Meeting the Challenge of Interdependent Critical Networks under Threat : The Paris Initiative

The growing globalization of activities translates into large-scale area of operation, just-in-time processes and increasing interdependencies among national and international networks. Combined with the emergence of a wide spectrum of threats -sabotage, terrorism, disease, natural disasters- one faces a whole new arena of large-scale emerging risks and crises involving critical networks in which failure to operate can have debilitating impacts on an entire country and even abroad. Strategic and operational answers have to be developed to deal with such events and improve collective preparation through the creation of specific partnerships. In the aftermath of 2001 Anthrax crisis we suggested launching an ambitious debriefing process on the Anthrax episode: a large pilot study, with a clear strategic view consisting on bringing some hallmarks to help postal operators at the highest executive level. This led to the "Paris Initiative", with senior executives of postal sectors from 30 countries meeting in Paris one year after the international crisis to share their experience gained throughout this "out of the box" episode and suggest new avenues of international partnerships. An innovative international platform for immediate cross-organizational response capacity resulted from that initiative too; a partnership enabling the necessary common learning process. To date postal operators have been among the very few to launch such an innovative process to understand and meet the collective challenge of an increasingly interdependent world. After discussing some key challenges associated with the operation of critical networks today as well as some behavioral barriers and financial issues associated with the development of an adequate set of possible actions by top decision-makers, this paper presents the Paris Initiative in more detail (challenges, preparation, choice of a strategic team within and outside organizations, success through measurable outputs). Beyond this specific pilot initiative, some strategic clues are suggested for successfully applying the developed framework to other critical sectors.Appendix 1: Strategic Check-List for Senior Executives