[JoshTriplett]

> There comes a point where you'll say something like "Huh, that looks interesting, I wonder what would happen if X", just because you still have some engineering thinking left in you, and three weeks later you'll get word that somebody spun up a working group to investigate X.

This is somewhat avoidable. You can communicate this to your team. You can make it clear you invite feedback and corrections, and demonstrating that in practice by responding well when people take you up on that. You can ask questions in a way that invites answers. You can make your relative level of expertise clear in an area when you ask questions.

And on the occasions when this still happens, sometimes it'll be because your musings sparked an idea in someone, and they thought it was a good idea to investigate X.

[groby_b]

Yes, you can avoid this to some extent. But as team size grows, the scope for misunderstanding grows. And so your communication has to become as clear as you can possibly make it.

Which means musings, mumblings, funny remarks, sarcasm, and snarkiness are right out. All of those require shared context, and the bigger the audience, the less shared context there is.

[ryandrake]

I worked in a place once where, when you met with any of the senior execs, you had to have 2-3 notetakers present, so that every word the guy said could be jotted down and turned into actions. Everything that came out of an exec's mouth had to be turned into a project, because nobody was willing to stick their neck out and try to distinguish between "random musings" and a "command to do this thing". It was a very toxic environment. It was kind of like those guys always following Kim Jong Il around with notepads recording everything Dear Leader says.

[camjohnson26]

Reminds me of the sticky bear sketch from Silicon Valley https://youtu.be/uAxAVusStCg