Keeping Up With Change

How does an organization stay ahead of change? This question is probably more critical today than ever before. Fads come and go in months rather than years. Consumer trust in brands is more fragile. Social media and constant news access fuel many changes. But what starts change?

The usual starters are external and internal forces. Some forces are evolutionary: regulations, macro trends in demographics, technology adoption within an organization. Others are much more rapid: changes in customer requirements, acquisitions and divestitures, reactions to internal economic pressures.

These examples are familiar to the food industry. Customers requiring GFSI certification as a mandatory entry for doing business may drive significant changes in a company’s food safety program, especially if it is a new endeavor. Understanding and complying with new FSMA regulations is top of mind with many food and beverage companies and their supply-chain partners.

Change is constant, so it is imperative to constantly mold organizations and shape culture to align and adapt to new business directions. A resilient organization is one that not only survives event-induced change, but also learns to turn challenges into successful growth opportunities.

Often hardest for an organization is managing the speed of change. A highly successful new competitive product or new sets of customer requirements as a result of a major food safety incident can drive change fast. When a company expands into food and/or beverage categories outside core competencies, it might have to create new and different food safety programs and practices. The operational ramifications of these are sometimes difficult for executives to foresee. Technology that increases productivity can add to food safety complexity as lot sizes and line speeds increase. New equipment design may inadvertently increase the inefficiency in cleaning, sanitizing, changeovers, or startups.

Hand in hand with overall culture is cultivating a food safety culture. Too often, activities such as audits or inspections are viewed as a means of satisfying a business metric. Key performance indicators that solely reinforce the end result can drive a minimalist behavior rather than creating an environment that celebrates finding deficiencies, reinforces sharing information, and leverages a third-party food safety professional’s expertise to help defuse potential issues before they become hot spots.

Today’s consumers expect safe and reliable commercially produced food and beverages worldwide. This is the trust they place in the brands they buy. That trust is fragile, hard to build, easy to break, and extremely difficult to reconstruct. A failure leading to a catastrophic consumer health issue can happen anywhere along today’s complex food supply chain. Although the incident may directly impact only a few companies, there is a ripple effect across all brands and companies operating in that industry sector. A world-class food safety culture views food safety as an approach to elevate the entire food system including suppliers, competitors, and distributors. So how do we keep up or get ahead of the change curve? One vector is interpreting the unarticulated customer needs into products/services at a speed matching expectations. Another is to eliminate issues that frustrate or anger customers. Value is achieved in eliminating waste whether it stems from business process errors, inefficient communications, rework, or excessive cycle time.

Speed to market with new products and services drives change. If an innovation is highly successful, it can drive change for an entire industry. A strategy like building capacity or cross training can keep an organization one step ahead of the change curve. Although reactionary, quickly applying best practices can ease challenges from a major change.

Change is inevitable and constant. The difficulty is predicting the magnitude and speed of change. Creating an environment that embraces change will make future challenges easier to overcome. Keeping a pulse on the indicators of change will facilitate proactive planning over the extremes of reactionary movements.

The author is President and CEO, AIB International.