Enacting Digital Resilience to Navigate Through Adversity

By Xiao Li, Julia Kotlarsky, and Michael Myers

What's the article about? 

Organizations are seeking digital solutions that employ digital technologies to deal with potential disruptive events. This entails the enactment of digital resilience – that is, a concerted, ongoing effort to harness digital assets and abilities in order to bounce back to business-as-usual operations. Yet, little is known about how such enactment unfolds. Against this backdrop, the research team examined how digital resilience can be enacted through dynamic coordinative efforts during an unfolding disaster.

The research team conducted a case study at Foodstuffs North Island, a New Zealand-based grocery cooperative. Foodstuffs North Island’s response to Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 stands out as a compelling demonstration, particularly its coordinative efforts with multiple stakeholders to deploy technological solutions to address the ensuing connectivity challenges. 

Dive into the details 

The effective crisis management at Foodstuffs North Island exhibited a balanced blend of structured protocols and improvised responses through coordinative actions that focused on orchestrating, following, decentralizing, and aligning efforts of dispersed stakeholders affected by the cyclone. Our findings show that the enactment of digital resilience necessitates the integration of structured and improvised coordinative actions, both temporally and spatially, to address unexpected challenges and bounce back to business-as-usual operations.

From a temporal perspective, digital resilience relied on proactive and reactive mechanisms. Structured coordination was employed in the preparation and early stages of the disaster, with leadership orchestrating available resources in a proactive manner, while sub-teams and local stores followed this centralized decision-making. As the disaster unfolded, the need for improvisation intensified to address emergent threats and the needs of local communities. Sub-teams leveraged their situational awareness to devise ad hoc solutions aimed at resolving problems locally. They later aligned with the leadership to reflect on how to incorporate lessons learned from improvised coordinative actions into updated crisis management plans.

From a spatial perspective, digital resilience was enacted within hierarchical yet interconnected networks within the organization. It relied on top-down, leadership-driven structured coordinative actions to establish priorities, allocate resources, and define disaster response plans. Sub-teams dispersed across the local community stores and functional teams served as drivers of improvisation, leveraging local knowledge and expertise to tailor bottom-up coordinative actions. Importantly, these spatially distributed actions were facilitated by robust communication channels that enabled sharing situational awareness, and supported continuous alignment between the central leadership and sub-teams.

The takeaways 

The key insight is that digital resilience requires a combination of structured and improvised coordinative actions that encompass proactive and reactive mechanisms deployed through careful alignment between top-down and bottom-up approaches. Based on our research with Foodstuffs North Island we suggest a set of recommendations for organisations in devising digital resilience strategies:

Proactive digital resilience strategies:

• Prepare emergency plans: Formulate actionable
  emergency response plans with tiered impacts, such as business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans. Clarify the roles of responsible teams in emergency plans.
• Foster a culture of prevention and preparedness: Conduct regular training and drills to enhance employees' awareness of potential threats and improve their response capabilities.     
• Improve crisis communication channels: Establish clear crisis response contacts and escalation mechanisms within the organization. Leverage tools such as email, web conferencing, and shared documents to facilitate smooth communication and rapid dissemination of crisis information.

Reactive digital resilience strategies:

• Implement workaround mechanisms: Assemble dedicated teams to develop improvised solutions and encourage innovative thinking to address emerging issues and unexpected challenges.
• Foster cross-functional collaboration: Encourage communication and collaboration among different functional teams to identify the right problems and expedite resolution processes.
• Adopt a decentralized decision-making process: Simplify decision-making chains during emergencies and empower localized personnel to make flexible adjustments to established emergency protocols based on real-time conditions.

Top-down digital resilience strategies:

•  Establish a centralized crisis management
  structure: Form a top-level crisis management team to oversee the overall emergency situation and centralize resource allocation during crises.      
• Identity priorities of crisis management tasks: The crisis management team discusses and determines task priorities, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.
• Implement monitoring and accountability mechanisms: Track the crisis status and actions, ensuring functional teams act following top-level directives and execute appropriate measures.

Bottom-up resilience strategies:

• Empower local/regional or sub-team leaders: Allow capable employees to assume leadership roles, leveraging their expertise and experience to make local decisions.
• Leverage personal networks: Utilize personal relationships and social networks to form improvised teams to collaboratively address urgent needs.

Post-disaster:

• Conduct post-incident reviews: Organize team discussions to reflect on the emergency event, integrating lessons learned from improvised countermeasures into established processes.