Digital Operational Resilience: The Role of Non-routine Responses in Crisis Situations

This study focuses on digital operational resilience (DOR) to ensure the stability of increasingly integrated digital services, which is currently receiving heightened attention due to ongoing environmental crisis situations. Researchers often relate DOR to planning and preparation activities, such as business continuity or disaster recovery planning. However, some types of organisations – such as scale-ups – tend to lack elaborate plans for crisis situations, mainly driven by their rapid growth and resource constraints. Such firms seem to regularly engage in non-routine responses to overcome sudden disruptions, namely heuristics (i.e., swift decisions) and improvisation (i.e., swift actions). We present preliminary results of an in-depth case study demonstrating how a FinTech scale-up applied heuristics and improvisation for its crisis response. We show how the consequences of such non-routine responses go beyond immediate crisis resolution, incurring either negative effects that need to be managed (coping debt) or opportunities to be leveraged (new/revised business processes).