Fable
Exactly how many machines in the city can do accounting
Every government office in Hechuan City had bought an accounting machine. The tax office had one, the warehouse had two, and the clinic even had one brought by a foreign merchant. Each machine had solved problems, so no one was in a hurry to keep a general ledger.
A few years later, the city lord asked: across the whole city, how many machines actually influence residents' decisions? No one could answer. Some were in active use, some had been tried and stopped, and some, though nominally stopped, still kept collecting data.
The staff first sent out a form. Some filled in only formal purchases, some missed what outsourced vendors brought in, and some thought small tools did not count. The form was neat, but the gaps were huge.
A single complaint made the problem serious. The clinic denied a patient's subsidy application based on a scoring machine that had long gone unmaintained. In the city, no one could be found responsible, nor could the rules and risk levels it relied on.
The city lord established a machine registry, no longer asking only what was bought, but which automated judgments are affecting business, customers, employees, or compliance obligations. Each machine is registered with its purpose, owner, status, vendor, data sources, risk level, and decommissioning plan.
After registration, the city saw the full picture for the first time: some were duplicates, some were high-risk with no reviewer, some were low-value yet occupying maintenance resources. The first step of governance is not to judge good or bad, but to first know where it is, who owns it, and what it affects.
After the machine registry was established, the hardest part was not registering new machines but dealing with old corners. Some said it was only a trial, some said the supplier was responsible, some said it had long been unused. The city lord required judgment by impact rather than by name.
As long as it still participates in decisions, still collects data, and may still change people's treatment, it must be registered. The machine register brought budget, responsibility, and risk to the same table for the first time, and the city also gained an order for cleanup and replacement. Later, when newcomers started, the old masters no longer began with abstract categories; instead they had them review that failure: where intuition had originally been relied on, why the first patch was not enough, and how the new arrangement kept risk in a place that could be checked. Only when they could explain these details clearly, and also point out when to continue using it and when to upgrade it, were they considered to truly understand this approach. Later they also handed this approach to newcomers for drills: first have the newcomer do it the old way and see how errors appear; then redo it under the new rules and see which step is blocked earlier and which step leaves evidence. If newcomers can only recite names, they will still misuse it in similar scenarios; only those who can state the applicable boundaries, costs, and remedies after failure are allowed to take on work independently.