Modern buildings are networks of sensors, controllers, power systems, carriers and people — and small, mundane failures often cascade into costly outages. In this episode Alex Morgan interviews Michael Harrington to unpack how tiny issues (a stuck damper sensor, a flaky UPS transfer, an unlabeled vendor handoff) propagate across systems, why common procurement and ops choices create hidden single points of failure, and owner-focused steps to interrupt the chain before tenants notice. We break down root causes, tradeoffs between redundancy and complexity, and the operational controls that actually reduce risk: simple telemetry sanity checks, spare-parts strategies, validated failovers, clear ownership maps, and low-disruption tests. Michael shares concise case studies and capital-planning perspectives so listeners leave with concrete, practical actions to reduce operational risk and improve uptime. This episode is written for busy facilities, IT and property leaders who need immediate, feasible ways to prevent small problems from becoming big outages.