Annual reviews: a ritual that grades the past to avoid talking about the future

The annual performance review is a strange kind of theatre. Everyone knows it is a compressed, retrospective guess, assembled from a few memorable incidents and whatever happened in the month before it was due. Yet organisations keep staging it with the solemnity of a verdict. My sense is that its real function is not measurement but permission: it gives managers a sanctioned excuse to have one dreaded conversation a year, and gives employees a number to argue with instead of a question to answer. The tragedy is that the document usually lands in a drawer while the useful conversation, about what someone is actually trying to do next, gets postponed until it is too late to matter.