The Sentinel Afternoon Post: The Doorman Fallacy

Roy Sutherland

There's a famous story about a London hotel who wanted to fire a doorman. They wanted to save some money, and here was a quick fix, so the doorman was gone by Friday. But within weeks, the complaints were flooding in: people were left outside in the rain, they couldn't hail a taxi, and everything seemed just a bit colder.

According to Rory Sutherland, this is one of the worst mistakes a modern business can make. Because the hotel had assumed that the doorman could be defined purely by his job description: opening doors. But there was so much more to it. He welcomed people. He hailed taxis. He remembered names. Doorman might have been his title, but his contributions went beyond anything that appeared on a spreadsheet.

Sutherland calls this the 'doorman fallacy,' and it's when we define a job by its most visible elements, and ignore everything else about it. And it happens all of the time. If a company fires a receptionist because 'anyone can reply to emails,' they also fire the person who can remember every client's kids' names. If a company closes its high street branches because of an app, it forgets the power of in-person small talk.

And so the doorman fallacy is more than just business strategy. It's about the modern compulsion to optimise, to measure, and to strip away anything that can't be justified on a slide. It's when we mistake a measurement for what matters. But almost all jobs and relationships are more than what they seem. And it's a foolish person indeed who seeks to reduce a person to just a data point.