Objective. This study explains the process through which digital resilience is formed in small and medium-sized enterprises operating under wartime conditions. The core problem is that war does not confine disruption to sales or day-to-day operations; digital infrastructure, communication channels, revenue flows, team coordination, employees’ psychological security, human-resource decisions, and the firm’s operating logic are affected simultaneously. Consequently, small firms relying on websites, messaging applications, social networks, payment systems, and search engines face a compound fragility that is at once technological, financial, human, and managerial. The research question is not what actions managers took, but in what sequence and through which mechanism those actions produced resilience. On this basis, digital resilience is defined not as possession of advanced technology or large-scale digital transformation projects, but as the capability to rapidly reconfigure vital functions and to maintain a minimum flow of communication, sales, service delivery, and decision-making.





Method. The study is applied in purpose, qualitative in data, and process-oriented in explanatory logic, and was conducted through a multiple-case study strategy. The unit of analysis is the small or medium-sized enterprise, and six cases (coded SME1–SME6) were selected through purposive homogeneous sampling. Inclusion criteria were small or medium scale, process dependence on digital channels, direct experience of wartime disruption, practical implementation of resilience measures, and willingness to provide a detailed account of decisions and outcomes. The cases are structurally homogeneous: 4–6 employees, 3–5 years of operating history, location in Tehran, Alborz, and Qom provinces, and high dependence on online sales platforms and AI-based tools. The temporal scope is May 2026, approximately 40 days after the end of the forty-day war. Data were collected through three semi-structured group interview sessions; in each session all six enterprises were present, team members deliberated internally, and a representative articulated the position of that enterprise. In total, 24 hours of discussion (three eight-hour sessions over three weeks) were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Analysis proceeded in five stages: familiarization with the text, initial coding, conceptual categorization, organization of categories into six dimensions, and within-case and cross-case analysis. Cognitive mapping served neither as a theoretical foundation nor as the primary analytical method, but as a tool for representing and constructing the process model after cross-case analysis; it was built on concept co-occurrence and participants’ explicit causal statements, and the final map was validated by returning to the transcripts and through member checking.





Findings. Seven themes were organized into four process stages, and the overarching pattern was a shift in managerial logic from “digital growth” to “survival command.” The first stage is disruption of digital functions: the primary shock was neither fear nor falling demand, but the loss of the infrastructure underpinning the revenue model—internet outages, website inaccessibility, collapse of search traffic, and restricted access to foreign tools (Theme 1). The second stage comprises urgent resilience needs across three simultaneous layers: a shortened decision horizon and a shift in managerial language from market development to customer retention and firm survival (2); the translation of resilience into a numerical and temporal calculation based on cash flow and one- to three-month scenarios (3); and human-resource decisions caught in an ethical–economic tension between preserving team belonging and controlling costs (4). The third stage consists of agile solutions in the form of small, fast, low-cost, testable interventions: channel substitution through domestic messaging platforms, direct contact, and relational capital (5), and responding to external turbulence with internal order via regular meetings, online work boards, and daily tasks (6). The fourth stage covers outcomes: minimal operational continuity, retention of key customers, preservation of the core team, and structural learning; the war acted as an organizational mirror, exposing single-channel dependence, contractual silence on force majeure, weak product portfolios, and the absence of a liquidity horizon (7).





Conclusion. Under wartime conditions, digital resilience is less a technological asset than a managerial capability for rapid reconfiguration across five functions: digital, financial, human, operational, and market. The theoretical contribution is the repositioning of resilience from an asset-based property to a process-based capability: when infrastructure lies beyond the firm’s control, “bounce-back” is unavailable, and the criterion of resilience shifts from technological maturity to channel substitutability. Agility, at micro scale, is the operational mechanism through which resilience is realized, and structural simplicity together with the founder-manager’s proximity to operations becomes an advantage in crisis. The value of the study lies in integrating four streams—resilience, agility, entrepreneurial bricolage, and dynamic capabilities—under the concept of “survival command” and specifying the sequence in which they connect; the resulting model has diagnostic application.