Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The six-month review
In practice, the six-month review mostly reflects the last 30 days because of recency bias, and it is rarely actionable: you're doing this well, you're doing that poorly, maybe do better. Olympic athletes have somebody coaching them and giving feedback every day.
Daily AI feedback
In Nubank's HR operational system, an engineer's AI copilot reviews their pull requests and shows how they use the tools and how they could use them better. A designer gets feedback on how they do their job and how they could do it better. The feedback is specific to the work.
Managers with more visibility
Managers with large teams have little information, and one-on-ones with every person tend to be low in information density. With this instrumentation, a manager sees in real time how each person on the team is doing, which helps people improve.
Why does recency bias distort performance reviews?
People remember the end of a sequence better than its middle, a pattern psychologists call the recency effect. In a 1962 free-recall experiment, Bennet Murdock found that people recalled the last items of a list most reliably. A reviewer working from memory will therefore lean on recent events. The first items in a list are also remembered better than the middle ones, which is why the pattern is called the serial position curve.
Why does daily feedback improve skill faster?
Psychologist Anders Ericsson studied elite violinists at a Berlin music academy and published the results in 1993. He found that the best performers spent the most time in deliberate practice, which includes specific goals and immediate feedback. Feedback that arrives soon after an action lets a person adjust before repeating a mistake. Elite sport applies the same idea with coaches who review every session.
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