Before you measure, you define. And most companies define like a drunk with a highlighter: they mark the one task they can see, then file everything else as waste.
Rory Sutherland calls this the doorman fallacy. It is the cleanest explanation I know of why “efficient” organisations keep waking up uglier.
If you sit on a board, or you run a P&L, this is a test you can run on this week’s pack.
The Hotel, Reduced to a Hinge
Define a hotel doorman as a person whose job is to open the door. Once you have done that, an automatic door is an obvious upgrade. Cheaper. Always on. Never in a mood. The spreadsheet purrs.
Is opening the door the job?
The doorman also sees who comes in. Deters the pickpocket and the working-girl traffic that would recode the postcode. Flags a taxi in the rain. Helps an older woman out of a car. Makes a returning guest feel like a returning guest. Stops the doorway becoming a bedroom. And, not incidentally, makes the building feel like a hotel that may charge a hotel price.
None of that is “opening the door.” All of that is why people pay for a night that could, technically, be a lock and a mattress.
A few months later the stories start: thefts, noise, Booking.com reviews with the emotional range of a fire alarm, people sleeping in the entrance, guests who cannot work out why this place still asks for a luxury rate. Nobody storms into the office of the manager who saved a few hundred a day on wages. He defined the role shallowly. The arithmetic only arrived afterwards, to bless the definition.
The automatic door still opens. That is the tragedy. The metric is green. The hotel is not.
Efficiency Is What You Do After You Have Already Lost
Sutherland’s point is not “never automate.” It is that strategy collapses into cost-cutting the moment a role is allowed to equal its most visible task. Define narrowly, replace, book the saving as profit, leave before the rack rate falls out of bed.
The sequence is always:
- Define the job as the cartoon of the job.
- Measure the cartoon.
- Optimise the cartoon.
- Wonder, later, why the business feels cheaper than the model.
Step 4 is never attributed to step 1. Step 1 is “being commercial.”
You Are Running Doormen You Have Not Named
You do not need a uniform and a whistle.
- The senior engineer who “just writes tickets” also stops you shipping a lawsuit.
- The branch manager who “just opens the store” also is the brand, the security, and the reason the regular still comes.
- The legal secretary who “just files” also is the institutional memory that keeps you from repeating last year’s disaster.
- The salesperson who “just closes” also is the person who knows which logo would poison the book.
- The analyst who “just builds the deck” also is the only person who still remembers what the KPI used to hide.
If you define them by the verb on the job description, you will replace them with a portal, a chatbot, a shared services centre, or a self-checkout. You will be right on the verb. You will be wrong on the firm.
The Board Question That Cuts Through the Fallacy
Do not ask “what does this person cost?” Ask:
If we removed this role, which unpaid jobs would still need doing? And who, exactly, would do them?
If the answer is “the customer,” you have not automated. You have unpaid labour with a nicer UI.
If the answer is “nobody,” you have found the doorman. Congratulations. You may now enjoy the reviews.
If the answer is “another team, in another budget,” you have found the cousin of the fallacy: you did not remove work. You moved it to a place your hero metric cannot see.
Definition is the crime. Measurement is only the getaway car.
Kodak, Blockbuster, and the rest did not fail because nobody could count. They failed, in part, because they counted the wrong job - the job that fit on a slide. While the real job moved.
- Why the numbers people almost always defeat the visionaries
- The efficiency report that hides the damage
- How to move your company’s work onto your customers (satire)
- The doorman fallacy
- Leads versus the brand you cannot count
- Goodhart’s Law
- The quarter versus the decade
- A KPI audit for boards
Relevant Sources
- Alchemy — Rory Sutherland (the doorman fallacy) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorman_fallacy
- The Doorman Fallacy — summary of Sutherland, Alchemy, p. 126 — https://articles.data.blog/2020/04/09/the-doorman-fallacy/
If you want a working session that pressure-tests role definitions before the next cost programme, that is a board conversation worth having. Contact me.