Fable
Two machines at the weaving shop
At the east end of town there was an old weaving shop, filled with hand looms; weaving a bolt of cloth took three days. The owner, Master Wang, saw that other shops had adopted machines, so he gritted his teeth and bought ten automatic looms. Weaving was now ten times faster, and Master Wang was overjoyed.
But the new machine had a problem: it didn't know when to change the weft thread or when to change the color. Master Wang couldn't bear to let go of the old workers who had worked for twenty years, so he had them stand beside the machine and watch. When the machine reached a point where the thread should be changed, the old worker would shout 'stop' and then change the weft thread by hand. The machine was still fully automatic, but it couldn't do without a person for a single step.
This model was indeed effective. Output went up, and although people still had to watch over it, at least they no longer had to weave by hand. But Master Wang discovered a new problem: among the ten old workers, some had poor eyesight, some were slow to react, and some were clumsy. When thread changes were slow, the machine had to idle, and output still could not rise.
Meanwhile, a new weaving shop opened at the west end of town, and the owner was a young man. He did not use the old method at all, but directly imported a completely new full weaving setup from abroad. This setup required no human management from raw material input to finished product output. The machine sensed the weft color itself, adjusted tension itself, and reconnected broken threads itself.
The shop at the west end ran smoothly at first, with output several times higher than the east end. But one day a small fault occurred in the control unit of the whole setup, and the entire production line stopped. The craftsmen were at a loss, because the setup was so new that no one could read the foreign-language manuals. In the end they asked Master Wang for help. After studying it for a long time, Master Wang said: "I can't fix this either."
The difference between the east shop and the west shop is not the machines, but whether "a person stands beside it watching" or "everything is handed over to the machine." At the east shop, a person directs the machine, and the machine is just a tool for doing work. At the west shop, the machine makes its own decisions, and if something goes wrong, you can only wait for the machine to fix itself.
Master Wang later figured it out: the East End shop used a "human + machine" hybrid model, where the machine was an extension of the hand, and when something went wrong a person could immediately patch it. The West End shop used a "full machine" model, where the machine was an independent complete setup, and when something went wrong a specialist had to be called to repair it.
People add new-style mechanisms into the process to help, but the core is still people managing things—this is a semi-automated process. From the start, the process was designed for the new-style mechanism, and the new-style mechanism can run the entire workflow by itself—this is a new-style-mechanism-native process.