From Toyota to TOSD: For high performance, make time the boss
Most businesses remain stuck in the industrial-age logic of capacity orientation. In complex markets, however, rhythmicity of work, flow and self-organization are vastly superior
Time is money, they say. But in complexity, time isn‘t just money. Here, time is a lot of money. Which is why time-orientation with rhythmicity, but without rushing or shortness of breath, is the future of work. It is also, as last year’s research from the BetaCodex Network has shown, the future of manufacturing and the future of software development.
Visit a management conference or corporate event these days, and you will find that there’s a lot of talk of leaders and leading – but not much else. The tone in which corporate heroism and command-and-control are proclaimed and demanded (again) in keynotes, panels, speeches a nd trainings has become deafening. Strolling over the last Frankfurt Book Fair, a few months ago, I noticed a related trend: It turns out that most new business books (just as business media) have largely turned to promotion of forms of leadership as leaders and as leading. Which is not a BetaCodex song at all, for sure.
In short: Business books, academic research, consulting and so-called thought leaders have clearly run out of ideas. Not many people in our sphere seem to note that progressive ideas (and action) around organizing and management have gone missing. Looking back in time, it’s fair to say that after decades of modest but steadily growing enthusiasm for self-organization, systems thinking and humanistic ideas around work, rather sobering times have arrived at the dawn of the 2020s. It appears that the rise of nationalist-conservative and authoritarian politics in our societies, combined, in the world of work with the implosion of the Agile bubble, and the relentless (albeit highly bubbly) A.I. hype going on, a business climate has been produced in which not much is going on in management, conceptually.. Only a certain return to corporate leadership as authoritarianism and as managerial power in action is noticeable. At least for now.
Summing up the observations made here: It appears to me that, by and large, the management arena is stalling, or moving backwards to the glorification of command-and-control dogma. Which would be fine if everything in the world of business was sway. It isn’t, though. Companies are facing stiff international competition, and the regulatory and political environments are becoming tougher. The hairy problem that has strangled organizations since the dawn of the knowledge age in the 1970s persists: That companies and not-for-profits alike are stuck in command-and-control mode and that centralized, bureaucratic steering just doesn’t work anymore. The big management movements of the last decades, like Lean or Agile, and New Work in the German-speaking countries, have achieved little. With hindsight, they appear to have been little more than cover-ups for perpetuated corporate failure, and a failure to transform to more democratic, more decentralized and complexity-robust models of organization. The fads of the last decades, by and large, have been slaps in the face of attempts to bring about corporate democracy and self-organization that would deserve the name.
So the big question is: What’s next? I feel compelled to try answering the question. Here’s my suggestion.
How about embracing a timeless, but somewhat unsettling idea, for a change?
If we want to produce a new wave of enlightenment in the corporate arena, we need a a fresh approach, a powerful “idea” that changes the way we think and act, both. We need an idea that’s neither retro, nor limited to just the abstract or just to the overly mundane. We need a different philosophy of work that’s also applicable. Now, mere taglines and changes of words and vocabulary will not suffice, which is why a return to labels such as empowerment or targets won’t cut it. We need to discuss and adopt a idea that’s so positively disruptive as to help us reject and overcome command-and-control thinking. Yet that idea must be so practical that the difference that comes from adopting it in practice will be felt by literally everyone in an organization. The idea must be so pervasive as to change the way we think and act, at the same time.
I have looked at many ideas and concepts, since the early 2000s, and reaching back to thinkers as early as Mary Parker Follett, Frederick Taylor and Kurt Lewin. All those approaches and thinkers have inspired, influenced and broadened the BetaCodex. We integrated a great deal of conceptual insight, since the creation of the BetaCodex Network, back in 2008. So a lot of reflection has gone into this conclusion for our days: We only have one option, really, to get organizational leadership unstuck: To make the necessary renaissance of organizational thinking about time. We can fill today’s void in management with something that works and that has been long overdue, as we have known since the dawn of the “Toyota age” in the 1980s or so: And that is the superiority of time-orientation.
To illustrate the importance of time to work, consider farmers and rural population as an example. Working on the field, or on a vineyard, you have to work during daylight, weather conditions and the progression of time, combined with the crop’s development largely dictate what one has to do on a particular day. The seasons, the daily routine and the development of the crops largely tell you what you have to do - day by day by day. And when a day is over and the farmer has accomplished what’s necessary, then when she goes to bed she can say to herself: The day’s work is done. A day’s work has a beginning and an end, with the day in between. There is substantial emotional value in being done: that profound feeling of accomplishment when the day is over matters to human beings. The rhythmicity that the daily portion of work provides humans with a sense of self-determination through the perception of daily closure.
Most people who live in cities have been deprived of this feeling since the dawn of the industrial age, when mass production and automation started to prevent the experience of the daily portion. It doesn’t have to be that way, but today there is no daily portion in factory work, in administrative work, or work of urban population in general. Work routines are organized in disrespect of people’s need for daily closure and a routine sensation of accomplishment. This has consequences, as without the rhythmicity of daily, weekly, seasonal and annual experience of closure, socio-technical systems break down.
Time matters. Rhythm matters. And if work fails to be organized according to the structure of time, instead of against it, then the quality of the human experience will suffer. The predicament we find ourselves in is that mass production, automatization, the assembly line and other industrial techniques have turned a way of thinking into a standard that’s hostile to proper time orientation. That now dominant way of thinking is called Capacity orientation.
It’s time to try something new. That thing is time-orientation
The problems that Capacity orientation creates couldn’t be more obvious. Overcoming them is hard, though, if you are not aware of the alternative of Time orientation and of how Time orientation works: The two concepts, Capacity orientation and Time orientation, are based on entirely different sets of assumptions, and even on different language, wordings, rituals and patterns.
First, a few words about Capacity orientation. Its hallmark is that it considers capacity as “fix” and lets delivery time fluctuate. This has several consequences: Lack of punctuality will be considered normal an inevitable. Capacity will be used “flexibly” and be closely monitored, managed and utilization optimized. In today’s complex contexts, optimizing capacity and utilization involves constant forecasting, estimating, planning, steering, batch-compiling, scheduling, re-scheduling, stop-and-go, inventory creation and yet more re-scheduling. These symptoms have been present everywhere in batch processing, project management, in Waterfall software development, but also in Lean and in Scrum.
It’s important to understand that common practices of both Lean-as-we-know-it and Agile-as-we-know-it are both Alpha, or capacity-oriented (see left side of the illustration below), not Beta, or time-oriented (see right side of the illustration). Neither Lean, nor Agile have attempted to overcome command-and-control, and capacity orientation - with the exception of a few notable Lean approaches called Quick Response Manufacturing, Lean RFS, the Weichselbaum System and the Toyota Production System itself. I have recently written about the predicament of current forms of Lean and Agile elsewhere here on Substack in more detail.
The proposal to move towards called Time orientation is not plucked out of thin air. Much the contrary: Time orientation has a long history that goes back to the early days of the Toyota Production System, in the 1940s and 1950s. Personally, I have researched Time orientation more systematically since 2015, gathering insights through study of literature, consulting work and interactions with a diverse set of pioneers.
My most forceful introduction to the realm of time-orientation happened when I got acquainted with Ernst Weichselbaum (1944 - 2024) – the world’s foremost philosopher of time-orientation, as I like to call him. Read a recent piece about my relationship with Ernst Weichselbaum and his work that began in 2015, and involved the joint publication of Ernst’s only book. Working with Ernst, however, was just one of the streams of research into time-orientation. Around the same time, I got in touch with the Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) movement started by Rajan Suri. Later, in 2024, I got introduced to the work of Ian F Glenday around Lean Repetitive Flexible Supply (Lean RFS), another great approach to consistently time-oriented work systems. Over time, Silke Hermann and I at Red42 started to apply all these concepts in our consulting work with clients. At Bayer Bitterfeld part of Bayer group, for example, where we combined Lean RFS and the Weichselbaum System with Cell Structure Design to a coherent whole.
In 2025, I made another deeper excursion into time-oriented thinking, when Stefan Schmeing and I researched the dawn of the Toyota Production System - the birthplace of modern-day Time-Oriented Work Systems, Stefan and I dove deep into the work of Taiichi Ohno (1912 - 1990) and his thorough insights around flow, rhythm and punctuality. The effort led to us to editing the first-ever book of quotes by Taiichi Ohno, entitled What would Ohno-san do?
Combined, this work and research around Time-orientation enabled us, in 2025, to publish two highly substantial BetaCodex Network research papers exploring the potential of time-orientation in work and organizations: Slave to the Rhythm: Adopt Time-Oriented Work Systems. Now (#24), published in mid-2025. And, in October of the same year, Introducing Time-Oriented Software Development (#26).
Industrial-age capacity-orientation comes in a thousand shapes and disguises
In a recent workshop with consultants and trainers, we had a little brawl about the following little topic: We discussed whether the concept called Theory of Constraints (TOC), popularized by consultant Eliyahu Goldratt (1947 - 2011) in the 1980s, was time-oriented, or capacity-oriented. The question asked the group to contemplate was whether TOC was paradigm-shifting for capacity-oriented organizations, or whether TOC was just about optimizing capacity-orientation. The group was divided, at first.
I would like to share my reasoning on the matter, so that you can make up your mind yourself. First, consider the concept’s name, which hints at its bias towards capacity-orientation. Then consider the means that TOC deploys: It requires to remove bottlenecks of capacity in existing processes. It should be obvious that such methods aren’t about time-orientation. Not that removing bottlenecks was a bad idea. I like to think, however, that it is one of hundreds of useful concepts that are considered common sense at Toyota, and elsewhere where Lean is taken somewhat seriously. Other Toyota, Total Quality, or Lean concepts are far more explicitly time-oriented: Take the work of Shigeo Shingo (1909 - 1990), for instance, which was about dramatically reducing set-up times. Shingo’s SMED approach has been far more impactful and sophisticated than just removing bottlenecks, and so is the far more rounded and consistently time-oriented QRM approach by Rajan Suri. By contrast, Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints aims at merely achieving consistent capacity throughout a process, without proper consideration of fixing delivery time.
Put differently: Capacity-oriented thinking comes in a gazillion shapes and disguises. It has its own language, which helps to recognize its friends. Likewise, time-oriented thinking has its own methodologies and also language, much of which can be found in places like Toyota.
Time-orientation makes some problems disappear at a stroke, others float to the surface. Even better: Coherent self-organization becomes possible
There’s a straight line between the Toyota Production System (TPS) and Time-Oriented Software Development (TOSD). Both TPS and TOSD involve consistent time-orientation, and single-piece flow, which means processing single items instead of batches, or groups of identical production items. In making value creation flow and based on individual pieces, delivery time can be fixed and punctuality elevated to naturalness. When this is combined with self-steering and agreements among autonomous teams (a.k.a. decentralization), and floating, or swinging capacity that can follow demand closely, then true high performance becomes nearly inevitable.
You have trouble with planning, estimation, scheduling and forecasting? All that pointless overhead will be removed by consistent time-orientation. You have too many managers and not enough people actually doing value-creating work? By making time the boss, instead of having many bosses, you will streamline operations and get away with much stop-and-go, rework, pointless roles, processes, meetings and measures. People in your organization are unwilling to collaborate, and to work in teams? Some of that will evaporate in a time-orientated system, while other, hidden reasons for lack of collaboration previously covered up by capacity-orientation will become clearly visible.
Time-orientation is not a quick fix. Nor is it a silver bullet that “solves all problems”. It will solve or remove some problems that reside in an organization’s system, for sure – as it eliminates pointless steering, bureaucracy, silos, and barriers to collaboration. Other problems will naturally float to the surface, in a time-oriented system, so that you will finally be able to tackle them. For good.
Find out more about time-oriented organizing:
Read my BetaCodex Network research paper No. 24: Adopt Time-Oriented Work Systems. Now. Free download
Read BetaCodex Network research paper No. 26: Introducing Time-Oriented Software Development, by Sebastian Kubsch and Niels Pflaeging | Red42. Free download
Get the fabulous book by Ernst Weichselbaum that edited and designed for him, in 2020 (German only)
Ready my popular article about why so-called Sprints are a terrible idea
Visit the Time-Oriented Software Development website at www.timeoriented.dev
The connection to be made between capacity-orientation and the command-and-control cry for optimization and utilization is one that deserves sharing far and wide. That realization alone brings into sharp relief the fundamental flaws behind budgeting and forecasting.
A great article, Niels. It clearly explains contexts and connections, classifies and honors many “heroes of time orientation.” The article also shows the impressive research you did over the last decades.