Let’s take it offline

A sure sign, in an all-hands conference call , that some ingénue has made the fatal mistake of dropping through the cloudbase of cliché and into the inconvenient world of substance and detail, a grim place of intractable ugliness that is immune to resolution by crystalline management theory. You have as much chance of persuading a management consultant to embrace the actual workings of daily life as you have persuading someone who quite likes steak to help slaughter a cow.

Fortunately, there’s a ready made defence. Expect a hasty plea to “take it offline” which, by tonal inflection, you might read as “let’s set aside some time to drill down into detail just the two of us, sort it out, and circle back with a bit more granularity later in the day” (benign), or “ugh — let's kick the can down the road and maybe something else will intervene to mean we never have to figure out the answer to that” (neutral), or “how about you just shut your cake-hole and let the change management workstream lead run the project, counselor?” (hostile).