It’s easy to throw furniture in an empty room
Edition 046 · 27 August 2026
Nobody asks who emptied it. Or why it’s empty in the first place.
At one of our offsites a while ago, we were debating core values – what values do we hold dear, that need more reflection in what we have right now? And the room stalled. Not on the idea. On the wording. We kept circling “the ability to ask questions,” which is fine, which is true, but it’s the kind of phrase you print on a wall and forget by Q3. Then someone said it differently: “the ability not to assume, but to ask the question as to why.” And the room went quiet in the good way.
For those who don’t know, I’m a TV obsessive. And in that moment I immediately thought to the Ted Lasso scene – the darts one, where Ted realises that every room he’s ever been in has spent his whole life underestimating him because nobody thought to ask whether he played darts as a kid.
We’re not claiming it. It’s borrowed, on purpose, from Ted Lasso. The point of that scene isn’t optimism. It’s mechanism. Curiosity isn’t a mood you walk in with; it’s a decision to withhold judgment until you’ve asked the question that would actually tell you something.
I use it now when I think about what happens on day one, or week three, or year three, of any new engagement. Because the instinct I see in new joiners, in new agency partners, in new CTOs stepping into a platform they didn’t build, is to start moving furniture. A room. It’s empty, or it’s full of things arranged in a way that clearly isn’t working. The obvious move is to start placing furniture. Pick up the sofa, shift the desk, put a rug somewhere. It reads as progress in a standup, but it’s just decorating – rearranging the contents of a room without knowing why the room looks the way it does.
The new joiner feels this pressure most acutely. You’ve just walked in, you have a reputation to earn, a room full of people watching to see what you do first. So you do something. You flag a problem, propose a fix, open a ticket, schedule a workshop. It reads as value, but it’s usually just velocity without direction. What I’ve had to learn in my own work is that “show me how this was done” and “show me what we’ve done in the past” are the questions that make “ok, let me do it my way” actually mean something. They turn a new approach into an improvement instead of a wipe. Skip them, and you’ll move furniture with total confidence into a layout that was the product of hard-won decisions by people who were in the room before you. You’ll be right that it needs work. You’ll just be wrong about what the work is.
I’ve seen this enough times now to notice the shape. A technical or performance audit – one of the things we run a few weeks into any onboarding – almost always surfaces the same pattern. What it finds isn’t a disaster. It’s something more common and more annoying: a reasonable decision that got skipped under time pressure at the start of a project, or a migration, or a platform build. A decision that made sense on a Tuesday in March two years ago, when the deadline was real and the alternative was to slip. Nobody was careless. A corner got cut for a good reason that nobody wrote down, because nobody thought to. And then that corner compounded. Slowly. Quietly. Until what you’re looking at isn’t what was planned. It’s what accumulated.
Be curious, not judgmental. That’s the Ted Lasso line, and it’s the mechanism, not the mood. It means walking into that room, a platform, a team, an account you inherited, and holding your first opinion for a week. Not because opinions are bad, but because an opinion formed in hour one is an opinion formed without the sequence. And without the sequence, you’ll propose a fix for a problem you’ve misdiagnosed. You’ll move furniture into a room that needs a different shape entirely.
What this looks like in practice is unglamorous, and that’s the point. In week one, it’s asking “why is this built this way?” and meaning it. Sitting with the answer even when it’s “because we had four weeks and six months of work.” It’s not opening a redesign ticket; it’s writing down the decision, the constraint, the trade-off, so that it stops living in one person’s head and starts living in the room. The thing you fix, when you actually fix it, is the missing note. Not the code.
In year five, it’s harder, because you’re past the curiosity. You’ve been here long enough to know the room. You know where the furniture goes, what works and what doesn’t, and the temptation is to stop asking why the room is the way it is and just maintain it. That’s when the compounding corners get missed again: a small deferral, a “we’ll circle back to that,” a decision that’s fine until it isn’t, by which point three more years of reasonable choices have built on top of it. The five-year veteran inherits the same room the new joiner does. They just have more furniture to move before they notice.
What the new joiner and the five-year veteran share is the temptation to move furniture. The difference is whether they can say out loud, to themselves or to the person who handed them the key, “here is how this got here.” If you can’t say that, you’re not solving a problem. You’re decorating one.
The room was never empty. Every empty space was a decision someone made.
This post was previously featured on CEO & Founder, Jamie Huskisson’s LinkedIn newsletter, Breakthrough Commerce.