The Black Swan Theory Perspective and the Challenges of the COVID-19 Crisis as Catalysts for Managing a Business

This paper aims to explore the extent to which digitalization can be utilized as a change management tool during black swan events. This article explores how digitalization can help businesses adapt to black swan events like the COVID-19 pandemic and examines the correlation between digitalization growth rates, income, and brand strength in 30 countries with varying viral threats from 2018 to 2021. This paper compares digitalization’s impact on change management success in two different contexts. The first context is regular business events that occurred pre-pandemic, as measured by revenue stability and brand strength. The second context is the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis, considered a black swan event. The paper explains the difference in impact and how digitalization can contribute to change management success in both contexts. Our approach to crisis management considers the Black Swan Theory and change management offers a unique and valuable perspective. We found that digitalization can enhance business resilience during the pandemic, although we caution that the benefits of digitalization may be limited to the short term due to its flexibility. Due to consideration of the COVID-19 crisis as a black swan type, this paper clarified the accessibility of digitalization as a measure of crisis management and the scale of the anti-crisis effect of digitalization as a tool of flexibility and adaptation to the black swan.