You can optimize a system straight into dishonesty.
The Apollo virtues matter: go to the floor, measure flow, remove waste, repeat. I believe in them. They work. But they are not enough, because optimization can sharpen a process without touching the meaning people are protecting inside it.
On a night paving job, trucks stacked up and idle time burned cash in the dark. The dashboard made the waste obvious. But the waste-creating decision had happened hours earlier, when uncertainty was high and the only socially admissible move was to over-order trucks so no one got blamed for starving production.
That wasn’t a math problem. It was a meaning problem. The superintendent needed a way to surface uncertainty without looking incompetent. Planning tools worked only when they also functioned as communication tools and made it safe to be wrong in public.
That is the limit of Apollo: it can optimize a system, but it cannot metabolize what the system means to the humans inside it. Ignore that, and the metrics improve while the organization gets colder.