The Orange Extension Cord Running Through Your Business

There's a story I keep coming back to. I believe I first read it on Forbes, and I think about it almost every time I sit down with a business owner who feels stuck.

A senior leader shows up for his first week at a new office. He walks through the front door, past the receptionist, and notices something odd: a bright orange extension cord running from behind her desk, snaking down the hallway. It's the kind of orange you can't miss. Construction cone orange. Highway safety orange.

He asks the receptionist about it. She says, "What extension cord?"

He points at it.

"Oh, yeah, that. I don't remember. Somebody needed it."

Over the next few days, he pieces the story together. Somebody in an office down the hall had brought in a personal fridge. The fridge kept tripping the breaker on that circuit. So instead of fixing the electrical issue, or moving the fridge, or accepting that a personal fridge in a private office was maybe not the hill to die on, someone ran an extension cord back through the hallway to a different circuit. Problem solved.

He tries to get someone to deal with it. He brings it up in an executive meeting. The reaction is the same one the receptionist had.

"What orange extension cord?"

He walks them out and points at it.

"Oh, right. That one."

The cord stays. A few months later, the company moves to a new building. As the movers pull desks and file cabinets away from the walls, there it is again. Bright orange. Running the length of the hallway. Everyone sees it now, because everything else has been stripped away.

Then they leave the building, and the cord goes in a box, and life continues.

Every business has one

I think about that cord all the time because every business I've ever worked with has some version of it. Sometimes it's an actual piece of hardware. More often it's a workflow, a spreadsheet, a person who has to be looped in on something they should have nothing to do with, a report that gets generated every Monday that nobody reads.

You don't see it. Your team doesn't see it. If I asked you to make a list right now, you probably couldn't tell me what your orange extension cords are.

That is not a personal failing. It is the way human attention works. When you walk into a room for the first time, everything is signal. Every detail is new, so every detail gets your attention. The second time you walk into that room, some of it is background. By the tenth time, most of it is background. By the hundredth time, only the changes register. A new piece of furniture. A different color on the wall. The rest is gone.

This is a useful feature of your brain. If you noticed every detail every time, you would never get anything done. The problem is that when the same brain runs your business, the same thing happens to your operations. The workaround from three years ago becomes furniture. The reporting process that only exists because someone once asked for a specific number in a specific format becomes furniture. The tool that everyone quietly dislikes but nobody has replaced becomes furniture.

And here's the part that makes it worse: your team is looking at the same furniture you are. Ask them what's broken and they'll shrug, not because things aren't broken but because they can't see the breakage anymore. It's just how work works here.

The two ways to see it again

You get your vision back in two ways. One is when someone new joins the team. The other is when someone from outside comes in on purpose.

Both work because the person hasn't built up any furniture yet. Every process is new to them. Every workflow gets a fresh evaluation. They ask "why do we do it this way" without any of the baggage that stops the rest of you from asking. And a good chunk of the time, the honest answer is some version of "I don't remember. Somebody needed it."

I saw this recently with one of my clients. They hired a new employee, and within the first month he had a running list of things that the rest of the team had stopped seeing. Not big dramatic things. Small process gaps, a couple of tools doing the same job, one workflow that everyone was quietly working around. Every item on his list, someone on the team had a version of "oh, yeah, that" when he brought it up.

His fresh eyes were worth more in that first month than any efficiency review the leadership team could have run themselves. Not because he had some super power the rest of the team didn't. He was just new. He hadn't had time to stop seeing yet.

If you are the person who's new, this is your window. It doesn't last long. Within a few months you'll start to accommodate. The workarounds will feel normal. The extension cord will fade into the wall. So while you can still see it, write it down.

Not to fix everything on day one. You don't have the context for that yet, and you'll make bad calls if you try. Just write it down. Keep a running list of everything that makes you think "wait, why is it done this way?" Some items will turn out to have good reasons behind them, and that's fine. Others will be genuine orange extension cords. Six months from now, when you have the context to fix them, you'll be glad you kept the list, because by then you won't remember what looked strange when you started.

What to do if you're not new

If you're the owner or the operator, and nobody has joined in a while, and the team you have has been around for years, you have a harder problem. You are all looking at the same furniture. Nobody is going to spontaneously see the cord.

This is where outside eyes help. Not necessarily a big consulting engagement. Sometimes it's an advisor who spends a week with your team. Sometimes it's a fractional operator who comes in one day a month. Sometimes it's a peer in the same industry who agrees to walk your operation and tell you what stands out.

The point is not the credentials. The point is the fresh eye. Someone who has not been trained by your specific building to stop seeing your specific cord. Someone who will look at the workflow you've been running for four years and ask "why is it done this way," and not accept "because we've always done it that way" as an answer.

The reason this can be uncomfortable is that some of those cords are going to be things you set up. You ran the cord four years ago because it solved a problem four years ago, and you never went back. Somebody pointing that out can feel like criticism. It isn't. It's the same thing that happens to every business at every scale. It's not a comment on your judgment. It's a comment on the fact that you have been running your business, which means your attention has been elsewhere, which means you stopped seeing the cord roughly two weeks after you plugged it in.

You get the benefit of that outside look one time per person. After a few weeks, they start to acclimate too. So use it while it's fresh. Ask them for the list. Have them go through it item by item. For each one, decide together: does this have a real reason, or is it furniture we should pull up?

The move-out test

There's one more version of this worth mentioning, because it shows up in the extension cord story and it's useful.

The company in the Forbes piece never fixed the cord. They moved out of the building, and only when they were pulling desks away from the walls did everyone finally see what had been there the whole time.

Moving is expensive. You don't want to wait for a real move to notice your operational furniture. But there's a lower-cost version of the same thing you can do on purpose: pretend you're moving.

If you had to rebuild your operations from scratch tomorrow, with the tools available today, using what you now know about your business, what would you keep? What would you leave in the old building? The workflow that made sense when you had four people and a shared inbox, does it still make sense at fifteen people? The tool you picked five years ago because it was the only option, is it still the best option? The report that started because a customer once asked for it, does that customer still exist?

Every year or so, walk your business as if you were about to move it. You don't have to actually change anything. You just have to force yourself to look at each piece of it again with the eye of someone who hasn't seen it before. Most things will earn their place. A few will not. Those are the cords.

What to do this week

If you're new to a job or a team, start the list today. A running note in whatever tool you already use. Every time something makes you pause, add a line. Don't try to fix any of it yet. Just capture it while you can still see it.

If you're not new, pick one process you haven't questioned in a while. One workflow, one tool, one recurring meeting. Ask someone from outside your business, an advisor, a peer, a friend, to walk through it with you and tell you honestly what they see. You don't need a formal consulting engagement to do this. You just need one person who hasn't been trained to stop seeing.

The cord is there. It's been there a while. Somebody once needed it.