A company can become more efficient while becoming less truthful.
That is the limit of the Apollo Program: go to the floor, name constraints, measure flow, remove waste, repeat. Those tools work. I built a career on them. But they are necessary, not sufficient, because optimization cannot metabolize meaning. It can tighten the machinery while trust is spent down and people become colder, more guarded, more performative.
I saw this clearly on a night paving job. The dashboard showed trucks backed up and dollars burning in the dark. But the real mistake was not dispatch. It happened hours earlier, when uncertainty was high and over-ordering trucks was the only socially admissible move. In messy systems, waste is often insurance.
Ritual Time did what Run Time could not: it made uncertainty speakable before the fact and error discussable in public. That matters now because AI will reward optimization everywhere. The scarce advantage is building an organization that can metabolize error without burning its people.