After 20 years in HR, I've watched various organisations run the same exhausted cycle — and the annual appraisal, as most organisations run it, is one of the most counterproductive rituals in modern business. Not because the principle is flawed — feedback, reflection, and goal-setting are genuinely essential — but because we have built a fundamentally broken process and then kept running it, year after year, wondering why nothing changes. I could provide a long list of why th