Exactly, but that's out-of-story knowledge. Presumably in-story, the "red beads" means something else which we don't have intuition about - downtime incidents,

Exactly, but that's out-of-story knowledge. Presumably in-story, the "red beads" means something else which we don't have intuition about - downtime incidents, number of broken widgets produced, part yield... If those (in-story) managers had a basic statistics knowledge, they would have said: "Wait! The variance is too high, you cannot make any decisions based on 2-4 points". Then they'd do some statistical tests (or at least plot points with error bars and eyeball it), and realize that the numbers given are random noise and are not actually related to individual performance. But those managers apparently flunked their stat, or they forgot it all, so innocent people got fired, and project got cancelled. A sad story about why math is important even if you are not in STEM directly.