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.
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
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.