You can optimize a system and still make the people inside it less able to tell the truth.
The Apollo virtues matter: go to the floor, name constraints, measure flow, remove waste. They work. I’ve seen them work spectacularly. But they break at a specific boundary: they can improve the machinery while the human substrate quietly deteriorates.
I saw it on a night paving job. Trucks stacked up, idle time mounted, dollars burned in the dark. The waste was not stupidity. It was insurance. Hours earlier, when uncertainty was still high, the only socially admissible move was to over-order trucks to protect production.
That is the limit of Run Time. Dashboards can reveal waste after the fact. They cannot make uncertainty speakable before the fact. As I wrote in the book, Ritual Time did what Run Time could not: it made it safe to be wrong in public.
That matters now because AI will make optimization cheaper. It will not make truth easier to bear.