I’m about to start a new role leading a team I’ve never worked with. After a decade at Google, I’ll be the person who doesn’t know where anything is again.

I’m genuinely excited about that.

There’s a window when you join a new organization – maybe 90 days, give or take – where being new is actually a superpower. You can ask the questions everyone else stopped asking years ago. You can wander into long-standing debates and poke at assumptions without anyone assuming you have an agenda. “Don’t mind me, I’m new here” is a surprisingly effective shield for what would otherwise be career-limiting curiosity.

I’ve come to think of this as the temporary ignorance superpower, and I’ve learned to use it deliberately.

What the window looks like

When I joined the Cloud SDK team at Google, I spent the first several weeks in what felt like an endless series of “explain this to me like I’m five” conversations. Why do we have two different library generation pipelines? What’s the history behind this particular API pattern? Who decided we’d support these languages and not those?

Some of those conversations surfaced decisions that made perfect sense five years ago but nobody had revisited since. The original context had shifted, but the decision had calcified into “just how we do things.” Others revealed tensions that people had been navigating around for so long they’d stopped noticing them. And plenty were just me learning things everyone else already knew – which was fine too, because that’s also what being new is for.

The key is that I could ask all of these questions without anyone assuming I was building a case for something, or that I had a political agenda, or that I was implicitly criticizing their past choices. I was just… new. Trying to understand. If I accidentally stepped into something sensitive, I could offer an “aw shucks, didn’t realize that was a thing” and back out gracefully.

That’s the superpower: temporary license to be a bull in a china shop without breaking anything.

Why the window closes

After a few months, people start to expect you to understand how things work. You’re no longer the new person – you’re just a person who should know better by now. You can still ask hard questions and challenge assumptions, but you have to be more deliberate about it. You need to pick your moments. The “I’m still getting my bearings” card has an expiration date.

This isn’t necessarily bad. Organizations need people who understand the context, who can navigate the history, who know which battles have already been fought and why certain compromises exist. Perpetual naivety isn’t a virtue. But it does mean that the window for consequence-free curiosity is finite.

The mistake I’ve seen people make isn’t moving too fast – early wins matter, and you should absolutely be executing. The mistake is not taking advantage of the superpower while you’ve got it. You can deliver results and ask the questions that reveal your lack of context at the same time. But if you wait until you’re “settled in” to start poking at assumptions, you’ve already lost the window.

Using it well

The goal isn’t to come in and shake everything up, or to delay action until you’ve mapped every corner of the organization. It’s more about recognizing that you have a brief period where you can surface things about the team and product that will be much harder to learn later – and that window is running whether you use it or not.

A few things I try to do during this window:

Talk to everyone. Not just the people you’re supposed to talk to during onboarding, but the folks who’ve been around forever and have opinions about how things got to where they are. The person who’s been on the team for seven years often has context that never made it into any document.

Ask “why” more than feels comfortable. Most questions that feel obvious aren’t actually obvious – they’re questions that everyone else stopped asking because the answer seemed settled at some point. Sometimes the answer is still clear and you just needed to hear it. Sometimes the answer is “honestly, I’m not sure anymore.”

Notice what surprises you. Your instincts about what seems weird or inefficient or confusing are valuable precisely because they haven’t been trained out of you yet. Write them down. You don’t have to act on all of them, but they’re data about where the organization might have blind spots.

Give yourself permission to not have answers yet. The temptation when you’re new – especially as a leader – is to feel like you need to know things before you can act. You don’t. You can execute and ask “wait, why do we do it this way?” in the same week. The questions don’t undermine your credibility; they’re part of doing the job well.

The other side

If you’re welcoming someone new to your team, encourage them to take advantage of this window – and take advantage of it yourself. Ask them what’s surprised them. Encourage the questions that might reveal their lack of context. When they poke at something that feels obvious to you, resist the urge to explain it away – sit with the possibility that maybe it’s less obvious than you thought.

I’ve watched new team members uncover things the rest of us had stopped seeing, simply because they didn’t know they were supposed to accept them. That’s a gift, if you let it be one.

Starting over

I’m about to be new somewhere again. Part of me is anxious about all the things I don’t know yet – the systems, the people, the history, the politics I’ll inevitably stumble into.

But a bigger part of me is looking forward to that brief period where not knowing is exactly the point. Where I can be curious without consequence, ask the questions that stopped getting asked, and maybe surface a few things that have been hiding in plain sight.

The window won’t last forever. I intend to use it well.