Annual reviews are a massive agile anti-pattern
January. Time for the annual review. A moment for discussion and reflection on last year’s plan. Maybe some appraisal here and there. Reflection is good, right? I mean, in Scrum we almost preach about inspection and adaptation.
So I felt I performed well last year. Reeled in my own assignment, finished the Disruptive Strategy course from Harvard, started a podcast series on business agility (available on all the big platforms). Did some really cool things. And then it struck me: none of these were part of my year plan. The same thing can happen to my colleagues, as they have the same format. Limiting the discussion to ‘inspect’ the plan, unable to change anything about it. Inhibiting adaptation. What happened?!
Career development is empirical, too
There were some things I planned, together with my employer, for the 2020 year. Things included advancement on the Professional Scrum Trainer track, obtain the last certificates by Scrum.org (gotta catch ’em all) and follow up on the Co-Active Coaching fundamentals I did in 2019. These provide easy checkboxes to tick off.
But as time progresses, we never seem to reflect on the plan iteratively. In other words, if anything happens in the meantime, there is no “formal event” to adjust the path that has been set out. I can…
