The Lift That Broke (And What It Reveals About How Organisations Actually Work)

For the past few weeks, our office has been effectively inaccessible.

The lift servicing our floor in a relatively new, 13-storey building stopped working. There are two lifts, but only one reaches our level. Since then, everyone (staff, clients, cleaners) has been climbing the fire stairs.

On the surface, this sounds trivial. A lift broke. Parts take time. These things happen.

But I've learned that small failures are often where you find the real story.

What happened next is more interesting than the breakdown itself.

The lift company, KONE, told our building manager it would be fixed by mid-January. Then the timeline shifted to "early February." Early February arrived. No update. No explanation. No revised timeline. Just silence.

At a certain point, uncertainty becomes its own problem. Research on customer experience consistently shows that people tolerate delays far better than they tolerate not knowing. Give someone a six-week timeline and they'll adjust. Give them shifting goalposts and radio silence, and frustration compounds exponentially.

So I did something that probably sounds naïve: I wrote directly to the Managing Director of KONE. Not a complaint. A detailed, factual explanation of the situation, the impact on our people and clients, and the risks being created.

No response.

I wrote to the agent of the Owners Corporation. Same approach: here's what's happening, here are the safety implications, here's the reputational damage to everyone involved.

No direct response apart from being copied into an email to the building manager.

Meanwhile, in the real world:

We are holding fire stair doors open with a watering can and a pot plant.

That's not a metaphor. That is literally how people access our office right now.

Pause on that image for a moment. A modern office building. A company that works hard to be a great place for our team and our clients. People arriving for meetings. And the solution we've been left with is a pot plant propping open a fire door.

Does that feel like 2026 to you?

Here's what I find genuinely fascinating about this situation.

We spend enormous amounts of time discussing AI systems, automation, and whether humans are "in the loop." We worry about hallucinations, autonomous agents making decisions, accountability frameworks. Important conversations, all of them.

But the failure in this story isn't technological. It's organisational.

The lift didn't fail because of AI. It failed because no one owned the outcome end-to-end. Messages were passed along. Timelines drifted. Responsibility dissolved into process. And at no point did anyone stop to ask a simple question: What does this feel like for the people living with the consequence?

That question almost never gets asked in large organisations. Not because people are callous, but because systems aren't designed to surface it.

There's a pattern here worth naming.

When organisations don't respond, they're still making a decision. They're deciding whose inconvenience counts. They're deciding how visible a problem needs to be before it deserves attention. Silence isn't neutral. It's a choice with consequences.

I suspect this situation would look very different if both lifts had failed and every tenant in the building was affected. The asymmetry matters. One tenant, one floor: easy to deprioritise. Easy to let slide.

But deprioritising people isn't a victimless act. It erodes trust. It turns a manageable operational issue into a reputational one. And it signals, quite clearly, how an organisation behaves when it thinks no one important is watching.

KONE's website talks about delivering exceptional service. I'm sure they mean it. Most companies mean it when they write these things. The problem is that service isn't defined by values on a website or claims in a pitch deck. It shows up (or doesn't) when things go wrong.

Small failures are the real test cases.

They reveal whether systems are designed for humans or just for operational efficiency. Whether accountability exists in practice or only in policy documents. Whether "customer experience" is something you believe in, or just something you talk about.

The quiet risk of modern organisations isn't that systems break. Systems always break. The risk is that when they do, no one feels personally responsible for the human at the other end. Silence becomes normalised. Inconvenience gets externalised. And the people affected are left improvising with pot plants.

If we want better systems (human or artificial), we should probably start by answering emails.

It wouldn't have killed anyone to write back.

And that's precisely the point.