Schrodinger’s appraisal

As far back as 2009, I wrote an article for the Training Journal about the ineffectiveness of appraisal processes in organisations being rooted in their compression ratios. We try to compress a year's worth of work into an hour's worth of feedback and fail because this is beyond the tolerance of human communication. 

Appraisals don't work because appraisees arrive as a hot neurotic mess of hyper-vigilance, 

"Do you love me? Tell me you love me. Purlease.... tell me you love me. Oh God, you hate me, don't you?!" 

They over-interpret every available clue whether visual, verbal or otherwise from their line manager until they decode the central message as either good or bad. At which point they stop listening. If they perceive the negative, they either turn in on themselves in an auto-perpetuating spiral of self-loathing or they launch a counter offensive to rewrite the wrong that their manager is peddling. If they perceive the good they also stop listening and bask in self-satisfaction or start positioning for a pay rise.

Compare this with lesson observations for trainee teachers. Feedback sessions almost always occur directly or soon after the observed teaching. The feedback can sometimes take longer than the observed teaching itself. The student knows that they can improve and actually wants to be helped, so often the feedback doesn't feel like criticism and is thus welcomed.

The difference between the two approaches has parallels with Erwin Scrodinger’s famous thought experiment involving a cat, a radioactive source and a flask of poison. At the risk of an epic oversimplification only possible from a historian talking about quantum mechanics, Schrodigner’s cat inter alia articulates the superposition, in which the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. It is only when we open the box to observe, thus collapsing the waveform, that we establish the reality of whether it is alive or dead.

In the common or garden annual organisational appraisal described above, the appraisee tends to collapse the waveform very early on in the appraisal into the binary choice of either good or bad. Contrastingly, in the trainee teacher feedback session both trainee and mentor tend to maintain the superposition of both good and bad at the same time for much longer.

When we feedback about teaching we tend to reinforce and amplify positive behaviours e.g. “It was really good when you did X Y Z, you could also try using that approach in the following situations…”. We also tend to suppress negative behaviours with positive substitutions e.g. “Did you notice it went a bit flat when you did A B C, next time you could try D E or F”. The conversation holds onto the idea of both good and less than good teaching behaviour as being present in all lessons.

It’s odd that we don’t always take what we know from one domain to another.