The fastest way to be wrong in a new organization is to be right too early. 

You were hired for pattern recognition, and you have it. The trouble is your patterns come from a different company with different constraints and a different history, and in week two you cannot yet tell which of the strange things you're seeing are dysfunction and which are load-bearing. 

That baffling approval step may exist because something went badly wrong once. That pointless meeting may be the only place two people who don't get along are ever in a room together, and killing it will cost you nine months. Most odd things in an organization are scar tissue. Learn the injury before you cut.

Weeks 1–2: ask fifteen people the same five questions 

Not fifteen different conversations. The same five questions, fifteen times. The answers aren't the point. The variance is the point. Where fifteen people agree, you have a fact. Where they split three ways, you've found the fault line — and that's your engagement. 

1. What are we actually trying to do this year? 

2. What's the thing everyone knows is broken but nobody says in the meeting? 3. When you need something done fast, who do you go to? (This draws the real org chart. It never matches the official one.) 

4. What did the last person in this seat get wrong? 

5. If I fixed one thing in ninety days, what would make your Tuesday better? 

Question 4 is uncomfortable to ask and worth every bit of the discomfort. It tells you the shape of the hole you're standing in and what people are braced for you to do. 

Spend the honeymoon on questions you'll be embarrassed to ask later 

For about six weeks you have an asset that never comes back: permission to not know things. "Sorry — why do we do it that way?" is free right now and expensive in month four, when the same question makes you look like you haven't been paying attention. 

Ask everything. Write down the answers, because you will forget them and you won't be able to ask twice. 

Week 3: fix one small thing nobody will defend 

You need credibility in the account before you can spend any. Find something that is visibly annoying, genuinely small, and owned by nobody who'll fight you for it. 

The recurring meeting everyone hates. The report that goes to fourteen people and is read by two. The onboarding doc still naming someone who left three years ago. It doesn't need to be strategic. It needs to make someone say, unprompted, to someone else: oh, that got fixed? 

Resist making your first win a big one. Big wins in week three are how you discover which thing was load-bearing. 

Day 30: the memo 

One page. Titled "What I'm Hearing." Not "Recommendations."

- Where there's strong agreement. Three to five things everyone told you. Proves you listened, and gives people the pleasure of being right. 

- Where people diverge. Two or three genuine splits, stated neutrally, no names. "There are two active views on which channel is the priority, and both are being resourced." Naming a split without picking a side is the most valuable paragraph you'll write all quarter. 

- What I'd like to dig into next. Your agenda, framed as curiosity. 

- One recommendation. Exactly one. Small enough to approve in a hallway. That's it. A five-page memo at day 30 signals you were writing instead of listening. 

This document does something quietly enormous: it makes it safe for a leadership team to look at a disagreement they've been carefully not looking at. And you accused nobody of anything. You just wrote down what you heard. 

Don't mistake busy for landed 

You'll be swamped in month one. Swamped is not embedded. The test: when something politically sensitive happens, do people call you before or after the decision? 

Before means you've landed. After means you're staff. 

One thing to try this week: Whether you're on day 12 or year two, ask three people question 3. See whether the real org chart matches the one in the deck. 

— Michael J Washington, Ocean Stride Advisory