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).