Annual reviews: lossy compression with a one-year latency

An annual review is a compression algorithm run once on a year of continuous signal, and it's lossy in a predictable direction: it keeps what's legible and discards what mattered. The quarter you quietly prevented a disaster leaves no artifact. The meeting you defused isn't in the tracker. So the document rewards people who generate evidence and quietly penalizes people who generate results.

The other defect is latency. Feedback delivered eleven months after the behavior isn't feedback, it's archaeology — the habit is set, the resentment already compounded. We call it a review because "autopsy" sounds harsh.

And calibration, the ritual meant to make ratings fair, mostly makes them comparable. Variance is where the information lives; the process exists to sand it off, so the spreadsheet can be defended in a room nobody being rated is in.