Continuous, Real-Time, Semi-Structured Feedback Instead of Annual Reviews

In a question on Quora about how a start-up should handle performance reviews, John Lilly writes:

After believing in annual reviews for most of my career, I don't really believe in them anymore. Not timely enough, demoralizing in general (everyone thinks they're above average), and just a hell of a lot of work for everyone. This negative view of annual & traditional reviews is quite strongly supported by university research -- it's just counter-productive, even though we all think we should do it.

via ben.casnocha.com

brains learn more effectively from success than from failure. http://goo.gl/YVwly via @kevlinhenney

i've watched Kevlin Henney's talk from NDC 2011 on cognitive biases.  about 15-20 min in he references a study on how the brain learns from success and failure.

that we learn better from success because of how we're wired in the brain should inform us in a lot of contexts - that goes for the rest of the biases mentioned in the talk, too.

some of those contexts:

• failed projects - learning from, what you change next time
• strengths-based thinking
• reviews, retrospectives
• learning all sorts of new stuff
• how you teach stuff, trying to get others to learn
• business startups (perhaps motivation for lean startups)
• creating prosess based on revealing failure...
• estimates - expecting them to get better next time
• budgets (optimism, large numbers)
• comprehension of complexity in code
• adding people to a project mid-project
• testing
• usability (from programmers' perspective)
• multitasking, in work and life
• meetings
• planning
• tolerance for randomness, variation in software development