The question with which we had ended the previous conversation stayed with me longer than I expected. If the people who knew the hotel best were absent tomorrow, would the property still know how to make those decisions that seem natural today?
I thought again about the rooms and something as simple as a guest asking specifically for quiet. I imagined them arriving one afternoon and finding someone behind the desk who had worked at the property for many years. A brief conversation would probably be enough for that person to understand that this was not a minor preference. They knew the rooms, knew which ones might experience more movement at certain times and perhaps remembered similar situations. They did not need to consult an instruction telling them what to do. They listened, interpreted and chose among the available possibilities.
The following day, another guest might arrive with a similar need and find someone who had only recently joined the team. They might be just as willing to help, know the room categories, have read the available information and be equally committed to providing a good experience. But they had not yet accumulated everything their colleague knew. The room remained the same and so, perhaps, did the guest’s need. What had changed was the knowledge available at the moment of deciding.
Until then, I had tended to think of such differences as a fairly natural consequence of experience. Someone who has worked somewhere for years knows things that someone who has just arrived still needs to learn. I had heard similar phrases many times in different operations: let’s wait until the person who knows more about that is here; ask the person who has been here longer; reception knows about that; better let the manager look at it. They had never seemed particularly worrying. On the contrary, they usually indicated that there were people within the team whom others recognised as experienced and capable of resolving situations whose answers were not always obvious.
That was indeed a strength. The difficulty appeared when an important part of the hotel’s ability to respond appropriately depended on those same people being present. It was one thing to have an experienced person to turn to in exceptional situations and quite another to discover that relatively routine decisions could not be made with the same quality when that person was absent. In the first case, experience expanded the hotel’s capability; in the second, it might be replacing it.
The most immediate answer seemed fairly obvious: if important knowledge existed that only certain people possessed, it needed to be documented. Procedures could be written, records completed, preferences registered, handovers between shifts improved or particular details recorded so that whoever came next did not have to start again from scratch. None of that was unusual in a hotel. Much of an operation requires precisely the opposite of improvisation: a room must be prepared according to certain standards, a reservation must be recorded correctly, and there are checks, sequences and responsibilities whose very purpose is to ensure that the outcome does not depend on who happens to be working that day.
But the more I tried to apply that same logic to the decisions we had been observing, the clearer it became that documenting a response did not always preserve what had made that response possible. We could write down which room an experienced person had chosen for a guest requesting quiet and even record which rooms were preferable when someone mentioned sensitivity to noise. That information would be useful and would prevent others from having to rediscover something the property had already learned, but it did not completely solve the problem.
One guest might ask for quiet because they were a light sleeper; another because they were travelling with a baby. Someone might need a few hours’ rest before continuing a journey, while another person might value silence but prefer to keep a particular view or some specific feature of the room. The word being used could be the same while the circumstances were entirely different. If we reduced the learning to an instruction—when faced with this request, offer this room—we would have managed to preserve a response, but perhaps not what had allowed us to understand why that response was appropriate.
I returned then to an idea that had appeared much earlier in our journey and that now carried a different consequence: first understand the person; then decide how to look after them. Until then, we had used that formulation to recognise a logic behind certain experiences at the hotel. Now I was beginning to wonder what it meant to make such a logic shareable across a team. If understanding had to come before deciding, transmitting previous decisions was not enough; somehow, we also needed to preserve the questions, observations and reasons that had made those decisions possible.
That was when a distinction appeared that seemed particularly important to me: two people did not need to make exactly the same decision in order to exercise the same judgement.
For a long time, I had associated operational consistency with repetition. In certain situations, responses need to occur predictably because that is precisely what a standard depends on. But hospitality also contains decisions where always doing the same thing can be just as unreasonable as improvising something different every time.
A procedure can establish how to record a reservation or which checks to carry out before handing over a room, and it would be difficult to see any value in each member of the team inventing their own way of doing so. But when someone presents a particular need, asks for an exception or a circumstance arises that requires choosing among several reasonable possibilities, consistency can take another form: perhaps it no longer consists of repeating a response, but of sharing what we need to look at before deciding what that response should be.
That explained why two different decisions could be perfectly coherent with one another. Faced with apparently similar requests, one person might agree to an exception while another concluded that it was not appropriate. The difference would not necessarily indicate arbitrariness if the relevant circumstances were different and both had been understood through a common judgement. What would be truly difficult would be sustaining that coherence if every member of the team interpreted independently what to observe, what mattered and how far they could go.
The problem was therefore no longer only how to transfer information. It was becoming a question of how one person’s experience could help others interpret situations they had not yet encountered more effectively.
I thought about how many things are learned in a hotel precisely because something does not happen as expected. A guest presents a need no one had considered, a decision produces an unexpected outcome, a policy reaches its limit, a question forces us to reconsider something that had seemed obvious, or a simple solution works better than expected. The person involved may come away from that situation knowing something they did not know before, but the hotel does not necessarily learn at the same time.
A person learns when an experience changes the way they will approach a future situation. I began to think that an organisation started to learn when that discovery ceased to be available only to the person who had lived through the experience.
If someone found a good way to resolve a situation and everything ended there, we gained individual experience. If what they had discovered could help someone else faced with a future circumstance, we began to turn that experience into a capability of the property.
That did not mean recording every episode or preserving every solution as though it could be repeated indefinitely. Sometimes the most valuable part of an experience was not what had ultimately been done, but the question that had allowed us to understand the problem, a condition no one had considered, the limit that had emerged or the information it would have been useful to know beforehand. Perhaps learning did not consist only of remembering what we had done, but of understanding what we had learned by doing it.
That idea also changed the way I thought about the most experienced people on a team. Their value did not lie solely in the number of situations they could resolve personally, but also in everything they had learned to recognise before making a decision: small signals, necessary questions, operational limits or consequences that someone less experienced had no reason yet to anticipate.
Over the years, experience could make someone the person others turned to; perhaps one of its most valuable expressions appeared when what that person knew could continue to help even when they were not there.
This did not mean, however, that everyone needed to know everything. A hotel brings together different areas of expertise, responsibilities and levels of decision-making for a reason. Someone working in the restaurant does not need to know every commercial condition attached to a reservation, just as reservations does not need to master every decision made inside a kitchen. Distributing every piece of knowledge indiscriminately would create more noise than capability. The question was to recognise which knowledge needed to cross those boundaries because it affected an experience that, for the guest, had never been divided into departments.
We speak of reception, reservations, housekeeping, food and beverage, maintenance or administration because we need to organise responsibilities. The guest, by contrast, does not move from one company to another every time they enter a different space or speak to a different person: for them, it is still the same hotel. They may have communicated a need when booking, meet someone else when they arrive, discover something in the room and later speak to another person over breakfast. Internally, each of those situations may belong to a different department; for the person experiencing them, they are part of a single experience.
That was why some knowledge needed to travel across the property, precisely because the guest already did.
I then began to reconsider the role of the person managing an operation. In many hotels, the manager’s experience naturally turns them into the person everyone consults when something does not quite fit. They know the background, remember decisions, understand the relationships between departments and can quickly resolve situations that take others longer. That capability is useful and, at certain moments, indispensable. The problem appears when every decision that departs even slightly from the ordinary needs to reach the same person.
For a long time, feeling indispensable could easily be confused with managing well. If everyone consulted the manager, it seemed to demonstrate that they knew the operation deeply, and that was probably true. But it could also reveal that too much of the property’s knowledge remained concentrated in one person.
Managing could not consist of becoming the hotel’s largest memory. The role was beginning to look different to me: ensuring that relevant knowledge was available where it needed to be used and that people understood the judgement organising certain decisions well enough not to need an answer from above every time circumstances departed from what had been expected.
That did not eliminate hierarchy or mean that anyone could decide anything. Economic, commercial, operational and responsibility limits needed to be clear, and some decisions had to be referred precisely because their consequences extended beyond the person making them. Nor did a team become more capable simply because it was given permission to decide. It needed to understand what to observe, what information mattered, what limits existed and what consequences should be considered before doing so.
Autonomy without judgement could become inconsistency; procedure without room for interpretation could produce the opposite problem: responses that were formally correct and wrong for the particular person.
Between those two extremes, the challenge was to ensure that enough knowledge travelled across shifts, departments and people to allow a better understanding of the situation at hand, accompanied by sufficiently shared judgement to make a decision within it.
Experienced teams often manage to do this almost without speaking. Beneath that apparent collective intuition usually lie years of conversations, mistakes, observations, corrections and decisions that have gradually built a shared way of interpreting certain circumstances. The difficulty appears when that way of seeing things has to outlive the people who helped build it. Teams change, someone joins, someone else leaves, a person changes shifts or an operation grows and something that once could be resolved among three people begins to require ten. If judgement could only be acquired after years of working alongside those who already possessed it, the hotel would risk losing part of what it had learned every time its people changed.
Nor did it seem possible—or desirable—to eliminate that fragility entirely. Part of hospitality depends precisely on experience, sensitivity and the individual ability to interpret what no rule could anticipate in all its nuances. The point was not to replace that capability, but to avoid having to rebuild it from scratch in every person. What needed to remain was not necessarily the gesture or the specific solution, but whatever made it possible to recognise why a response made sense in one case and might cease to make sense in another.
There I understood more clearly a distinction that had begun to emerge in the previous conversation: A procedure can preserve a response; an organisation also needs to preserve the reasons that make it possible to decide when that response is appropriate.
Perhaps that was ultimately what it meant for the hotel to learn: not getting everyone to remember the same situations or act in exactly the same way, but making it possible for a valuable experience to leave something behind—a question someone else would know to ask, a condition that would no longer go unnoticed, a limit that could be recognised earlier, information available when it was needed, or a reason that would help someone make a better decision.
A person’s absence would still matter, as it does in any team, but it would not necessarily force the property to forget everything it had learned with them.
And that distinction also changed the question we would have to ask next. If the hotel became better at recognising what it knew and managed to keep some of that knowledge available to those who needed to use it, there was still the question of what happened to the person on the other side of the door.
The future guest did not participate in shift changes, internal conversations or the learning accumulated by the operation. Nor could they know everything the hotel had learned about itself simply because that knowledge was better shared among those who worked there. For them, the property would still be whatever they could understand from the outside.
The problem was shifting once again. It would no longer be enough to ask how the hotel managed to preserve what it knew.
We would have to ask which part of all that knowledge needed to leave a trace.
Management Perspective
Knowledge begins to truly belong to the hotel when it can continue to guide decisions even when the person who acquired it is not there. Achieving that does not require turning every experience into a procedure or making everyone respond in the same way. Some situations require standards; others require interpretation. In the latter, sharing knowledge also means preserving the reasons, questions and judgement that make it possible to understand a situation before deciding how to act.
An organisation’s consistency does not depend solely on repeating responses, but on different people being able to make recognisably coherent decisions even when circumstances require different responses.
The Case Study
In the hotel we have been observing, the question was no longer only where the knowledge accumulated by the operation lived, but what happened when a decision depended on the presence of the person who possessed it. The same need could receive different responses not necessarily because the intention to look after the guest well had changed, but because what each person knew at the moment of deciding was not always the same.
The challenge was therefore becoming something else: allowing accumulated experience to travel across shifts, departments and people without reducing hospitality to a collection of predetermined responses.
A Question Before Moving On
Does your team share only what it needs to do, or does it also understand what it needs to look at before deciding what to do?