The phone menu problem

All of us have had the experience of calling a line and hearing an automated voice say “For X, press 1; For Y, press 2; For Z, press 3…” The system works until you have a situation that does not fit neatly in any of the categories. The result is often being sent in circles. This is the phone menu problem.

On the surface, the problem is only mildly frustrating. But closer examination reveals a more fundamental issue of how organisations operate.

What it shows is that structures define what counts as a problem.

The same happens when an organisation concerned with safety is structured around compliance of components, a health system divided into mental or physical health, or an environment department into animal or plant. An issue that is “unsafe but compliant” could not be recognised.

This was visible in the Grenfell Tower fire. The cladding was highly combustible, yet counted as compliant under the prevailing Class 0 regime. While it later emerged that fraudulent and misleading behaviour by manufacturers had distorted test results, this is not the deepest point. Even if the material were somehow compliant, the system had no mechanism to say: “It burns dangerously, so what if it is compliant—we must act anyway.”

In other words, the organisation, structured around compliance, made it difficult to handle signals that did not fit into its categories.

This was mirrored in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry (especially Phase 2, 2024) findings. It identified, at the deepest layer, that the regulatory framework itself was structurally flawed. The inquiry did not just point to non-compliance or misconduct. It went further: even if the materials had passed a correctly interpreted compliance check, the system was arranged in a way that prevented holistic risk assessment and limited how warning signals could be acted upon.

When a person calls a phone menu and is sent in circles, that person will usually persist until the issue is resolved. In this way, the person actively renders the problem legible to the system.

Most problems are not like that. Disasters and systemic failures are often preceded by continuous, weak, and passive signals. Such signals are either sidelined because they do not fit anywhere, or trimmed into a local problem for the team that happens to receive them.

Seen in this way, all structures create blind spots by imposing a grammar for what counts as a problem. Signals of faults struggle to turn into decisive action because they are dropped, resisted, misinterpreted, or otherwise absorbed.

The phone menu also provides a hint of a solution. If all structures create blind spots, then one response is to have a team (or individuals) with the mandate to assess signals unmediated by any structure. This is the equivalent of the “Press 0 for any other enquiries.”

Such teams are, at any point, just one step away from operational intent. They do not need to first resolve structures before confronting a problem. Misalignment to operational intent becomes the sole trigger—not compliance checklists, departmental boundaries, or risk registers.

And in part, this was reflected in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Phase 2 final report, first recommendation:

”That the government draw together under a single regulator all the functions relating to the construction industry to which we have referred…”

That is, an independent and consolidated oversight structure to address the fragmentation that contributed to the disaster. This recommendation was accepted by the UK Government, which moved the Building Safety Regulator to independent status on January 2026, published a detailed prospectus, and run a consultation which closed 20 March 2026.

But this cannot be the solution for every organisation. In the worst case, it becomes another structure of illegibility.

Instead, organisations need to accept that all structures create blind spots, and need to develop a scepticism toward their own structures—any structure. Organisations need to normalise teams and individuals whose value lies in their independence of perception. Without them, the organisation will tend to reinforce what its structure allows it to see, and, as in the case of the Grenfell fire, remain latent until it becomes a disaster.