Week 4: Improvements for CommonLit

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, CommonLit constantly seeks feedback and ways to improve from both outside sources that may be critiquing certain features or content on the site or internally to make sure everyone has a positive work experience. I find this constant search for improvement admirable, but a few times I have noticed questions are often raised, a discussion is had, but a conclusion is not always reached.

Every Thursday during the curriculum team meeting, we have a section called Tactical. We go around in a circle and people bring up issues we want to discuss with the team, which may be anything ranging from how people use the message app to ways in which we could better share resources with each other. For the past couple weeks, when we go around this circle, everyone has passed (not brought up an issue) the first time around, so this week it was brought up that maybe we should broaden tactical to include discussions about outside topics for weeks when no one had any issue to bring up. It was during this Tactical on the very nature of Tactical itself that I started to question the usefulness of practice at all.

The week before we had talked about the messaging app we use, and whether or not there should be a protocol for responding to messages just to ensure that the sender knew you had seen it. After the allotted eight minutes for discussion, no conclusion had been reached, and the topic of conversation had danced around the original point to how distracting Slack can be and the use of private versus public channels. The week before that a similar thing happened when discussing the publicness of everyone’s calendars. Although they have a specific time set aside for solutions and next steps, this time usually is filled with more discussion and minimal resolution.

I admire the attempt to create a space to bring up issues, but I think more focus should be put on creating concrete next steps or solutions. Everything is timed (though more often than not, this time is extended), but I think only one major issue should be brought up in a Tactical session so that there is adequate time to come up with tangible next steps. Even just acknowledging that solutions are rarely reached could also be a starting point, so that people can be more intentional about solutions moving forward. On days when no one has an issue to bring up, I don’t think that people should force it because this leads to the discussion of problems that aren’t really problems and, therefore, have no solutions. Overall, the effectiveness of Tactical could be improved by not forcing people to come up with issues when there aren’t any and by focusing on concrete solutions and next steps.