The other side I heard from someone who worked at Amazon:
The SMEs read critically and take the full time. The PMs skim it and start pitching whatever idea comes first to mind.
The SMEs read critically and take the full time. The PMs skim it and start pitching whatever idea comes first to mind.
This is a problem regardless of the document culture. If anything the document culture gives you an objective standard that makes it very clear whether a line of discussion is on topic.
The act of “shutting down a tangent” will be seen as hostile and a grudge is created. Hurt parties will refuse to or be difficult to cooperate with. Your culture can survive only if there’s a shared commitment to it and people feel like they belong.
Perhaps you would want to shut down “politely” and it’s an art to do it without embarrassing the receiving party? But that means that only people with such political skill/power can take that action.
"Thanks for raising that. In this meeting I want to focus on X. Why don't you start an email thread with <whoever> or setup a time to discuss this later."
But what typically happens is people get excited and have ideas. That's great, but focus is key and people need to be reminded.
TBH, I don't even see any art in shutting it down. I get excited about ideas and can head off on tangents. The meeting runner (or anyone else) should call me out, and get us back on track. And when this happens, I apologize and thank them for the reminder.
It's easy to get excited and run off topic a bit. Brining it back in actually shows a respect for everyone in the room. Not everyone in the meeting is interested in the random off the rails thread anyway, schedule a follow up and get the meeting back on track.
Ah, corporate language :-)
Let's not solve this, solve.
It's a transient state that leads to a solution eventually but not necessarily by the end of the first discussion
To Solve: To identify a definitive solution immediately.
Sure, you're not wrong, it's corporate-speak. But it does have some nuance.
To be clear, it’s very possible that both these perspectives can be true simultaneously. Big corps are one in name only, different divisions could be different companies and thus the variance in experience.