There is an intensifying obsession in businesses with automation, aided and abetted by AI, which is so overpowering that it has displaced from the public sphere all else, displaying a poverty of thinking through. Since it is clearly not a phase, the sooner businesses realise the folly of such narrow thinking, the better it will be. Will they?

There are some expressions, seemingly simple but holding a deep truth within, that acquire a contextual deepening when the context is one with far-reaching impact. In this piece of writing, I have chosen to write on the ‘doorman fallacy’, a concept developed by Rory Sutherland in his book Alchemy – the dark art and the curious science of creating magic in brands, business and life.

Sutherland uses this everyday event to describe a folly where we lose sight of the forest because we are so obsessed with the tree. Cryptic? Intentional, but bear with me. Incidentally, as you will see when you read further, the metaphor teaches us a lot about how to better understand a role, its title (which could be misleading) and its functions.

Let us first listen to Sutherland: “First you define a hotel doorman’s role as ‘opening the door’, then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism… The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman; his other, less definable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant deterrence, customer recognition, as well as in signalling the status of the hotel.”

Risks of a tunnel vision

The tunnel vision lies in reducing the doorman to just one aspect: opening the door, when he, in fact, does many other things which help the hotel guests. The irony is that despite experiencing such multiple services rolled into one, we fall into the trap of the singular: he opens the door.

The fallacy can be understood in more than one sense. One is reductionism, two missing the value while getting lost in a functional approach, three a narrow focus while breadth is the need, grasping only what is defined and missing what is not defined and so on. What is not defined and therefore missed is that he helps in creating a satisfied customer.      Unfortunately, this tunnel vision is the dominating overarching vision and persists until a crisis happens when ‘crisis experts’ get into action.

The decimal obsession

The purpose of business cannot be defined as profit, because profit is the result of providing some goods or service. This fundamental way of looking at a business has been almost completely eclipsed by the increasing dominance of the ‘market view’ or a ‘ROI’ view (return on assets). Everything is assessed in terms of its impact on the profit margin – annual wages and salary increases is understood as how many decimal points it will shave off the profit margin, when the share price goes up on announcement of layoffs.

To say that business is more than about profits is not to embrace some ‘socialism’ but a simple recognition that profit is the result of building a successful business. When an MBA student asked Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger in one of the Berkshire Hathaway annual general meetings, how they manage foreign exchange risk, the answers by Buffet first and Munger later showed how you look at building a business. Both replied that they did not see a foreign risk because they were concentrating on how to attract Japanese purchasing power, a part of it really, towards what Berkshire Hathaway had to offer, because that is how you build a business. And once the investment and returns are in the same currency, there is no foreign exchange risk because you are there for good!  

The rush to embrace AI

This doorman fallacy is clearly manifesting itself in the current thoughtless rush into AI. As we read the ‘messages’ endlessly repeated by the mainstream media, the dominant (and dominating) ‘discussion’ is only on how many jobs will be rendered superfluous by installing AI, how margins will be positively impacted, how businesses that don’t embrace AI will fall by the wayside.

Part fear-mongering, part playing to greed – eternal ‘selling points’ to push through a certain motivated point of view. There is not even a mention of what will be lost when so many people are let go. What kind of services will not be rendered because there is no one to render them. There is not even the beginnings of an attempt to understand how businesses will grow, how organisation structures will get reorganised and so on.

This is not some radical or leftist argument. Wealth managers too have realised the folly of such narrow thinking. Justin King has this to say: When every function of a business is looked at from the same narrow economic standpoint, the same game is applied endlessly. Define something narrowly, automate or streamline it — or remove it entirely — then regard the savings as profit. Is this, too, explained by argumentative thinking, where we would rather win the argument than be right? (Justin King, https://www.mfpwealthmanagement.co.uk/blog/doorman-fallacy-rory-sutherland )

Not by automation alone

Transformation is a word that has been bandied about since the enterprise-wide use of software, one of the earliest examples of ‘automating’ manually rendered work flows. Efficiency and precision may be the result of automation but that cannot be its purpose. Writing in LinkedIn, Kestral Gaian, shares her insights: “Tech transformation isn’t just about new systems — it’s about embedding those systems within a culture that embraces them, aligning the whole team behind a shared vision, and ensuring the tools serve the people, not the other way around. It wasn’t simply about implementing a VLE, integrating a CRM, or increasing automation; it was about bringing people along on a journey, bridging understanding between tech and non-tech staff, and creating a culture where technology became an enabler, not an obstacle”.

(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/doorman-fallacy-why-generalists-essential-world-obsessed-gaian-uhiue/)

The doorman fallacy completely ignores what is lost in the process of automation because it prizes efficiency above all else. As Gaian observes, “companies streamline so much that they lose the richness that makes their teams adaptable and creative”, which open up “opportunities for connection, insight, and the kind of flexibility that only humans bring”.

As one writer long ago captured such behaviour, this is wilful ignorance. There will be a price to pay. There always is.