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Comment by cle | Hacker News Reader

If someone is wasting time in a meeting on tangents unrelated to the goal of the meeting, the person running the meeting has every right and obligation to shut down the tangent.

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.

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I agree 100%, I'm a product leader at Amazon, and if a meeting goes off the rails we will say "let's take that offline". I even inject things from my background and end it with "let's connect offline". I've even told leaders higher up in my management chain "Let's not solution this here, we can schedule time for that if we agree on next steps". They don't mind, we're all busy, often very excited about what we're reading, and in free-flow feedback mode.

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.

> Let's not solution

Ah, corporate language :-)

Let's not solve this, solve.

When you are in a room with Solution Architects.. what do you say.. use the vernacular of your audience.

Former AWS SA Manager here, my team had a standing joke about dissolving the problem.

I guess they should be renamed to Solve Architects, then :-p

To Solution = Discuss options, tradeoffs, identify next steps, working towards a possible solution.

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.

or even worse solutionise/solutionising.

Conversating

When you begin to enforce such rules is when you know the culture is going to shit.

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.

I think it's pretty easy to politely shut down tangents.

"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."

Meeting is about X. If someone rolls in and only wants to talk about Y they are one or more of these things, a) clueless, b) unprofessional, c) disrespectful of others time.

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.

Pal, it's like meeting 101, the only people possibly get butthurt about this are those with zero work exp

Um this happens all the time, and you know what, usually the people involved in the discussion realise it is the wrong forum and it is one of them who will suggest 'taking it offline' so as to not waste everyone else's time.

Not in my experience. I value it hen someone realizes that a discussion path left to its own will not help with the goal of the meeting and then asks to have that discussion in a different channel. This is true when I was contributing to the distraction as well as when I was wishing we could get back to the meeting's purpose

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