When Two Worn-Out Systems Meet: Maria Haggo on the Neuroscience of Hospitality

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Maria Haggo, founder and CEO of Transform8, for a conversation that began with an unsettling claim: reality is not what we think it is. Haggo is a brain health strategist with an MSc in Psychology and Neuroscience from King's College London, and her work rests on a single idea, that the brain is core business infrastructure. She spent fifteen years in hospitality before moving into neuroscience, and over the interview she brought that idea back to the industry she came from. The full conversation is available to watch below.

Reality is a prediction, not a recording

We tend to assume our eyes work like cameras, capturing the world exactly as it is. They do not. The brain takes in a constant stream of input and makes predictions based on what it has experienced before, on memory and on established patterns. We then experience the world through that lens.

When the prediction is right, no harm done. When it is wrong, it becomes a bias that pulls us away from what is true. Haggo's example was ordinary. Two people walk into the same restaurant. One finds it warm and cosy, the other finds it loud and unpleasant. Same room, two different realities, each shaped by the state the person walked in with.

The state you arrive in decides what you see

That state is not fixed. Sleep, food, hydration and rest all feed it. Arrive worn out and the brain runs below its potential. You become less tolerant and quicker to anger. Ordinary situations start to read as threats.

Her point for hospitality is that guests rarely arrive in a good state. They have flown for ten hours, lost a night's sleep, eaten badly and run through a difficult schedule before they reach the desk. The complaint about the temperature of the soup is rarely about the soup. It is about everything that came before it, and how little energy the guest has left to deal with what is happening now.

A career that wears the system down

Hospitality, she argued, is built to wear down the people who work in it. The hours are long and out of step with normal life. Staff skip meals, forget to drink, and spend the shift on their feet. She described the old mindset plainly, the 1980s Wall Street idea that a nine to five is a part time job, that sleep is an afterthought, that "lunch is for wimps."

It is possible to push through all of it. The cost is that staff operate well below their potential, make more mistakes, and lose the chance to meet guests from a rested, grounded place. In fifteen years in the industry, she said, rest and recovery were almost never discussed. Burnout sat closer to a badge of honour.

When two worn-out systems meet

This is where the argument lands hardest. A guest arrives dysregulated. They are met by an employee who is also running on a worn-out system and who, under the rule that the customer is always right, has to do the managing. Two worn-out nervous systems, one of them required to stay composed.

Composure cannot be faked. Haggo was clear that a guest senses inauthenticity even when the words are correct. If the host's own system is unsettled, the effort to calm a difficult guest tends to fail, because the guest feels the gap between what is said and what is real.

Regulation is contagious

The same mechanism has a hopeful side. Nervous systems influence one another. Simone reached for the root of the word hospitality, which traces back to a Latin term meaning both guest and host, two people held under one word. Haggo took the image further. The relationship should work like a dance, each side feeding off the other.

If the host stays regulated, through knowledge, awareness and practice, that calm transfers to the guest. A regulated person reads situations more generously, forgives more easily and looks for danger less. That has a practical edge. Guest experience scores improve not only by training staff in service, but by helping them regulate, so they have something steady to pass on.

Make it safe to drop the ball

Haggo drew a line between the stress the work itself creates and the stress people pile on top of it. The work will always carry pressure. There will be unhappy guests, tight turnarounds and things that break. What teams can remove is the second layer, the fear of being blamed, demoted, passed over or shouted at for a mistake.

She framed this as psychological safety, an environment where it is safe to drop the ball because the team will catch it. Take that fear away and a large, unnecessary part of the stress response goes with it. People can then put their energy where it belongs, into the work itself.

Staying human in a world built for humans

The interview closed on the question HumanX puts to everyone, whether the future is technology and humanity rather than one set against the other. Haggo's answer was measured. She is not against technology, and she pointed to the ways it supports brain health and self-awareness.

Her caution was about outsourcing. Technology can read your state for you, but you can also build the awareness to read your own, and the second skill is the more useful one. She extended the worry to thinking itself, noting how readily people now hand reflection over to machines and lose the habit of working an idea through. Her closing instinct was simple. Stay human in a world built for humans, because that is the point of all of it. Lose that, and the rest stops mattering.