From Conflict Systems to Growth Strategy

I used to write, for the Atlantic Council and the Washington Institute, about war economies — how a siege produces a market, how an armed group becomes a customs authority, how a foreign patron's intermittent funding rewires a faction's incentives all the way down to the squad level. The work was analytical, but it was never abstract. The unit of analysis was always the same: who pays whom, on what condition, with what enforcement, and what does that arrangement select for over time.

When I moved into strategic digital transformation for Canadian B2B companies, my colleagues assumed I had switched fields. I had not. The toolkit is identical. A B2B sales pipeline is, structurally, the same kind of system: a set of actors with asymmetric information, transacting under conditions of uncertainty, where the rules of the road are partly written down and partly enforced by reputation, and where small shifts in incentive structure produce outsized changes in behaviour months later.

Three transfers, in particular, have held up engagement after engagement.

First: the unit of analysis is the transaction, not the actor. A common mistake in B2B strategy — and in conflict analysis — is to start with personalities. Who is the CEO? Who is the commander? It feels concrete, but it is almost always the wrong starting point. The right starting point is the transaction: what is being exchanged, on what terms, under what enforcement. Personalities then become legible as positions inside that exchange, rather than as autonomous decision-makers. This single move shortens most strategy diagnostics by weeks.

Second: the patron-client model travels. Anyone who has watched an externally funded faction collapse the month its funding tapered will recognise, in slow motion, what happens to a SaaS sales motion when an executive sponsor leaves the buyer's organisation. The relationship was never with the company; it was with the patron. The work that follows — quietly rebuilding sponsorship before the renewal cycle — is the corporate equivalent of what humanitarian organisations call localisation. Same logic. Different vocabulary.

Third: information asymmetry is the product, not the friction. In a wartime market, the trader who knows which checkpoint is open at 3am has the entire margin. In a B2B sale, the vendor who has actually sat in three rooms like the buyer's room has the entire margin. The strategic question is never how to remove the asymmetry; it is how to be on the right side of it long enough to be trusted, and then to convert that trust into a structural position.

Where the analogy breaks — and it does break — is on the consequences of failure. A bad B2B strategy loses a quarter. A bad analysis of a war economy loses lives. I take the work in the second register more carefully than I take the work in the first. But the discipline that produced the second made me unusually fast at the first, and I am increasingly persuaded that the people running mid-sized Canadian companies would benefit from analysts trained in conflict systems, not the other way around.

The practical version of this argument is in the engagements I run for Canadian B2B and SMB clients: I do not start with a brand exercise. I start with a transactional map. Who pays whom, on what condition, with what enforcement. Everything else — the website, the LinkedIn presence, the content motion — gets calibrated against that map.

If that map is wrong, no amount of polish will save the strategy. If it is right, even a modest amount of polish will compound over years. That, in the end, is what a decade in the Syria file taught me about growth.