I have a hard time identifying with this. The premise seems to be that the worker is just a passive participant in the system, literally a ping pong ball on a galton board. If the end state isn't what is desired the problem is with the board not the balls. This in fact may be true in the large, but that is the same as saying that management systems and processes are for people that need management systems and processes, reliably producing mediocre results. There is definite tension in accepting that this mediocrity is practically inevitable if anything is going to be done at scale.
If you treat people as overly simple machines you might as well mechanise that part of the process.
Human workers have hand skill, learning, intelligence, wisdom, introspection, communication, colour and pattern recognition all of which are not being utilised making the job repetitive and unfulfilling.
Then the threat of firing based on a random metric - this would create a culture of fear and one would expect a high turnover of any ‘good’ employees.
I agree this would be a horrible place to work.
Which is the genius of the allegory - how the wrong metric can make efficiency and progress impossible.
Of course even a good metric becomes corrupted according to Goodhart's law:
“
When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric because people will seek to game it.”
‘The Wire’ remains a salutary lesson on how all stats when tied to pay and promotion will get ‘juked’.
A metric can measure nothing but random chance ( there is always some randomness that is rarely accounted for ) - this makes management impossible and workers disempowered.
Even with good stats there are too few Baysians vs Frequentists in corporate numerical analysis.
In terms of the company in this analogy a useful exercise is to imagine how to improve things.
An immediate solution could be to allow the workers to make multiple sequential draws and to discuss what percentage of red beads constitutes a good draw and discard and resample if more red beads than that.
Let workers share their best practices and it may be that there is a subtle skill that can be learnt about how one wields the paddle in the box of beads to steer it away from red clusters.
Or divide and conquer and take fewer beads and allow the workers to discard all red beads, then combine the pure samples and batch up to correct size.
