The Venetian Arsenale
This is documented history rather than a laboratory result. The events are well recorded. What they teach is an argument, and the entry makes it openly.
In 1574, the King of France visited Venice, and the Venetians wanted to impress him. So they showed off the Arsenale, their shipyard. Over the course of a single banquet, while the king ate his dinner, the workers assembled a complete galley, a full warship, from the keel up, and floated it out finished before the meal was over. At its height, the Arsenale could produce roughly one ship a day, at a time when the rest of Europe measured shipbuilding in months. And the reason was the design of the work rather than any special brilliance in Venetian workers. They had standardized the parts so pieces were interchangeable, they moved the hull past stations where specialized teams each did one job, and they organized the whole thing as a line, three centuries before the factories that made that idea famous.
When output has to be reliable, the answer is almost always a better designed process rather than a more heroic worker. The Arsenale did not depend on any single genius shipwright it could not afford to lose. It depended on a system where ordinary skilled people, each doing a defined part, produced extraordinary results together. If your work only holds together because a few exceptional people are carrying it, what you have is a fragile operation that happens to be working rather than a reliable one. The Venetians proved four hundred years ago that the structure, not the individual brilliance, is what makes output dependable.
Source: Documented history of the Arsenale di Venezia, sixteenth century.
Adam Smith, 1776
Opens with exactly this idea, that output comes from the division of the work, not the brilliance of the worker.
Draw your own card. It does not take long, and it rewards taking your time.