Bright Orange Extension Cords

There’s a concept I keep coming back to whenever I think about onboarding, hiring, and organisational blind spots. I first encountered it through a piece about safety on film sets.

Film productions use a lot of cables, cords, and hoses running across the floor. On a busy set, these are genuine hazards — people trip, equipment gets damaged, shoots get delayed. The solution is simple but brilliant: paint certain cables bright orange.

The orange cables are the dangerous ones. Or the important ones. Or the ones that absolutely cannot be unplugged. Colour-code them so anyone walking onto the set for the first time can immediately see the risk landscape without needing a tour, a manual, or institutional knowledge they haven’t had time to build.

Why this happens

New hires can see the bright orange extension cords.

When you have been somewhere long enough, you stop seeing them. The orange fades into the background. You route around the problems instinctively. You know to avoid that process, that person, that system, without consciously registering why. You have adapted, but you have stopped noticing.

The window is real, and it closes fast.

Most new hires have six to eight weeks, maybe twelve if they are particularly good observers, where they can see things the way an outsider sees them. Where they can ask “why do you do it that way?” without it being strange. Where the cables are still orange to them.

After that, the adaptation kicks in. They learn the workarounds. They absorb the explanations. They get pulled into the current and start moving the same direction as everyone else. They stop seeing the cords.

This is not a failing on their part. It is just how humans work. We adapt. We contextualise. We stop noticing what we have normalised.

But it means there is a genuinely narrow window where a new hire possesses something nobody else in the organisation has: fresh eyes on the actual state of things.

For new hires: the notebook habit

If you are new somewhere, the most valuable thing you can do in your first ninety days is capture what you notice before you stop noticing it.

Keep a running document — a “new hire notebook” — where you write down everything that surprises, confuses, or strikes you as odd. Not to complain. Not to immediately fix things. Just to record. You are functioning as a sensor, and the most important thing a sensor can do is log the data.

Write down the things that seem like they could be better, the processes that seem duplicated or backwards, the things people seem to work around rather than through, the assumptions that seem to be taken as given without much examination.

Then, at some point in your first month — ideally in a one-on-one with your manager — share the list. Frame it as “things I noticed as a new person that I want to understand better” rather than “here is what you are doing wrong.” Most of it will have explanations. Some of it will be genuine insight that your manager has not had the bandwidth to see.

The ones without good explanations are the bright orange extension cords.

For leaders: how to structure this deliberately

If you are the manager or leader responsible for onboarding new people, the default approach is to spend the first few weeks filling the person’s head with how things work. Context, history, product, processes, culture. This is necessary and important.

But it misses the opportunity sitting right in front of you.

Schedule a “fresh eyes” conversation somewhere between weeks four and eight. Explicitly invite the new hire to share what they noticed, what confused them, what seemed inefficient or backwards or strange. Make it safe for them to say things that might be critical. Make clear you are not asking for a critique — you are asking for the view from outside that you no longer have access to yourself.

You will hear things in those conversations that your long-tenured team would never surface. Not because they are less smart or less committed, but because they adapted a long time ago.

Some of what you hear will have good explanations — historical decisions that made sense at the time, constraints the new hire does not yet know about, trade-offs that are less obvious from the outside. But some of it will be things you recognise immediately as problems you have been routing around without fully acknowledging.

Those are the cords.

What most organisations actually do

Most organisations treat the onboarding period as a one-way transfer. Information flows from the organisation to the new person. The goal is to get them up to speed as quickly as possible so they can contribute.

The implicit message is: the sooner you stop thinking like an outsider, the sooner you will be useful.

That is backwards. The outsider perspective is itself useful, and it has an expiry date. The goal should be to harvest that perspective before it disappears, not to replace it as efficiently as possible.

The organisations that do this well build it into their onboarding systems deliberately. They create structured moments where new hires are invited to observe and report back. They assign an experienced person the job of listening — really listening — to what the new hire notices. They follow up on the feedback.

The ones that do not bother with this are sitting in a room full of bright orange extension cords they cannot see anymore. And every time they onboard a new person who could have helped them find them, they spend the window teaching that person not to notice either.

Inspiration from Ken Krogue — article originally published in Forbes