One of the World's most successful organizations is characterized by a highly discipline and effective team of people from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, France, Uruguay, Spain, Croatia, Germany, Portugal, Holland and Belgium. Despite each employee's different nationality, color, religion, language and educational background they all play together following a very strict set of rules and behaviors according to the distinct culture of the organization they belong to: The Barcelona Football Club.

How does Barça do it? Looking back at some of our planet's most noteworthy food safety incidents, we frequently find that excellent companies with good and talented people were involved. Upon investigating these often tragic events, we discover that top management generally seemed to have been sincerely committed to food safety, stringent standards had been adopted, millions spent on HACCP and food safety training and still, these organizations failed to prevent human illness and suffering and took serious blows to their reputation and financial performance.

Root cause analysis often points to poor choices in real-time made by all levels of the organization. A poor choice can be a managerial decision to roll the dice and disregard or underestimate a potential hazard. A poor choice can be an employee choosing to ignore a food safety rule from lack of conviction. A poor choice can be a middle manager deciding to let an employee's violative behavior go unchastised from fear of losing popularity. These normal human decisions are not based on sound science, but rather on "gut feeling", "wishful thinking" and other decision drivers connected to people's beliefs, feelings, attitude, etc.. These attributes are strongly connected to culture.

It is management's responsibility to create and implement a food safety policy that supersedes individual behavior variation by forging a food safety culture, which dictates actions. In this learning session we will receive tools to create an organizational food safety culture, resulting in uniformity and discipline, while celebrating individual diversity and maintaining dignity.