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Our current system for homeland security does not provide the necessary framework to manage the challenges posed by 21-super-st-Century catastrophic threats. Copyright 2009 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Safety practices and preparations for limited emergencies are common activities in complex systems. In contrast, the vital task of planning for a crisis is usually poorly handled. This paper seeks to provide a better understanding of the prerequisites for successful learning processes to deal with crisis situations. It reveals the barriers that emerge during the process of developing satisfactory learning practices.The objectives of this paper are twofold. The first aim is operational: how can one develop adequate learning processes despite the challenges involved? The second aim is theoretical: what light do these efforts and the resistance they arouse shed on the debate between`High Reliability Theorists' and`Normal Accident Theorists', in which the status of learning processes is a key element. The author refers to his personal experience with crisis research and consultation.

The 2003 heat wave killed nearly 15,000 people in France. It was a stealth killer. “We did not notice anything”, as the Minister of Health declared to the Parliamentary Commission. It is of crucial importance to understand the keys to this collective failure, which has much in common with the Chicago experience in 1995 –the lessons of which had not been grasped nor learned. A four‐layered challenge explains the fiasco. The emergency challenge, which is not the realm of bureaucracies outside the “9/11” bodies. The crisis management challenge, largely documented since the 80s and the 90s, but still poorly known by most organisations, in France and elsewhere. The unconventional crisis challenge, emerging more and more today with “outside‐of‐the‐box” scenarios – and for which very few are ready to prepare, in any country in the world. The “texture” challenge, when the whole fabric of our complex systems (rather than just some specific segment) is suddenly deeply affected — an entirely new front‐line in the crisis world, which urges to switch from a mechanical or an architectural to a more “biological” approach to read, seize, and handle emerging csrises. The 2003 heat fiasco compels us to prepare for far more than climate‐related crises. It calls for a fresh and bold look at our crisis paradigms. As General Foch said: “Gunfire kills, but so do outdated visions”.

This paper is a modest contribution to the vast exploration to be embarked upon as our maps appear increasingly outdated. We will first explore some outmoded ‘taken for granted’ assumptions and visions: this section aims to clarify why the crisis management world has profoundly changed and how the current understanding of crises and theoretical frameworks is becoming increasingly less adequate. Then, we will try to meet the second challenge of this special issue, by suggesting innovative approaches that will contribute to elaborate the building blocks of a theory of crisis management. We will propose a new theoretical framework, through the use of a fractal approach, following the footsteps of Benoit Mandelbrot, in order to rethink and capture the essence of the new theatre of operations that must be dealt with. Throughout, we will show how this original framework could be put into practice and what its limitations and perspectives are.

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Findings of recent disaster research make mention of a changing disaster landscape.According to the disaster literature, there has been a general increase of the quantity of disasters per time frame during the last decades. On the other hand, several academics refer to a more important qualitative shift in the disaster landscape. Although this qualitative shift is very credible, there exists no academic study approving this evolution. If suchlike evolution is concrete, we will have to strengthen our emergency management in a substantial way in order to be better prepared for managing future disasters. After discussing the changing nature of disasters, we concentrate on a study of randomly selected disasters, using the Disaster and Complexity Diagram, a tool permitting to study qualitative trends in disaster evolution.