METRICS: The Summit That Aims to Transform How We Confront Crises

There is no shortage of conferences dedicated to risk, security, resilience and foresight.

They provide opportunities to share insights, compare experiences and establish valuable connections. But when participants leave, one question remains: what truly endures?

Ideas, certainly. Contacts, undoubtedly. Greater awareness, sometimes.

But rarely a common, lasting and measurable system capable of transforming these exchanges into methodologies, indicators and decisions.

It is precisely this missing link that gave rise to METRICS.

METRICS does not intend to become just another conference. It aims to be the founding summit of a European infrastructure for knowledge, measurement and decision-making in the face of crises.

Its ambition is to bring together businesses, institutions, researchers, insurers, investors, infrastructure operators, local authorities and public decision-makers in a sustained collective effort around a shared mission: to develop an independent framework for crisis forecasting, crisis management and recovery.

A framework that begins in France and Europe before progressively expanding internationally.

A framework that is transparent, adaptable and auditable.

A framework that belongs neither to a single commercial organisation nor to any particular sphere of influence, but serves as a common good supporting better decisions.

Because the real challenge is no longer simply to understand crises. It is to measure our collective ability to confront them.

• Can we detect the earliest warning signals?
• How much time passes between an alert and an effective decision?
• Where are the weakest links in our organisations?
• Which dependencies could trigger cascading failures?
• How long would it take to restore essential functions?
• Which decisions would genuinely reduce our future exposure?

Today, every organisation answers these questions using its own tools, definitions and criteria.

This fragmentation prevents meaningful comparisons, slows cooperation and weakens decision-making.

METRICS aims to establish a common language.

Today's major crises cannot be confined to a single category.

An armed conflict can trigger an energy disruption, destabilise industrial supply chains, unsettle financial markets, weaken healthcare systems and facilitate cyberattacks.

A natural disaster can interrupt transport, paralyse telecommunications, undermine suppliers, generate substantial insurance losses and trigger social unrest.

A health crisis can become an economic, political, logistical and financial crisis within weeks.

This is why METRICS will address five major categories of risk: armed conflicts, terrorism, health crises, financial crises and natural disasters.

But these risks will never be examined in isolation.

The central issue will be how crises propagate.

Understanding how a local failure becomes a systemic crisis. Identifying critical points of failure before they collapse. Measuring how quickly an event can spread across sectors, infrastructure and territories. Determining how to contain that propagation.

In other words, METRICS seeks to make visible what too often remains invisible until systems begin to fail.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure.

The METRICS reference framework aims to assess three essential capabilities: anticipate, decide and recover.

Anticipate means detecting early warning signals, assessing their reliability, identifying critical thresholds and calculating the time genuinely available before a situation becomes critical.

Decide means rapidly assessing an alert, mobilising the appropriate decision-makers, ensuring information flows effectively and translating analysis into action.

Recover means more than returning to the previous situation. It means restoring essential functions, financing recovery, learning from the crisis and permanently reducing the vulnerabilities it exposed.

METRICS will seek to develop comparable indicators covering detection and decision-making times, critical dependencies, operational autonomy, substitution capabilities, cascading effects, restoration of minimum essential services, total crisis costs and the implementation of lessons learned.

The objective is not to create a rigid standard.

It is to build a living framework, regularly updated, whose data, assumptions and methodologies can be understood, reproduced and independently verified.

The inaugural METRICS Summit will mark the starting point.

It will bring together founding stakeholders, identify priorities, select initial indicators, establish governance principles and launch the working groups responsible for developing the first version of the framework.

But the work will not end when the summit closes.

Dedicated sectoral meetings will subsequently explore the specific challenges facing industry, finance, insurance, healthcare, energy, transport, telecommunications, defence, agriculture and local communities.

Each gathering will contribute new data, scenarios and practical experience.

Between these meetings, methodological committees, sector-specific working groups, expert hearings, analyses of real-world crises and simulation exercises will ensure the continuity of the programme.

An independent learned society is envisaged to coordinate this collective expertise, safeguard the scientific rigour of the framework and ensure transparency as it evolves.

METRICS will therefore produce more than an annual event.

It will build an institutional memory, a shared methodology and a permanent capacity for action.

The value of METRICS will depend directly on its independence.

No partner, company or institution should be able to define an indicator, impose a methodology or influence conclusions on its own.

Governance rules must guarantee diversity among contributors, transparency in calculations and traceability of methodological choices.

Partners will therefore not join METRICS to purchase influence.

They will join to participate in a collective undertaking intended to shape, over the long term, how organisations assess their preparedness.

Participating from the outset means helping to define the questions that will matter tomorrow.

It means testing one's expertise against that of other sectors.

It means gaining a deeper understanding of one's own vulnerabilities.

It also means choosing not merely to comply with future resilience standards, but to contribute to their development.

Europe is home to some of the world's most capable researchers, businesses, institutions, insurers, engineers and decision-makers.

Yet this collective intelligence remains too fragmented.

METRICS aims to provide a common platform, a shared methodology and a global ambition.

The objective is substantial: to develop, from Europe, an independent framework capable of improving crisis forecasting, accelerating decision-making, limiting cascading effects and making recovery more effective.

This project will require time, rigour and collective commitment.

It cannot simply be declared into existence.

It must be built, tested, challenged against real-world conditions and refined year after year.

But every major infrastructure begins with a first milestone.

METRICS intends to be that first milestone.

Not a summit organised to comment on yesterday's crises.

A meeting point to prepare for tomorrow's.

Not another stage for disconnected speeches.

A collective endeavour to develop methodologies, measurements and actionable decisions.

Not just another event.

The beginning of a common framework to anticipate better, decide faster and recover stronger.