almanacs ceased to exist, in the time of internet and scheduling apps. But the Almanach for Farmers & City Folks keeps being sold until this day, detailing information “for 16 different regions of the US.” On a similar note, physical book and stationary stores would probably have all gone out of business by now, if there wasn’t substantial annual demand for calendars and agendas, which carry more generic, but still vital zeitgeber information.
Zeitgebers have lasting power, says Allen Bluedorn. “Often, institutionalized rhythms are echoes of zeitgebers past, and regardless of whether the zeitgebers are still present, the institutionalized rhythms, as with all institutionalized phenomena, create expectations. Such expectations themselves can become zeitgebers for new people entering the organization, as well as for other organizations dealing with it. And if the expectations are not met, the newcomers and their work tend to be regarded unfavorably, regardless of what they do.” Zeitgeber power can resonate for centuries. Consider the example of George Washington, a Founding Father and the first president of the United States. He entrained his country to an expectation that a president would seek and serve only two terms - thereby becoming not just the father, but the zeitgeber of that country. Other democracies followed suit and got entrained by the same, or similar pattern. That persistent, pervasive and long-lasting can be the power of a zeitgeber – in this case, Mr. Washington.
Time is a mind-boggling thing. Ernst Weichselbaum once told me: “Imagine that you have to perform a task repeatedly. If you could do the same in half the time, reliably and without exhausting yourself, then you would have doubled productivity!” Now imagine that this elevated swiftness could also be combined with increased gratification from work, by “feeling yourself closer to the ultimate customer” due to process flow, not to mention a possible increase in insights and learning that could manifest from more steady, more frequent feedback to improvement. Surely, such insight and learning would require pause for reflection, and thus consume time. But imagine if you could combine all those things, instead of accepting that speed, gratification, flow, learning and growth had to be antagonists. That is exactly what Time-Oriented Work Systems like TPS and the Weichselbaum System (and also approaches like QRM by Rajan Sui and Lean RFS by Ian F Glenday can accomplish.
We are well advised to grasp the zeitgebers, to find appropriate rhythms and produce entrainment, and to design our entire business systems for punctuality. As Ernst Weichselbaum put it: “We can be punctual forever, but we cannot grow forever.” We better get at it, before others do it.
Recommended books about Time orientation
Ernst Weichselbaum/Niels Pflaeging (ed.): In jedem Unternehmen steckt ein besseres. Zeitorientierte Betriebswirtschaft mit dem Weichselbaum-System. Pflaeging bei Vahlen, 2020. German only. The most powerful treatise of coherent time orientation available. With free poster. There is also a concept overview poster available from Red42
Allen C. Bluedorn: The Human organization of Time. Temporal realities and experience. Stanford Univ. Press, 2002. The quotes in this article were mostly taken from Chapter 6 of the book, Convergence, which is dedicated Entrainment.
Watch a videocast conversation with Allen C. Bluedorn
This conversation between Allen C. Bluedorn, Rijon Erickson and Niels Pflaeging | Red42 has been part of the BetaCodex Network podcast BetaCodex LIVE. Watch the episode with Mr. Bluedorn here!
"Time" is perhaps the most underestimated topic at present. Years ago, people mainly focused on time management. Ultimately, it was about controlling time. And it is no coincidence that time is one of the most challenging topics for physicists and philosophers. Economists still underestimate the complexity of the subject.
Thanks Niels, great invitation to think.
One important aspect of zeitgebers is that they are naturally connected to circadian rhythms, where human beings do not intervene by design. They are part of the natural context: the day–night cycle.
Something similar should apply to organizations. Instead of inventing internal, artificial time-givers, we should be looking for those cycles outside the organization: in the market, in society, in real interactions and feedback loops.
When organizations define their own zeitgebers in isolation, they tend to synchronize with control structures rather than with reality.