Fable
Only invite the first few suitable masters for each piece of iron
The market consultation tent originally ran on a familiar set of methods. When the consultation manager saw fewer patients, he let whoever was free take the next consultation, and rarely made mistakes when seeing patients at the old pace.
Later the matter grew larger. As patients increased, the famous doctor was surrounded so tightly that urging voices lined up from early morning to evening. The newcomers thought this was a quantity problem, solvable by sending more people and adding more hours; the veterans, however, saw that many details had already crossed the boundary that the old methods could bear.
The person in charge tried the first approach: have every physician see every patient. In the first few days there was indeed improvement, the queue got shorter, and outsiders felt this craft had finally caught up with the new times.
But trouble quickly changed shape. Some people skipped inspections to rush progress, some forced unsuitable work into old processes, and the most skilled people were dragged down by trivial matters. Errors were not always visible on the surface and often only emerged after delivery. The old ledger could still explain where things came from, but it could not explain how to change for the next step.
The person in charge added more rules, requiring everyone to sign more, report more, and add another layer of protection. On paper it looked thorough, but on site it was slower; the craftsmen were busy proving they were not wrong, while the real cracks continued to widen in place. Onlookers only saw results fluctuating between good and bad, and people on site found it increasingly difficult to judge whether to save speed, quality, or responsibility first. Everyone felt they had done a little more, yet the whole thing did not become more stable because of it.
A silent old craftsman laid several failures on the table. He blamed no one, only had everyone look at the same detail: the new restriction had never entered daily practice, and only suddenly appeared before delivery. He laid the several reworks out in the order they occurred, and only then did everyone discover that mistakes were always amplified at the same corner.
So the workshop adopted a new rule: the doctor at the door would first select the two or three most suitable specialist physicians to receive patients. At first, everyone was uncomfortable, as if their hands and feet were tied; but after several rounds, rough shortcuts were blocked, and truly reliable actions gradually remained.
When the same pressure came again, delivery did not become fancier, but it was clearly more reliable. The intake supervisor finally understood: sending problems to the few most suitable people saves effort and reduces chaos. If you wait until the end to remedy things, the cost is often already buried in every earlier choice; this new path did not eliminate cost, but made cost appear earlier, making it easier to handle while changes were still possible.