Fable
The bridge repairer skipped seven useless steps
Carpenter City had an apprentice street where newcomers collected wood, found blueprints, borrowed planes, and asked masters for acceptance checks. The city lord only looked at finished product counts and felt the street was already busy enough.
But the new apprentices complained privately: the drawings were scattered in three places, the planes often lacked blades, the inspection master appeared only in the afternoon, and one wrong step meant running halfway across the city. Many were not poor craftsmen; they simply spent time finding the way and waiting for people.
The city lord first posted more notices, and the notices grew thicker and thicker, but no one read them to the end. Later he personally followed a new apprentice through the whole process, from collecting materials to handing over the finished piece, noting every pause, guess, duplicate form, and unanswered question.
The workshop then changed its layout: commonly used tools were placed at the entrance, drawings were uniformly numbered, trial wood was free to take, small mistakes could be checked on the spot, and complex problems had fixed inquiry hours. The old craftsman also wrote common pitfalls into a short booklet.
In the first month after changing the route, output did not immediately double, but rework decreased and newcomers dared to ask questions. The old carpenter benefited too: he no longer had to answer how to walk the same route every day and could spend time on truly difficult joinery.
Only then did the city lord understand that whether streets are convenient is no small matter. Good craftsmanship requires materials, blueprints, tools and feedback to all be in place in time; removing seven useless steps is often more useful than urging people to run faster.
The new apprentice later drew the onboarding path as a short map and posted it at the street corner. The city lord no longer treated busyness as efficiency: one person running across half the city might just mean the system made him take detours. A truly good street lets people spend their strength on building bridges, not on looking for planes. Later, when craftsmen from the outer city came to learn, they could also find the drawings, tools, and acceptance inspector within half a day. The carpenter city did not lower its craft requirements; it merely removed unnecessary friction. The difficulty that remained was the difficulty truly worth learning. Many newcomers therefore did not become smarter, but they applied their intelligence to the right things faster. The road was shorter too.
A few months later, there was more finished work, not only because the apprentices were more diligent, but because the path to good craftsmanship had become shorter. Reducing obstacles, guesswork and waiting for the people doing the work is itself engineering that raises output.