I noticed it in a hotel where everything seemed to be working.
Not in a way that called attention to itself. Just a quiet sense that decisions had been made carefully. The room felt considered, the materials intentional, the experience smooth without trying too hard. The kind of place where you assume the thinking behind it is equally well resolved.
Later, in conversation with someone connected to the group behind it, sustainability came up. Not as a formal topic, just part of how the business was evolving. They were doing things. Suppliers had been reviewed, waste had been reduced in parts of the operation, energy was being tracked to some extent. There was intent, and there was activity. But there was also a hesitation that didn’t quite match the confidence of the space itself.
It wasn’t hesitation about whether sustainability mattered. That part felt settled. It was something else. A quieter uncertainty about what actually counted, what needed to be consistent across sites, and what would hold if someone looked closely enough.
That tension has started to show up more often.
Not in the language—most hospitality businesses can speak about sustainability now—but in the structure behind it. It tends to surface in ordinary moments. A request arrives, usually from a client or a partner. A form, a questionnaire, something slightly more detailed than the last. And suddenly the business is trying to connect pieces that were never really designed to connect. Different sites, different suppliers, different ways of tracking what is and isn’t being done. Nothing is obviously wrong, but nothing quite aligns either.
Hospitality makes this visible in a particular way because of how it grows. The industry is built on decentralisation. Local procurement gives flexibility, site-level autonomy allows for responsiveness, and franchise or management models make expansion possible without centralising everything. Operationally, that works. It’s part of what makes the sector dynamic.
But the expectations being placed on those businesses are moving in the opposite direction.
Consistency, comparability, evidence. Questions that assume a level of alignment that the underlying system wasn’t necessarily designed to produce. The business is being asked to answer centrally, while still operating locally. That gap isn’t theoretical. It shows up in the time it takes to respond, in the conversations needed to reconcile different versions of the same answer, and in the uncertainty about whether what is being said will stand up to scrutiny.
What’s striking is how often that moment is misread.
From the outside, it can look like a lack of effort. From the inside, it feels like the opposite. More time, more activity, more attempts to pull things together. The instinct is to add—more data, more initiatives, more reporting. But the problem doesn’t resolve. It just becomes more complex.
Because the issue isn’t how much is being done. It’s whether what is being done connects.
I’ve started to think of this less as a sustainability issue and more as a systems issue that happens to reveal itself through sustainability. Growth introduces pressure, and pressure has a way of exposing how a business is actually put together. Not in theory, but in practice. Across sites, across teams, across decisions that were made at different times for different reasons.
The businesses that seem more comfortable in that environment aren’t necessarily doing more. If anything, they appear quieter. But they are clearer. Clear on what matters, clear on what is measured, and clear on how decisions translate into outcomes. There is less friction in how information moves, and less uncertainty when it needs to be explained.
In hospitality, it is easy to assume this comes down to values. In most cases, it doesn’t. The intent is already there. People care, and they are trying to act on that care. What’s missing, more often, is the structure that allows those decisions to travel—across locations, across suppliers, across the different parts of the business that need to align without always being in the same room.
That is the part that becomes visible under growth.
Sustainability doesn’t suddenly become harder because the business expands. It becomes harder because the gaps that were manageable at a smaller scale are no longer hidden. They stretch across more sites, more relationships, more expectations. And once they are exposed, they are difficult to ignore.
Growth doesn’t break sustainability. It simply removes the conditions that allowed it to appear as if everything was holding together.