Pegs All the Way Down
A CEO stands at the top of a Plinko board he didn't build, holding a chip he didn't ask for, about to drop it into an organization he doesn't fully understand. Bob Barker smiles from below. The audience is counting down. Compliance has never been more fun.
"COME ON DOWN!"
The voice is warm. Avuncular. Trustworthy. It belongs to no one in particular — it comes from the regulatory ether, from the EPA and the SEC and the ESG ratings agencies, from the zeitgeist itself. It has always been here. It will always be here.
And today, it's calling your name.
You're a CEO. You didn't ask for this. You were just sitting in the audience, running a company, minding your emissions. But now your name is on the screen and the audience is cheering and you have no choice but to make your way to the stage.
Bob Barker smiles. He's been doing this since 1972. He'll be doing it long after you're gone.
"Welcome," he says, placing a warm hand on your back. "You're going to play our most popular game."
Behind him, the curtain rises.
The board is enormous. Forty feet of pegs and slots, gleaming under studio lights. You've seen it before — everyone has — but you've never really looked at it. The pegs seem to shift when you're not watching. The slots at the bottom are labeled with outcomes you don't fully understand: COMPLIANT. AUDIT FINDING. REMEDIATION REQUIRED. MATERIAL WEAKNESS. RESTATEMENT. SUSTAINABILITY LEADERSHIP AWARD.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Bob says.
You nod, though you're not sure that's the right word.
THE CHIPS
"Now," Bob explains, "you've already earned one chip just by existing. Congratulations on being publicly traded. But you can earn up to four more by correctly pricing these items."
A model wheels out a pedestal. On it sits a small, unassuming object.
"This," Bob announces, "is a Scope 3 Emissions Calculation. Tell me — is the first digit a 3 or a 7?"
You have no idea. You look to the audience. They're shouting contradictory numbers. Your CFO is in the front row, making a hand signal you don't recognize. Your General Counsel appears to be praying.
"Three?" you say.
"THREE IS RIGHT!"
Confetti. Applause. A chip is pressed into your palm. It's heavier than you expected.
Three more items follow: a Carbon Offset Verification Protocol, an ESG Disclosure Framework, and something called a Supplier Sustainability Attestation that no one in your organization has ever seen before. You guess. The audience carries you. Your Chief Sustainability Officer — hired eighteen months ago for this exact moment — mouths answers from the third row.
Four chips. You hold them like verdicts.
"Wonderful," Bob says, gesturing toward the stairs. "Now. Let's play Plinko."
THE ASCENT
The stairs are steep. With each step, the audience seems farther away. By the time you reach the top, you can barely hear them — just a dull roar, like the ocean, or like shareholders at an annual meeting.
Bob doesn't climb with you. He never does. He stands at the bottom, microphone in hand, smiling up. Behind him, leaning against the podium, you notice a long wooden stick. It catches the light. You wonder what it's for.
"You can drop the chip from anywhere along the top," he calls up. "It's your choice. Wherever you think gives you the best chance."
You look down at the board.
The pegs aren't arranged in any pattern you recognize. Some sections are dense, almost impassable. Others are sparse, offering the illusion of a clear path. You notice, near the middle, a cluster of pegs that forms a bottleneck — every trajectory seems to pass through it. Someone has scratched words into the board there, barely legible: OPERATIONS/ACCOUNTING INTERFACE.
Below that, another cluster: CONTRACTOR DOCUMENTATION.
And lower still, in a region so dense with pegs it seems almost solid: LEGACY SYSTEMS (DO NOT TOUCH).
You realize, with a sinking feeling, that you didn't build this board.
You don't even know who did.
It just... emerged. Layer by layer. Peg by peg. Decades of org charts and approval workflows and "that's how we've always done it" — all of it calcified into this towering, inscrutable machine. The board isn't architecture. It's geology. Sediment. The accumulatedite of every reorg, every compliance initiative, every well-intentioned process improvement that never quite improved anything.
And now you're supposed to drop a chip through it.
THE PRAYER
You think about the memo you sent last week. The one announcing the initiative. You remember the language you used: commitment to excellence, cross-functional collaboration, timely and accurate submission. You remember the org-wide email, the mandatory training announcement, the formal attestation requirements.
Standing here now, you understand what that memo actually was.
It wasn't a plan. Plans have steps. Plans have contingencies. Plans account for the fact that Greg retired in 2019 and no one remembers how the spreadsheet works.
The memo was a prayer.
Every sentence was a hope. Departments will collaborate — please let the chip bounce left here. Managers will attest — please let it clear this peg cleanly. Questions should be directed to — please, God, let it find that slot.
You wrote the memo because you had to write something. You sent it because that's what CEOs do. You announced training and attestations and cross-functional support because the words exist and the words sound right and the words are what you say before you drop the chip.
But the chip goes where the board wants it to go.
And the board doesn't want anything. It just is.
THE DROP
You hold the first chip over the board. You slide it back and forth along the top rail, searching for the spot that feels right. The audience counts down.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
You let go.
Plink.
The chip hits the first peg and bounces left. You didn't expect that. You thought you'd released it dead center. But the board has its own physics, its own logic, its own memory of every chip that came before.
Plink. Plink.
It's picking up speed now, ricocheting through layers you've never seen. You watch it pass through a section marked REGIONAL VARIANCE and carom off a peg that someone has labeled TODD.
Plink.
For a moment, it seems to be heading toward the center — toward the big slot, the jackpot, the SUSTAINABILITY LEADERSHIP AWARD that would look so good in the annual report. The audience gasps. You grip the railing.
Plink. Plink. Plink.
It veers right. Then hard left. It passes through TRAINING COMPLETION VERIFICATION without slowing down. The training was supposed to align the pegs. The training was supposed to create a clear path. But the pegs don't move. The pegs never move. The pegs just sit through ninety minutes of content, check a box, and remain exactly where they were.
Plink.
You lose sight of the chip entirely. It's somewhere in the lower third of the board now, bouncing through regions that have never been audited. You think you see it glint near DATA VALIDATION (OWNER: TBD), but you can't be sure.
The audience is murmuring. Bob is smiling.
THE STICK
Suddenly, the chip stops.
It's wedged between two pegs, frozen in place, halfway down the board. The plinks have ceased. The audience holds its breath.
Bob reaches behind the podium.
He produces the stick.
It's longer than you realized — six feet, maybe seven, made of smooth wood worn by use. He's called it the "Trusty Plinko Stick" in interviews, spoken of it with folksy affection, like it's a beloved tool that helps things along.
But watching him hold it now, you understand what it actually is.
It's not a helping hand. It's not gentle guidance. It's the only intervention the game allows, and it is not subtle.
The stick is the audit. The stick is the enforcement action. The stick is the headline in the Wall Street Journal, the congressional inquiry, the career-ending footnote in next quarter's 10-K. The stick is what happens when the chip stops moving and the system doesn't get its result.
Bob doesn't climb the stairs. He doesn't reach in and carefully guide the chip toward a favorable slot. He simply extends the stick, finds the spot where the chip is lodged, and whacks.
The whole board shudders. Pegs rattle. Somewhere in the middle, something falls off — a piece of legacy infrastructure, maybe, or someone's institutional knowledge.
The chip pops free and resumes its descent.
Plink. Plink. Plink.
Bob returns the stick to its place behind the podium. "Sometimes," he says to the audience, "they get stuck."
He doesn't say what happens if they stay stuck. He doesn't have to.
The stick is always there. The stick is always watching.
The chip must reach the bottom. The system demands a result.
THE LANDING
Plink.
Plink.
...
Silence.
The chip has landed.
You lean over the railing, trying to see which slot. The angle is wrong. The lights are blinding. You can't tell if you've won or lost or landed somewhere in between where the categories blur.
Bob walks to the board. He peers at the bottom with practiced theatricality. He turns to the audience.
"COMPLIANT!"
The audience erupts. Confetti falls. Music plays. A number flashes on the scoreboard — not the jackpot, but not zero either. Acceptable. Defensible. The chip is in a slot and the slot has a label and the label isn't MATERIAL WEAKNESS, so you smile and wave because that's what you do when you're compliant.
You descend the stairs on unsteady legs. Bob meets you at the bottom with a firm handshake and a warmer smile.
"Congratulations," he says. "You're a sustainability leader."
Behind him, a stagehand is already retrieving your chip. There are only ten in existence — kept in a locked box, precision-engineered to ensure fairness, identical in weight and dimension so that no contestant can claim the game was rigged. The chips are sacred. The chips are controlled.
The board, meanwhile, remains exactly as it was. The pegs haven't moved. TODD is still there. LEGACY SYSTEMS (DO NOT TOUCH) is still impenetrable. The path the chip took is already invisible, untraceable, unrepeatable.
Nothing has changed. Nothing ever changes.
"Same time next year?" Bob asks.
You nod. Of course. There's always next year. There's always another chip. There's always another prayer dressed up as a memo, another descent through pegs that no one remembers installing.
Bob Barker goes home. He sleeps well. He always does.
The game was fair. The game is always fair.
He'll see you next quarter.
EPILOGUE: THE ATTESTATION
Back in your office, you receive an email. Dozens of managers across the organization have certified that all required data has been submitted and verified. Their signatures are on file. The documentation is in the system. The training completion rate is somewhere in the nineties — close enough that no one will ask questions.
You don't know if the data is accurate. They don't know if the data is accurate. The chip bounced through sections of the board that none of you have ever mapped. There's a region near the bottom labeled SPREADSHEET (FINAL_V3_USE_THIS_ONE) that contains calculations no living employee understands.
But the slot said COMPLIANT.
So you sign off and forward it to the auditors and update the board presentation and add "sustainability leadership" to your talking points for the investor call.
Somewhere, Bob Barker smiles.
The system worked. The system always works.
That's the miracle.
That's the horror.
Plink.