I agree. It doesn't have to be collusion, in fact, I can easily imagine that there's no large scale coordination, maybe just coordination in small 5-10 person teams. For any incentive scheme, there's going to be a subset of people trying to game it. Given that potentially tens of thousands of employees were presented with the same incentive scheme (the performance system), it makes sense that many people/small groups could independently create similar strategies.

I think it's made more concrete by thinking of how many times you've thought of an app, business, screenplay, etc. and realized later that a dozen others have had the same idea. I bet a dozen people in this thread independently sketched out an app like Uber/Homejoy/"AirBnb-for-X" at some point just based off having the common annoyance of taxi-finding or hiring help.

In standup comedy, this happens a lot because we're all living in 2016 so any joke about the election, Bradjelina, Game of Thrones or any other sufficiently public/widely-discussed topic will have dozens of people trying to make a joke off of it. I'd guess that the set of actions you can take in a 'corporate game' is more finite and structured, so it makes sense that thousands among tens/hundreds of thousands adopt the same strategy.