This is unfortunately very true. You also have to be very careful with word/phrase choice in discussion about future work: people often hear “what we could do, is…” as “there is already a full feature that allows you to configure the tool to do…”.
You really have to drill home that ideas and possibilities are just that, and not concrete features that they could start using tomorrow.
Why is this unfortunate? If it weren’t true and people could separate the things, would we really be better off?
I ask because this guy s a common lament, but I’ve never figured out why. It shouldn’t be a surprise or (to me) disappointment that the fidelity of a communication also carries signal about the status.
Unfortunate because it's relatively easy now to mock-up the pretty part well enough to be mistaken for the real thing. Which people who don't have experience in this field then do, and get often get confused or upset even.
Example of this from another industry: working in manufacturing, a client wouldn't listen to our explanations about why their part wasn't ready to be molded in plastic. (lot's of design issues that would make it impossible to get out of the mold or lead to extreme cosmetic imperfections). To prove their point that their part designs were ready, they held up a 3d print of their part and said, "See? It's right here! You just have to do this!" This led to a half hour of answering questions before they started to understand that the two fabrication processes were very different and had different requirements.
I think the unfortunate part is really the time you have to sink into helping someone understand that's often unpaid, in my experience.
The problem is that it is easy to give one part of the communication, the visual, more fidelity than the rest, but that part is what people laugh into no matter what you communicate by other means (verbal, written).
So we, unfortunately, have to make effort to dumb down, or at least carefully manage, the fidelity of that part.
You really have to drill home that ideas and possibilities are just that, and not concrete features that they could start using tomorrow.