The Beta Universe is expanding fast
A world of opportunity is opening up for those willing to bring coherent self-organization, decentralization, flow and high performance to organizations
by Niels Pflaeging
A few days ago, I put together an update on the state of the Beta Universe. The updated overview allows a closer look at the ongoing expansion of the Beta Universe: The set of approaches, concepts, methods, business models and communication formats that make up BetaCodex theory and practice. One key pattern that emerges from the new update: In its 18th years of existence, the Beta Universe is finally becoming business-savvy.
This article is an invitation. An invitation to get involved with Beta practice - and to not just talk of transformation. It is an invitation to make Beta happen inside your own company, or to understand Beta transformation as a business, if you are a consultant, trainer, coach or facilitator. One thing will hopefully become clear to you from the following paragraphs: It has never been as attractive to be in the “Beta space” as it is right now. This is due to several reasons.
One major shift in Beta in recent years has been the arrival of a dizzying array of powerful approaches developed by members of the network. First came the work the system approaches OpenSpace Beta, Cell Structure Design and Relative Targets, which were created by Red42 between 2018 and 2021. Then came the arrival of the qomenius learning platform and the Big Five-based and non-judging personality test Myself at Work. The latter was created by
and her company distinctions. Both instruments can be used for many other purposes, but they were also developed with the intent of enabling and facilitating Beta transformations with organizations small or large.Even more recently, in 2025, we have developed breakthrough approaches to manufacturing or industrial production, and to software development. These entirely new approaches paving the way for Beta to impact many industry’s value creation even more profoundly. With these time-oriented approaches Beta advances into types of organizational value creation in which, up to now, more technocratic forms of Lean and Agile have been considered “best practice”.
The changing shape and nature of the Beta Universe
As recently as 2018, ten years into the BetaCodex Network’s journey, we were still making it pretty hard for ourselves to grow and get things done as a movement. While I wasn’t aware of it, at the time, it is clear with hindsight: Yes, the BetaCodex and its related concepts had been made “open source”, a decade ago. But we had been slow to offer ways for people to embrace Beta practice and Beta transformation - within organizations or as consultants. Unlike the Lean and Agile movement, weren’t betting on certifications, on building a trainer’s network, or on hourly/daily consulting fees (we still aren’t). On the other hand, we weren’t offering concepts that would make it easy to get things done in a Beta fashion.
The first successful attempt to change this was OpenSpace Beta – see top right on the image below. The OpenSpace Beta approach was created in 2018 and rooted in previous research by
and myself around Org Physics, Change-as-Flipping and Time-Boxed Change. It would enable companies to undertake Beta transformation within weeks instead of years, requiring only a minimum of outside help. It would enable capable consultants to undertake Beta transformation with clients from all industries and of all sizes, supported by some supervision from the creators, the first time they would do it. It was the beginning of a new, more accessible era for the Beta Universe.
In 2025, seven years on, the picture of the Beta Universe looks very, very differently. The amount of social technologies (“Work the System socio-tech”) has risen to five, with two new additions from 2025, namely OpenSpace DEV (an update on OpenSpace large-group conferencing for organizational development purposes) and Time-Oriented Software Development (TOSD). TOSD is a powerful, consistently time-oriented approach to “agile” software development which
and I are going to share with the world next week.A wide range of communication formats (dark blue dots on the right) now enable us to tell the world about Beta effectively. The formats include this Substack web magazine, podcasts in English and in Spanisch, 25 published research papers, 15 acclaimed books and booklets around Beta and Beta transformation, and, for sure, all kinds of social media presences.
New intervention tools like Flipo by Ernesto
Corona and the brand new BetaCodex Thermometer by Ernesto and Alejandro Faguaga of d-vops allow for highly effective and scalable workshop settings with clients and at public conferences. The use of these new intervention tools can be combined with Myself at Work and qomenius, to get conversations going Beta, and to support and accelerate Beta transformations.
The expanse: Time orientation extends the range of beta into new planetary systems
The most powerful trend in the Beta Universe that began this year may be our push into time-orientation. This seed for this development was sown through my professional partnership with the late Ernst Weichselbaum (1934-2024). Our close collaboration in the years 2017 to 2020, in particular, led to the publication of a joint book about Ernst’s stunning body of work around flow, lean organizing, consistent time-orientation and swinging production, in 2020. The book’s title: There is a better company inside every company. Since the publication of the book, I have tried to connect the pioneering insights from the Weichselbaum System with time-oriented thinking by others, with Lean concepts and practical theory from all kinds of business-related sciences.
One breakthrough has come from connecting time-orientation with other Lean concepts. In particular, with Lean RFS by
and Quick Response Manufacturing by Rajan Suri. Further insight came from relating the Weichselbaum System and time-orientation back to W. Edwards Deming’s work, to the history of Toyota and Taiichi Ohno’s work on the Toyota Production System. This led to the Time-Oriented Work Systems research, which I published as BetaCodex Research paper No. 24 earlier this year. In my mind, a major breakthrough for Beta, for Lean and the theory of manufacturing and industrial production.The Time-Oriented Work Systems research made me aware that there was more, much more to time-orientation in organizations than met the eye. A whole arena of new business theory and conceptual discovery was opening up by focusing work practices on rhythm, flow and time. Consulting work with my client Pradtke GmbH, a software company from Bochum, Germany, propelled this notion forward. A decentralized Cell Structure Design had been established at Pradtke in November 2024, and many improvements arge and small had been accomplished or were under way , including a profoundly new business model for Pradtke. But by Spring 2025 it had become clear that the practice of software development at Pradtke needed a more substantial overhaul, too. I figured that so-called “agile” approaches like Scrum or Kanban weren’t going to cut it, and that more consistent time-orientation, self-organization and flow had to be part of the solution. In June 2025, I had sketched out that first ideas to Time-Oriented Software Development (TOSD). We brought the concept to Pradtke at the beginning of August. The company managed to go live with TOSD as a new approach to organizing software development within four weeks.
We might call 2025 the year in which we made consistent time-orientation more broadly applicable in lean production and agile software development. But clearly, there are further fields of application for time-orientation in business worth exploring. We are currently discussing additional fields of application among BetaCodex Network associates. The story of Beta, time-orientation, flow and rhythm is by no means fully told.
The goal, remember, isn’t to produce fancy tools and shiny new techniques
Extending the range of approaches, concepts, insights and attractors in the Beta Universe is important. But the tools and techniques are means to an end that’s rooted in impact. The ultimate objective of BetaCodex movement is something different than methods and tools: Since 2008, our reason for being has been to promote and produce transformation of real-world organizations from Alpha (command-and-control) to Beta. The good news is: We are advancing well in that area, too.
Now, every year companies are going live with their respective, decentralized Cell Structure Designs, aided by Relative Targets performance systems. The most recent such company has been an global tech firm with headquarters in Germany. It went live with its decentralized structure just a couple of weeks ago, at the start of October, aided by
of Red42. BetaCodex approaches like OpenSpace DEV have played a role in this company’s transformation, and the qomenius learning system is about to be used to help cell teams reach the next level of performance, together.The arsenal of concepts, social technologies and tools at our disposal is now so rich and dense, that Beta transformation work with organizations, teams and individuals, has become viable, very fast and very reliable. Beta is now highly attractive both as a practice and also as a business. The objective is to impact organizational practice. What is holding you back?
For more detail around the Beta Universe update, watch yesterday’s episode of BetaCodex LIVE in which
and I talked about what’s new and next in the Beta Universe! You can watch the full episode No. 75 of BetaCodex LIVE here.
Disclosure: This article was written without the use of A.I. tools - except for research and translation purposes.
Wow. It is so important to keep updating and classifying the work. It is wonderful to see how, over the years, a far-reaching infrastructure of thought models, but also very practical offerings, tools, etc., has developed. Endless possibilities for practical work.