Fable
All messengers share one master key
Every evening the post station had to look up records and reply to letters for several secretaries. In the past, each desk kept a complete set of master ledgers, so even when eight people looked up the same old contract, each had to leaf through it separately, and the room was full of duplicate boxes and cabinets.
The station clerk first added cabinets and hired copyists, but lamp oil and hauling only increased. Later he organized the commonly used ledgers into one set of public registers and placed them in the central cabinet; each scribe still asked questions based on his own incoming letters, but they shared the same basis for verification.
After the new rules went live, the clerks could still write in different tones and with different emphases, but they no longer had to each keep the same old archives. The central cabinet became a bottleneck during busy times, so the station clerks optimized placement based on the most frequently consulted files, rather than making eight more copies.
What the post station saved was the cost of duplicate storage and searching, not each person's judgment. Many questions could be raised separately, but the shared basis did not need to be loaded onto every desk over and over.