“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
A Tale of Two Cities opens like that, writing about revolution. It is also a fairly accurate description of starting a new role.
Whether you have just joined a new organisation or been promoted into a different position within your current one, there is a particular kind of disorientation in those first weeks. Everything is unfamiliar, but not in a dramatic way. It is the small things. Acronyms that everyone else uses without thinking. Conversations where you understand the words but not the subtext. The slow realisation that decisions are not made where you assumed they were. Even if you have been in the building for years, a new role changes what you see and who you answer to. The map you had no longer matches the territory.
And yet, at the same time, there is a strange lightness to it.
Nobody expects you to have the answers. Nobody expects you to defend what came before. You are allowed, for a brief period, to ask questions that would sound naïve coming from anyone else.
Most people underestimate how unusual that is.
There is a Japanese concept for it. Shoshin. Beginner’s mind. At its core, it is about the absence of preconception. The expert sees through a structure they have already built. The beginner has not built it yet.
So they see differently.
There is a version of this that has nothing to do with work.
You feel it the first time you walk through a city you have never visited. Everything registers. The way people move. The inefficiencies nobody complains about. The details that seem obvious once pointed out but are invisible to the people who live there.
Anyone who has arrived in Brussels for the first time knows this feeling. The beautiful and the bizarre sit next to each other without embarrassment. Art nouveau facades beside buildings so ugly they seem like a deliberate provocation. A political capital where half the street signs are missing or contradictory. Construction sites that appear to have no beginning and no end. A train station, Gare du Midi, that looks like a crime against architecture committed in concrete. A city that has turned surrealism from an art movement into urban planning policy.
You notice all of this in week one. By year three, you are walking past it without looking up.
Just like everyone else.
Tom Kelley, the author of The Art of Innovation and partner at the design firm IDEO, has a name for the opposite of this effect. He calls it “vuja de.” Not déjà vu, the feeling that you have been somewhere before, but its reverse: the ability to look at something familiar and see it as if for the first time. He considers it one of the most important skills in innovation.
The thing is, when you start a new role, you do not need the training. You have the real thing. For a few weeks, sometimes a few months, you have that outsider’s clarity. And then it fades.
That is where experience becomes slightly dangerous. Not because it is wrong, but because it is sticky. The longer you stay, the more your own decisions accumulate around you. Budgets you approved, agencies you selected, formats you defended. At some point, questioning the system starts to feel like questioning yourself.
So you don’t. You adjust things at the edges. You optimise. You iterate.
And you lose the ability to see that the frame itself might be wrong.
Jeff Bezos built a philosophy around resisting exactly that drift. For years, Amazon shareholder letters ended the same way: “It remains Day 1.” His point was not about growth. It was about perception. The belief that organisations decay the moment they start treating their current way of doing things as settled. Day 2, he wrote, is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by death.
The discipline of Day 1 is the discipline of seeing your own operation as if you had just walked in.
When you actually have just walked in, you do not need the discipline.
You are already there.
And this applies whether you are arriving from outside or stepping up from within. If you have been promoted internally, the temptation is to treat the new role as continuity. But that familiarity is precisely the thing you need to set aside. It is your greatest asset and your biggest blind spot at the same time. Ask yourself: if I were an external consultant walking in today, what would I notice? What would surprise me? What would I question that nobody else is questioning?
That deliberate flip is harder than arriving fresh. But it is just as important.
What makes this moment slightly different is the speed at which the ground has moved.
Most communication strategies currently in place were built for a world where information moved more slowly, where visibility was harder to achieve, and where producing content at scale required significant resources. That world is gone, but many of the assumptions built around it are still in place.
You see it in small ways.
Organisations equate publishing with reach. They measure activity and call it impact. They invest heavily in formats that feel familiar, without asking whether they are still effective.
None of this is irrational. It is just inherited.
If you are arriving fresh, or seeing the operation from a new vantage point within it, you are one of the few people in the system who is not yet committed to those assumptions. You can see, quite quickly, where things feel off. The instinct is often to ignore that feeling, because it is easier to assume you are missing context.
Sometimes you are.
Often you are not.
Most strategies do not fail because they are wrong. They fail because nobody looks at them with fresh eyes again.
There is a tendency to treat the first hundred days in a role as a race. Deliver something visible, prove that you can execute, create early momentum.
In this environment, that instinct is slightly misplaced.
The advantage you have is not speed. It is distance.
For a short period, you are close enough to see how things actually work, but not yet embedded enough to defend them. So the more useful move is to slow down, slightly, and look properly.
Audit what is actually happening. Not the strategy as it is described, but as it is lived. What gets attention. What quietly fails. What exists only because nobody has asked whether it should still exist. You are the only person in the building who can look at all of this without defending any of it. That objectivity has a short shelf life. Use it before it expires.
Go deep on your digital reality. Investigate your organisation’s reputation as it actually exists, not as your colleagues believe it to be. What comes up when a journalist searches for you? What narratives are forming around your sector that you are not yet part of? The issues that will dominate your second year are already taking shape somewhere. Find them now while you still have time to prepare rather than react.
Use the tools that did not exist when the current strategy was written. AI-driven research can map a competitive landscape in hours rather than weeks. Sentiment analysis that once required a specialist agency can now be run in an afternoon. You do not need to become a technologist. You need to be curious enough to explore what is now possible, because the person who wrote the strategy you just inherited almost certainly did not have access to these capabilities.
Create your master plan. This is the part most people skip, and it is the most important. Do not present your management with a single recommendation. Present three scenarios. The first: continuity with incremental improvement. Be honest about what this delivers and what it leaves on the table. The second: the step change. The two or three major moves that would fundamentally shift your communication impact. The ones that require courage and budget and organisational will. The third: the dream. Close your eyes and imagine what an ideal outcome would look like. If you had no constraints, no legacy, no politics, what would you build? What would genuinely excite you about this role?
The dream is not fantasy. It is where you find the ambition that makes the other two scenarios worth pursuing. The best hundred-day plans borrow from all three.
Build your case and own it. This is where many new communication directors lose their nerve. They do the work. They see the gaps. They know what needs to change. And then they present a cautious, incremental set of recommendations designed not to upset anyone. Do not do that. If you have built the evidence base and arrived at a genuine strategic view, sell it with confidence and with data. It’s what you were hired to do.
The five steps will give you clarity on what to do. But the deeper question is how it all connects.
In a previous article, “Beyond the Coffee Meeting,” I described communication as the connective tissue of a modern advocacy strategy. The central nervous system that links direct engagement, events, and earned media into something coherent. Without it, you have a collection of disconnected moments. With it, you have a story that compounds over time.
A new person in the role has the chance to build that connective tissue properly from the start. How does each event reinforce the narrative? How does your digital presence extend the life of a conversation that started in a meeting room? How does your content strategy ensure that the story travels beyond the people who were already in the room?
Getting this right requires more than good tactics. It requires a clear, emotionally resonant story at the centre. Not a set of policy positions. A story. One that is simple enough to remember, flexible enough to adapt, and genuine enough to earn trust.
In my book Hyperthinking, I wrote about a mindset that applies precisely to this kind of situation.
We are not living through a one-off disruption. The ground does not settle. It shifts again. In that environment, the traditional model of expertise, where you master a domain and then operate within it for a decade, no longer holds. What holds is the ability to shift your thinking when the context shifts. To learn new skills quickly and discard old assumptions without sentiment. To build networks that stretch beyond your immediate bubble, because the insights you need are rarely found inside it. And to learn through experimentation rather than analysis alone, because in a world that changes this fast, the cost of waiting for certainty is higher than the cost of trying something and seeing what happens.
That is what Hyperthinking looks like in practice. And starting a new role is one of the best moments to adopt it, because you are already in the right posture. You are already learning. You are already questioning. You are already building new connections and testing new ideas. The trick is to recognise that this is not just an onboarding phase you will eventually move past. It is the way the work needs to be done from now on.
The more difficult part comes later.
Starting with a beginner’s mind is almost automatic. Keeping it is not.
Six months in, you are no longer the outsider. You have made decisions, aligned with certain views, and invested time in particular directions. The system is no longer something you are observing. It is something you are part of. The people who manage to hold onto that early clarity tend to do something quite simple. They keep asking the same questions they asked in week one, even when those questions start to feel uncomfortable.
We are operating in a period where many organisations are waiting, consciously or not, for things to stabilise. They probably won’t. Which makes the ability to see clearly, even briefly, more valuable than it used to be.
If you have just started something new, whether that means a new organisation or a new role in a familiar one, you have that clarity for now. It does not last very long. But what you do with it can reshape everything that follows.
What is the best advice you were given when you started a new role? And what do you wish someone had told you?
This article was originally posted by Philip Weiss on Linkedin
