Point of View
May 2007

“I believe that we, as food safety professionals, need to adopt a systems thinking mindset "
by Frank Yiannas, IAFP President        

Today’s professional, committed to improving food safety, can find a host of articles, books, and conferences describing a wide range of activities, which they can consider implementing within their organization or place of employment to further reduce the risk of foodborne disease. Some of the activities published and discussed range from specific food safety training programs to particular food safety standards to the types of methods used to detect certain microorganisms. While all of these topics are very important, one major drawback to approaching food safety in this manner is that it doesn’t demonstrate how the many activities an organization may choose to implement to manage food safety risks are linked together or interrelated. It doesn’t demonstrate how they might influ-ence each other. It doesn’t treat the totality of food safety efforts as a system. It sometimes misses the big picture.

This brings us to the topic of this month’s message – systems thinking.

To more effectively reduce the risk of foodborne disease, I believe that we, as food safety professionals, need to adopt a systems thinking mindset. That’s right – a systems thinking mindset.

As I have mentioned before, the words we use and how we use them are important. So let’s take a moment to review the word system.

According to Webster’s dictionary, a system is a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole. If you think about it, systems are quite common and they’re everywhere. They range from simple systems to the more complex systems of life. There are living systems and there are non-living systems. Examples of living systems include a single cell,
our central nervous system, a person, an ecosystem, or even an organization. In our case, the unified whole or the system that we’re concerned about as food safety professionals is the organization’s food safety management system.

While I realize that in the field of food safety today the term food safety management system is commonly used, it is not generally used in the context referred to in this message. The term food safety management system, as commonly used, often refers to a system that includes having prerequisite programs in place, good manufacturing practices (GMPs), a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point plan, a recall procedure, and so on. It’s a very process-focused system. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for well-defined processes and standards. They’re critical. But having well-defined processes and standards aren’t enough. The system I’m referring to in this message is a different sort of system. It’s process focused, but it’s also people focused. It’s a total systems-based approach based on the scientific knowledge of food safety, human behavior, and organizational culture. I’ll refer to it as a behavior-based food safety management system.

Remember, at the end of the day, to improve the food safety performance of an organization, you have to change people’s behaviors. You can have the best-documented food safety processes and standards in the world, but if they are not consistently put into practice by people, they’re useless. Accordingly, I believe a food safety management system has to address both the science of food safety and the dimensions of organizational culture and human behavior.

As we have acquired scientific knowledge through research and analytical methodologies about the causes of foodborne disease, food safety professionals have advanced food safety through the implementation of specific risk management strategies. At times, specific food safety concerns and strategies have been studied and tackled in isolation, as individual components, not as a whole or complete system. Although this sort of linear cause and effect thinking in many instances has served us well, at times it is not fully adequate to address some of the unique challenges we still face in the field of food safety today. This is because many of the issues we still face – especially those involving food workers – involve multiple components or factors that are interrelated.

A critical characteristic of a system is that it cannot be fully explained or understood by simply studying each of its components in isolation. It must be explained by understanding how each part or component interacts and influen-ces other components. Webster’s definition of a system used above, where the parts of the system interact and are interdependent, suggests something beyond a simple cause and effect relationship. A system calls for a more complex understanding of relatedness to explain the role of the various components in the system as a whole.

The next time you’re developing or reviewing a food safety manage-ment system, ask yourself, am I really considering all of the factors that interact to affect a particular outcome? In addition to basic food safety and sanitation principles, am I considering environmental factors, the work equipment and work tools used, dimensions related to human behavior, and the organization’s culture? We won’t make the types of dramatic improvements in reducing the burden of foodborne disease, especially in certain parts of the food system and world, until we get much better at developing a systems thinking mindset.

In closing, if you are truly committed to continual learning and reducing the risk of foodborne disease, I encourage you to make plans now (if you haven’t already) to attend IAFP 2007 at Disney’s Contemporary Resort on July 8–11. By all accounts, it looks like we’ll have a record-setting Annual Meet-ing.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please let me know. You can e-mail me at frank.yiannas@disney.com. Until next month, thanks for reading.