Global crises and disruptions have put supply chain resilience on top of the agenda in many research and management contexts. High-impact, low-probability downturn disruptions – so-called black swan events – constitute an important part of this discussion, and many supply chains are currently re-designed to potentially deal better with such events in the future. While black swan events as disruptions in a negative direction are generally acknowledged, large-scale disruptions with positive business impacts have received less attention, despite being similarly hard to manage. This perspective paper introduces the term “silver swan event” to describe sudden and large-scale upward demand surges as a typology of situations entailing considerable supply chain management challenges. We provide empirical examples for such events, outline typical characteristics and their embedded specific management challenges together with possible mitigation strategies and management tools like for example capacity ramp-down intruments. We extend existing theory on supply chain resilience management with three core propositions addressing the typology of silver swan events and aim to inspire business logistics research as the world of supply chain resilience and disruption management is much more diverse than the well-known black swan phenomenon.
