Bright Orange Extension Cords
The one thing new hires can do that no one else can
Dom OBrien
5/12/20265 min read
I share one story with every new hire in their first week. It's about an orange extension cord, and the lesson in it is one of the most useful things I know about organisations and the people inside them.
The story comes from Ken Krogue, who tells it from his own first week in a new role as Director of Marketing at a tech company in Utah.
He walked in on his first day and noticed a bright orange extension cord behind the receptionist's desk. It took a right turn down the hallway and ran into an office two or three doors down. Hard to miss. Practically luminous.
He asked the receptionist about it. "What orange extension cord?" she said. He pointed it out. She turned, looked at it, and told him it had been there a while.
Later that week he raised it in an executive planning meeting. Same response. "What orange extension cord?" Then, after a moment, someone remembered. A circuit in one office kept tripping the breaker. Someone ran the cord. Problem solved. The cord stayed.
About six weeks later, when the company moved to a new office, the cord moved with them. Still there. Still bright orange. Still completely invisible to everyone who'd been there long enough to stop seeing it and just step over it.
Krogue tells this story to every new hire too. He asks them to keep a notebook and write down every orange extension cord they can see, especially the ones nobody else seems to notice. Because, he tells them, in six to eight weeks, they won't be able to see them anymore either.
Why this happens
It's not laziness. It's not stupidity. It's normalisation, and it happens to everyone.
When you're new somewhere, you're comparing what you see against your entire prior experience. Everything that doesn't match (the odd process, the workaround that became permanent, the thing everyone does but nobody can explain why) registers and stands out.
Six weeks in, you're no longer comparing against everything you've ever seen. You're comparing against this place. The cord is part of the environment now. It's background. You stop seeing it.
This is how organisations accumulate orange extension cords. Not through negligence, but through familiarity. Every inefficiency that survives long enough becomes invisible. Every process that was set up as a temporary fix and never revisited eventually looks like the way things are done. Every band aid becomes a workflow.
The people who've been there longest are also, in this specific sense, the least able to see it. Not because they're bad at their jobs, but because they've been there long enough to normalise everything.
The window is real, and it closes fast
Six to eight weeks. That's roughly how long the window stays open.
In the first fortnight, everything is still clear. You notice things. You have questions. You compare what you see against what you've seen before and the gaps are obvious.
By week six, you're heads down. You're trying to hit your targets. You've got your own problems to solve. The cords are still there, but they've faded into the background and you're no longer noticing them.
This is why onboarding matters so much more than most organisations treat it. Not the compliance training and the HR paperwork but the actual structured attempt to capture what a new person is seeing before the window closes. Most organisations don't do this at all. They onboard people into the existing way of doing things, which means they actively accelerate the normalisation process.
The cost of not capturing it is hard to measure but real. Every cord that goes unfixed is a process that stays broken, a friction point that stays in place, an inefficiency that compounds.
For new hires: the notebook habit
If you're new somewhere, the most valuable thing you can do in your first four weeks has nothing to do with your actual job description.
Keep a notebook. Not a digital one, something you carry. Every time something strikes you as odd, inefficient, confusing, or just not quite right, write it down. Don't filter it. Don't decide yet whether it matters. Just write it down.
At the end of week four, go back through the list. Some of it will be things you now understand, you now have context you didn't have in week one that explains what you were seeing. Cross those out.
What's left is your orange extension cord list. The things that still don't make sense, or that you now understand but can still see are broken.
That list is worth more than anything you'll produce in your first month. Present it to your manager. Not as a list of complaints, but as a genuine offer: here's what I'm seeing, I wanted to surface it before I stop being able to see it - better yet if you have solutions to the cords
The best organisations will treat that list seriously. Some will act on parts of it. A few won't. How they respond tells you a lot about where you've landed.
For leaders: how to structure this deliberately
If you're onboarding someone, don't leave this to chance.
Build two formal conversations into the first six weeks. The first at two weeks: "What's the most confusing thing you've seen so far? What doesn't make sense yet?" The second at six weeks: "Before you get too embedded, what are the things you've noticed that we should probably look at?"
Make it a structured question, not a casual check-in. People need permission to say "this seems broken" to someone more senior. They need to know the answer won't be "that's just how we do it here." If you ask the question and then defend every cord they point out, they'll stop pointing things out. And you'll lose the window.
The best question I've found for the six-week conversation is simple: "What's the thing you've noticed that nobody else seems to be talking about?"
That question does a few things. It signals that you want to hear it. It acknowledges that there's probably something there. And it gives the person permission to say something that might sound critical without framing it as a complaint.
You won't act on everything. Some of it will have context they don't have yet. But some of it will be real, and it'll be stuff you haven't seen in years because you stopped looking.
What most organisations actually do
They bring someone in, sit them down for a week of onboarding sessions, and then hand them a task list.
Within a month, the new hire is operating like everyone else. The cords are invisible. The workarounds are workflows. The broken processes are just processes. Band-aids work...until they don't!
The organisation hasn't gotten worse. But it's missed an opportunity to get better. Every new hire who joins is a genuine chance to see the place with fresh eyes. Most organisations treat that window as something to close as quickly as possible, when the smarter play is to hold it open as long as they can
Inspiration from Ken Krogue - article originally published in Forbes
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