Fable
How a detective agency works
There was an old detective in the city who had a fixed rhythm for solving cases: when a case came in, he first sat down and thought, decided what to investigate next based on known information, and after investigating looked at the results before thinking about the next step. Think, investigate, look, think again—that was how the case was pushed forward step by step. This rhythm had stayed with him for twenty years.
After the agency expanded and hired more people, the old detective began taking on apprentices. He found that the three apprentices he trained were very different: one thought quickly but did not know what to investigate, one investigated quickly but jumped to the next step without looking at the results, and another forgot to think about this step and rushed out to investigate for a whole day. The old detective realized that what the apprentices lacked was not any single action, but the rhythm of advancing through the whole alternating process.
He did something very clumsy: he drew three boxes on the office wall—Think, Act, Observe—and then required every apprentice, after completing each step, to first walk to the wall and point at the current box before moving to the next step. After a few days, the apprentices' continuity in investigating cases improved noticeably, and the chain from clue to conclusion became clear.
Meanwhile, the firm bought a new set of lookup devices: a national archive index machine, an automatic telephone directory dialer, and a telegraph transceiver terminal. Each device had its own way of operating, but as long as you told it what you wanted, it could quickly return results. The old detective found that putting these devices into the execution step was most efficient—think clearly about what to look up, then decide which device to use for the lookup.
Once, an apprentice confused equipment with rhythm. He thought having equipment was enough, skipped thinking and directly tuned three devices to query in parallel, bringing back a pile of data on the table with no idea what to do next. After looking, the old detective said one sentence: equipment is for execution, rhythm is something that cannot be skipped in the whole process. You skipped the thinking step, so the later observation had no direction.
The firm drew a diagram in the new employee handbook: at the top is a three-cell loop—think, act, observe; below it are the names of various tools. The loop tells you when to use which posture, and the tools tell you exactly how to adjust which device. If the loop breaks, no matter how many tools there are, they can only produce noise.
When the old detective retired, the three-line grid was still on the wall. The apprentices pasted the names of new tools and operating manuals under each row, but the three-line grid itself had not changed in twenty years. In the old detective's words: rhythm is the bone, tools are the flesh. As long as the bone does not break, any flesh that grows can do the work.