Time is vastly underrated as a force of organizing

Time has gotten a bad reputation in management circles — and undeservedly so

Jun 29, 2026

Our relationship with time at work is twisted and broken. If we want to overcome being stuck in planning hell, if we want to end that fruitless obsession for acceleration and speed, and go beyond pessimistic ways of organizing, then we should make time the new framework. This, however, will require a mental revolution.

Leaving university, my first job was at a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil. One of the first things I learned there was: everything we did was organized in very large batches. Production was organized around batches: Our 400-people plant near Sao Paulo would churn out every products in huge quantities that would be made every few months only. Consequently, inventories were massive: We held around six months of stock on most products: “You never know how sales will be next month.” And sales greatly varied from month to month, indeed. The Sales department loved fulfilling large orders from the handful of large distributors located in the state of Minas Gerais, 600 kilometers away. These distributors would swallow gigantic amounts of stock every few months. But their orders were absurdly high one month, and would implode the next, as those distributors would then sell on from their own, massive inventories. Visibly, the buying patterns of the large distributors would closely follow the sales campaigns and discount promotions our company ran.

In short: Those big production batches would be put on stock somewhere for months - at our company’s own (massive) storage facilities or with distributors that would hold several months of stock as well. Sales volumes for all drugs, even for cardiac medicine, which is taken steadily by patients, swung dramatically between months. Sales were usually made at absurdly high discounts, hurting our profitability. And you never quite knew when those distributors would order again, as the flow of product to on to pharmacies was non-transparent and unpredictable for us. It was all a mega-sized clusterfuck (pardon the language).

Where are we now?

I later learned that most companies were similarly capacity-oriented and steering-addicted as my first employer. They were forcing batch processing and irregular, unpredictable work cycles upon themselves, instead of working according to the flow of demand.

Of course most industrial companies at some point have made attempts to bring Lean about, in order to tackle the kind of mess I am describing. Many have been successful at reducing the mess, to some extent. Still, few have gotten close to almost zero inventories, as Toyota-style flow production would suggest. Plus: Similar kinds of messes can be found in other, non-industrial organizations today. Take internal change initiatives (“Not doable in less than a year!”). Consider product development (“It always takes months or years!”), take software development (“It’s just not moving, and we don’t know why… we will try the same thing harder!”).

Let the work flow, instead of batching,
grouping and scheduling it.

Everywhere you look, time and duration seem to be a massive problem. Punctuality appears to be unachievable. But we keep thinking of time (or duration) as an inevitable by-product of our “highly efficient actions”, as a function of reasonably designed processes. We say: ”It takes as long as it takes.” And: “We are so fast already,” since we are good professionals, and since we have already optimized the hell out of every process.” Or so we like to think. Consider furniture companies: Most of them still have delivery times of 8 to 16 weeks, once a customer places an order. In most cases, this is not because the production site were far away, on some other continent. But because furniture companies produce and deliver in batches, letting orders and finished products wait idly, which creates all kinds of queues and wastes.

Organizational systems are still too often relying on planning, targets, steering of resources, managerial oversight, rules, fear and intimidation, combined with batch processing and large inventories. The alternative would be to apply process discipline, binding agreements between teams, decentralization, principles, social density, transparency and temporal control.

Our troubled relationship with time

At present, time is perhaps the most underestimated organizational topic there is. Three prevailing conditions blind us for the potential of time as a force of organizing:

Capacity orientation: A habit of working in (large) batches, combined with the deep-rooted, flawed ideology of optimizing for utilization.
Command-and-control: Belief in the need for steering and control of people (“Theory X”) – often framed as a call for leading and leaders.
Centralized coordination and silo thinking: Lack of insight into value creation “physics”, accompanied by preservation of functionally divided, hierarchically steered team and group structures.

Intertwined, these assumptions blind us for the potential of time as a force of organizing. We maximize utilization, try to improve people and resort to steering, in order to advance, improve and innovate – causing yet more friction, waste, delays, and demotivation.

Now you might say: Why should we care about any of that – as AI is about to turn everything upside-down, anyways? But even the current obsession with AI is part of a faulty dogma around utilization, speed, efficiency and batch thinking that is unhealthy and far from realistic.

We come from a place where capacity orientation is not just dominant, but the only we to think about organizing. In this kind of thinking, we assume that capacity is fix, or limited. We assume that, as a consequence capacity utilization must be maximized – regardless of the impact of such maximization on waiting, bottlenecks, inventory, or other forms of waste. We assume that scale is usually good. We assume that prediction and estimation is professional, and that it works. All this in the face of globalized markets and high market complexity, and conditions of high variability. In short: We assume a lot. And many, or most of the assumptions our thinking around organizing revolves around became wrong, when the industrial age ended, around five decades ago. Though theory has long hinted us at better concepts and principles, many of us have preferred not to listen.

The problem extends the realm of work, of course – and well into our private lives. In this article, I will however focus on the impact that a distorted relationship with time has on work, collaboration and organizing.

The Iron Triangle versus Change That Works: A case in point

Let’s take a closer look at a specific area in which capacity orientation, bundling and conventional thinking hampers organizations: Large-scale software implementation projects, like ERP adoptions, Supply Chain Management or Logistics system adoptions, or CRM adoptions. Sizable organizations assume that adopting such systems - from decision-making to some kind of Go Live, will usually take at least 18 months to accomplish, and often last “several years”, with many people accepting that such projects usually “run completely out of control”, eating up more resources and time than planned.

There is one concept that everyone who has ever been in touch with project management, and large-scale change projects, has heard of, at some point. It is called The Iron Triangle (depicted below). You may know the concept under a different name, but it usually takes the shape of a triangle, with its corners being Quality/Scope, Cost and Time. This little, but fateful concept offers great insights into our dominant thinking about time in the realm of work and organizations, and its relation to performance.

Again: In the Iron Triangle, we assume that projects have three dimensions - Time, Cost and Quality, or Scope. Now the underlying philosophy of the Iron Triangle, that you will likely have heard of, assumes that the three edges of the triangle can never be optimized together: At least one of the dimensions has to be sacrificed - Quality/Scope, Cost or Time. This assumption is rooted in the firm belief that capacity is limited and that nothing can be done to change that. Optimize Quality/Sopce, and Cost and Time will suffer. Optimize for Cost, you will hurt Quality/Scope and Time. Go for the shortest implementation Time, you will have to sub-optimize Cost and Quality/Scope. Put differently: Once you accept the dogma of the Iron Triangle, you invite hopelessness and failure. In this logic, you will balance one thing against the other, sub-optimizing everything and giving in to all kinds of supposed “pressures” that stakeholders come up with during your project.

Reality, however, is rather different that what the Iron Triangle claims it to be:

Time, Cost and Quality are NOT disconnected.
Instead, cost and even quality are interdependent functions of time.

To believers in the Iron Triangle and in conventional project management wisdom, the statement above is impossible to accept. It must be wrong. But it is not so hard to find proof that the ideology of the Iron Triangle is flawed. Take the example of the Toyota Production System of car manufacturing (often referred to as Lean), that has proven for decades that flow (or reliably fast production, if you will), will lead to lower cost and better quality. Thought leaders like W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran and others have for decades taught us that “quality is free”, that “quality and cost” should be seen as positively linked, and are by no means opposed to each other.

In a similar fashion, in project work, time isn’t supposed to be a function of anything:

Time is supposed to be the constraint
that will limit cost and ensure high quality.

Using capacity as the constraint, instead, with time being perceived a mere function, is a recipe for disaster. There are several reasons for this. First: Capacity is a terrible disciplinarian. Capacity tends to fluctuate, inevitably. e.g. when those with the authority to secure work capacity are distracted or inattentive. Capacity is then likely to drop or fizzle away, causing queues, delays, waiting and erosion of quality. With an eye on cost reduction or control, capacity will likely be compromised, too. Time will spiral out of control. You will likely reduce capacity to optimize cost, instead of keeping time and capacity in check. In short: In a complex environment like project management, capacity orientation is a recipe for disaster.

The alternative: Fix time and duration, then design the project delivery system for capacity, instead of becoming a victim of it. In the Time-Oriented Software Implementation, TOSI, approach to project work, which we are currently developing at the BetaCodex Network, time is fixed to, say 3 months, with capacity being subjected to this constraint. This means that capacity will be designed as a system, for the project period of 90 days, which, pretty much regardless of the price of an individual resource (like people’s time), will assure the lowest possible cost: You will only need those people for a maximum of 90 days - limiting waiting, minimizing problems of availability, hand-overs, queuing etc. Does this mean you need more “fully dedicated people” than in conventional project management? Maybe. But you will only need their full capacity for a period of three months - not years.

In short:

In change work, never make time a function.
Time is supposed to be the constraint,
while Quality/Scope and Cost are functions.
Making capacity the constraint, with Time being a function,
is a sure recipe for disaster.

Competing dogmas: Siloed Time and Flow Time

So where does the common disdain for the constraint of time come from? Why do we try to manage unmanageable things like utilization, instead of designing systems and for capacity? I suggest that the underlying problem is a prevailing concept of time that is centered in the past – and often a clearly distorted vision of the past. Management thought leaders keep preaching that obsolete view of time, sadly. Take the example of strategy guru Gary Hamel, who I very much admire, but who likes to accentuate his view that change is growing exponentially growing, over time, claiming that “everything accelerates.” Innovation accelerates, as the story goes, so we must change faster, and innovate ever faster. “These are unique times”, Mr Hamel and other gurus keep saying. It feels both chilling and important.

The everything accelerates dogma is more narrative than fact, of course. Most things do not accelerate, if you think about it. Even the field of AI, things accelerate, but then they consolidate and become less speedy than what those gurus like to assume.

The everything accelerates dogma comes with certain, less optimistic and rather contradictory assumptions about change and social systems: It claims that internal change in organizations hard, slow, or too slow (“You have experienced how tough and slow it is!”). Usually one of the reasons given by the dogmatists is that “people dislike change”, or “find change hard.” Which runs counter to scientific knowledge around change both personal and social. As change takes “a lot of time” in the everything accelerates dogma - time is an enemy which we suffer from. It is “the great harvester”. Put together, I have come to a somewhat sobering conclusion about the promoters of the everything accelerates dogma: That its thought leaders are missionaries of hype and doom. In their minds, the future is an empty and indeterminate dimension, closed off to knowledge. The future is something we should be afraid about, and humans – individually and in groups – are hopelessly incapable of processing the change that is forced upon us. Despair and run!

I have long struggled with the everything accelerates dogma and with the remedies that its proponents promote. But I found it hard to grasp and articulate for myself an opposing, more positive and humanistic dogma about time, the past and the future, change and how we can create solutions, instead of getting stuck. Until, a few weeks ago, I discovered that a more positive take on time already exists. I found this approach, and a rounded critique of the dominant, and flawed view of time in an article entitled The times of cause and flow in organizational change, by Ron Purser, Allen Bluedorn and Jack Petranker. The three researchers published their article more than two decades ago, in 2004, arguing that the future is immediately available – it is present arriving. Purser, Bluedorn and Petranker make the case that common belief in the notion of Siloed Time (which the authors call Causal Time) is misguided and impractical, submitting us to temporal alienation – a gloomy vision about both the present and the future (see table below). The authors also argue that an opposing, more realistic view of time exist, which they brilliantly call Flow Time.

I have attempted to sum up these two opposed views of time in an overview. The facets of these notions of time cannot be explored in this article, of course. But I am inviting you to explore them yourself. It will be well worth your time.

Based on: Purser/Bluedorn/Petranker (2004), Pflaeging/Hermann (2019), Weichselbaum/Pflaeging (2026)

Get unstuck: Adopt the constructive notion of Flow Time, to get human interactions and level up systems of work

Flow Time isn’t optimistic, but humanistic and constructive. The concept of Flow Time combines well with the BetaCodex Network research conducted from 2018 onwards, which showed

You may say that there is nothing new under the Sun, and that Flow Time isn’t new. Which is obviously true. This constructive way of thinking is just usually ignored. Instead, we have subjected ourselves, work and organizations to a limiting, and destructive view of time that is Siloed Time, which condemns us to hopelessness, failure and suffering. It’s about time to change our minds about time.

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