One of the reasons ESG causes so much confusion inside organisations is that it keeps getting handed to parts of the business that are solving a different problem.
Every function operates with a built-in way of deciding what matters. In finance, decisions are filtered through efficiency, return, and control of capital. In strategy, attention naturally goes to growth, positioning, and competitive advantage. In operations, success is defined by delivery, reliability, and keeping the system running. These aren’t preferences or styles. They’re the logics those functions exist to apply.
ESG doesn’t naturally sit inside any of them.
So when ESG arrives, it doesn’t enter a neutral space. It lands inside one of those logics, and that logic immediately starts shaping what ESG becomes.
What follows is almost automatic. ESG gets translated. People try to make sense of it using the tools they already rely on. It gets reframed in terms of delivery, measurement, or efficiency, and activity starts to build around it. From the outside, it looks as though ESG is being absorbed and managed.
That translation is where the break happens.
ESG is not trying to optimise performance inside a single function. It is trying to govern exposure that sits between functions. It is concerned with how risk moves across boundaries, how dependencies tighten, and how failure can cascade once pressure is applied. Performance systems aren’t designed to hold those questions, because they exist to improve outcomes, not to surface fragility.
Once ESG is forced to operate inside performance logic, it starts to feel wrong. It either becomes too vague to manage properly, or too expensive for what it appears to deliver. The system keeps testing it against criteria it was never meant to meet.
Over time, ESG begins to fragment. Different parts of it settle into different corners of the organisation, shaped by whatever logic they’ve landed in. Each piece feels workable on its own, but the overall purpose governing exposure across the organisation disappears.
This is exactly why risk governance exists as a distinct discipline. Some problems don’t belong to any single operating logic. They need somewhere they can be held without being translated into performance terms.
Until ESG is recognised as operating in that category, it will keep being reshaped by the systems it passes through.
The problem isn’t that ESG lacks clarity.
It’s that it keeps being handed to logics that cannot express what it actually is.
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