I wonder what the limits of this are? From a naive point of view there has to be a point where training/skill/physical endurance/etc. come into play. The bed experiment seems to fit a fixed rate, assembly line style of work. While I would agree that numeric/performance ranking is mostly meaningless, everyone knows that one somebody you go to when no one else can fix a problem.
As you have observed already, this experiment is set up specifically to eliminate the effect of training/skill/physical endurance etc, and YET when it's performed in real life with a good facilitator, people who are unlucky start to feel like they're underperforming and need to step it up, while people who are lucky start to feel like they deserve the praise for doing well.
I've read about people who go for days after the experiment and feel bad about their subpar performance because they feel like they've let down or brought shame to their company and wonder if they couldn't have done something better.
And this is an experiment that's set up to remove any trace indivdual agency what so ever! People still beat themselves up over it.
When you experience this experiment for real, you start to forget that it's actually designed to eliminate any sort of skill.
In other words, the experiment shows how hard it is to recognise when we're judging the system and not the people in it. The experiment shows that even when you think you're seeing individual performance, it's very plausible you're not.
I see what you mean, but I also think that’s encapsulated in the idea of “ready willing workers.”
Obviously there are differences between people, and better and worse teams. But the lesson here is about how the environment factors in, and how management can accidentally arbitrarily suppress innovation or reward luck within normal bounds of success. Or hamper themselves to failure by insisting on a broken process.
Could it be the case that “everybody goes to Jim,” and as a result, Jim gets good at helping people? Could it be that if everybody just went to Kim for 2 weeks, that her fixes might turn out to be better yet completely orthogonal method of solving the problem?
The Red Bean experiment is an antidote to rigid process and the praise/blame game as based on inspection of results. It’s a story intended for management to hear, not an absolution or dismissiveness of personal reasonability.
If you’ve hired “ready willing workers,” then looking at the results doesn’t necessarily show you who was killing it and who wasn’t.
That worker who is always “killing it” may be good at scooping up projects that always look great. That worker who is always underperforming might be maintaining essential infrastructure without which the system would fall apart.
The worker who’s killing it may be doing so by spending all their time “buttering up” a customer. The worker who appears underperforming may appear so because they spend all their time “buttering up” a customer, but someone else always lands the sale.
Focusing on the type of work being done is a bit of a bike shed, since the experiment isn't about the work per se, but the measurement of the work as a function of the employee alone - ie, without the context of the systems in which the employee functions.
A good example of the type of mismeasurement done in non-manufacturing contexts is the ridiculously stupid burn-down chart.
