Let’s take this offline. The speaker moves a difficult topic out of the meeting and into a private talk.
Can I grab you for a minute? This is a quiet request to speak with someone alone.
Pull someone aside. This means to speak with one person away from the group, often about a problem.
I’m going to have to escalate this. The speaker takes a problem with a colleague to a manager.
Let’s loop in HR. A problem between people goes to the human resources department.
Can I push back on that? This is a polite request to disagree. It is often heard in meetings.
Let me play devil’s advocate. The speaker argues the other side on purpose to test an idea.
I respectfully disagree. The disagreement is open, and the tone stays polite.
Let’s agree to disagree. Both sides end the argument, and neither side gives in.
Challenge the assumptions. This is a common instruction in planning and strategy sessions.
Don’t be a yes-man. This is a warning against agreeing with the boss by reflex.
Kim Scott’s Radical Candor was a bestseller in 2017. It gives a common failing of bosses a name: “ruinous empathy.” The manager cares about a person but does not challenge the person directly. The criticism comes sugar-coated and unclear.
Scott had run the AdSense program at Google and later built a management course at Apple. She tells of an employee whose poor work she never named clearly. In the end she fired him. He asked her: “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Peter Drucker told a story about Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors. At a meeting of a top committee, Sloan said: “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded.
Sloan went on: “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting, to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain understanding of what the decision is all about.”
Drucker stated the lesson as a rule: “one does not make decision unless there is disagreement.”
In 1942 the town of Arlington, Vermont, held a town meeting on plans for a new school. Jim Edgerton was the lone dissenter. He stood and stated his objections. Norman Rockwell lived nearby. He watched the others listen to Edgerton with respect.
Rockwell painted the scene as Freedom of Speech. It appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on February 20, 1943. In the painting a young workman stands to speak. Rockwell’s neighbor Carl Hess posed for him.
The rules for after-action reviews at the Army’s Joint Readiness Training Center say the review is “not a critique.” It is “a professional discussion that requires the active participation of all attendees.” Army guidance asks leaders to “encourage people to give honest opinions.” A key rule is that “everyone gets a chance to enrich the discussion, from the company commander to the newest private.”
A 2007 report by the Army Research Institute found a limit. When senior leaders spoke first, it was “very difficult for junior personnel to think of anything new.” Starting with the lowest-ranking soldier “appears to elicit more responses.”
Lincoln–Douglas debate is a form of competitive debate between two students. It is practiced mainly in American high schools. It is named for the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. The format places heavy weight on logic, ethical values and philosophy.
In cross-examination each side questions the other. The negative side questions the affirmative “to expose logical flaws” in its argument. Within a tournament, each debater argues each side about equally often. The topics set by the National Speech & Debate Association change every two months.
Around midnight on September 12, 2001, CIA director George Tenet called in two of his senior people. The next morning the CIA formed its Red Cell. Tenet’s instruction to it was: “Tell me things others don’t and make [senior officials] feel uncomfortable.”
A Red Cell memo from 2010 carries a note. It says the cell has been charged with taking an approach that will “provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint.”
Andy Grove was president of Intel from 1979 and its chief executive from 1987 to 1998. He shouted at employees, often in front of others. He called this tactic “constructive confrontation.”
Grove’s stated aim was to “attack the problem not the individual.” The writer Betsy Corcoran was not a fan. She wrote that “too frequently the ‘confrontation’ could overwhelm the, ah, ‘constructive’ parts.”
Pixar calls its review group the Braintrust. It meets every few months to assess each film in production. Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, called it the studio’s “primary delivery system for straight talk.”
The Braintrust had no authority, Catmull said. “They could not tell the director what to do,” he said in a 2014 talk published by Stanford’s eCorner. He said Pixar needs “a lot of candor about what works and what doesn’t work.”