I'm a pretty idea-ish person, and I sometimes intentionally rein in the "where we really want to get to with this" talk if I feel like the audience isn't right,

I'm a pretty idea-ish person, and I sometimes intentionally rein in the "where we really want to get to with this" talk if I feel like the audience isn't right, but I think the real key is emphasizing what has been done already and what the immediate next steps are— that puts the accountability out there and keeps the conversation grounded in reality. I think another litmus test for idea-executor vs pure executor is your willingness to do throw-away work. A pure executor reads the design doc, says "sure", and just builds it— an idea-executor recognizes that the long-term maintenance of the system will almost certainly dwarf the initial cost of coding it up, and is willing to extend the discovery phase with partially-functional prototypes and so-on in order to really get a firm handle on whether the thing is going to go where they want it to go. (Recent example— building up chunks of a moderately complicated build setup in parallel in Jenkins Pipeline and GitLab CI in order to understand how the two solutions would compare on maintainability, end user ergonomics, permissions hassles, flexibility, how much documentation we would need to support it, etc etc.)