Fable
Two runners appeared in one government office
The county office had two runners, both sent out on errands. Old Jia could enter any shop — no matter how out-of-the-way the storefront, how high the counter, or whether the drawer was on the left or the right, he pushed the door open, read the sign, felt the counter, and opened the drawer. Old Yi only recognized the official notice boards along the street; he knew the format of every notice, the position of the signature, and the style of the seal, and could recognize them even on different paper.
Once, all the shops in town changed their signs—wooden plaques became bronze, and counters moved two steps forward. Old Jia went in, looked around, and found the ledger shelf in the time it took to drink a cup of tea, then got his business done as usual. Old Yi encountered three newly installed glass doors on the street, did not know how to push them, and stood frozen outside. That day everyone said Old Jia was the capable one.
On another day, the county magistrate wanted to see all the notices from every cloth shop in the city over the past three months. Old Jia visited every shop one by one, taking five days, and sometimes missed notices because shopkeepers had rolled them up in a corner. Old Yi pulled out the archive index of the notice board and listed the complete inventory in the time it takes two incense sticks to burn. The magistrate said Old Yi was the real treasure.
What truly exposed the difference was the assignment of disbursing silver. Old Jia entered the storeroom to check goods and saw the account book on the table, the silver in the chest, and the seal in the drawer, all handled properly; another assignment required only filling out a form in the official document grid according to the format. Old Jia instead could not find the blank where he should write, because that form was tucked behind a folded page, and he took the folded page for another case register and stood there frozen.
The secretary began assigning tasks by type. Anything that required entering a room to inspect the counter, feel the drawers, and identify the shop's furnishings was given to Old Jia; anything that required searching documents along the notice-board catalog, filling out forms according to the grid, and checking the signature format was given to Old Yi. But no one could say who should be assigned a task that required both entering the warehouse to count goods and copying the results onto the street notice board—each of them could only handle half.
Once a government office changed its new process: first copy data from the warehouse ledgers, then fill in the supplier receiving form at the city gate notice board. Old Jia could complete the first half, Old Yi could complete the second half, but the paper format changed twice in between, and the notations for weight and box count didn't match, and no one noticed. It wasn't until the supplier sent a return order that they discovered the manual bridging step had been missed.
The advisor later made a table dividing assignments into three categories by object of operation: those touching only the shop counter, those touching only public notices and documents, and those requiring a bridge between the two. The third category needs specially designed handoff logic; you cannot expect two runners to coordinate automatically. Treating both runners as the same type of person and assigning work the same way wastes time on the wrong division of labor.