Every business has a museum.

Somewhere in every business is a museum. It is the folder of files no one opens, the software still being paid for and no longer used, the shared drive with seven versions of the same document and no sign of which is current. Nobody built the museum on purpose. It accumulated, one well-intentioned decision at a time, and now it sits there, quietly charging admission.

The museum is a tax on every new person, who must learn which exhibits are real and which are abandoned. It is a source of small errors, when someone works from the wrong version because the right one was indistinguishable. It is the reason “where is that” takes ten minutes instead of ten seconds.

Most businesses treat the museum as permanent, the way you treat a basement. You stop seeing it. An assembly begins by walking through it with the lights on and asking, of each thing, whether the work still touches it. What remains gets a home. What does not gets closed. This is a matter of deciding more than deleting.

The measure of a good assembly is partly how small the museum becomes: curated down to the history a business actually keeps. When the live work is easy to find because the dead work is no longer in the way, the business feels lighter for a reason it can rarely name. The museum stopped charging admission.

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