[nonfamous]

One of my Statistics professors made great use of one of these (he called it a Quincunx) our my Six Sigma class. It was about management, and how reacting to processes you can’t control just makes things worse.

He’d pick someone from the class, tell them he was going to check their performance (like they were a Sales manager), a run a ball through the Quincunx. If the ball landed on the left, that meant they’d underperform, and they got a tongue lashing. If it fell on the right, they got praise. People got angry about the senselessness of it all.

But that was the point. The lesson: if you mandate targets on something that is essentially random and can’t be controlled, you’re going to have a bad time. (And if you react to those random results by changing the process, results get even worse — but that was another class for another day.)