What The Expanse Can Teach Today's Business Leaders

Lessons in Strategy, Culture, and Survival from the Best Sci-Fi Show You've Probably Already Watched

Science fiction has always been a mirror for our present, even when it's gazing at a fictional future. The Expanse — the critically acclaimed series set in a colonised solar system roughly 200 years from now — is, on its surface, a story about political intrigue, interplanetary war, and the discovery of an alien intelligence. But look a little deeper, and it's one of the most sophisticated explorations of organisational dynamics, leadership under uncertainty, and systemic inequality you'll find in any medium. Not bad for a show with space ships and proto-molecule.

I've been a fan of The Expanse for years. And the more time I've spent in service architecture, large-scale transformation, and navigating the politics of complex organisations, the more I've found myself thinking: this show gets it. Here's a look at what today's business leaders — whether you're running a service team, a consultancy, or an enterprise — can genuinely take from the world of The Expanse.

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1. The Belters Know What Happens When You Ignore Your Workforce

The Belt — the asteroid belt and outer planets where humanity's most resource-critical labour force lives — is The Expanse's most powerful social commentary. Belters mine the ice and rock that keeps the inner planets alive. They are, in every practical sense, essential workers. And for generations, Earth and Mars treated them as expendable.

The result? Rage, radicalisation, and the rise of the Outer Planets Alliance — a resistance movement born entirely from institutional neglect.

Sound familiar?

• Ignored pain becomes organised resistance. Belters didn't start out wanting revolution. They wanted fair pay, better air, and acknowledgement that their lives mattered. When those things weren't given, they took more drastic action.
• The gap between those who make decisions and those who do the work is always dangerous. Earth politicians never set foot in the Belt. That physical and cultural distance made it easy to forget the human cost of their resource extraction policies.
• Engagement isn't a nice-to-have. In the show, the cost of disengagement was an interplanetary conflict. In your organisation, the cost is quieter — but the pattern is the same: turnover, disengagement, quiet quitting, and the slow erosion of institutional knowledge.

In my opinion, the Belter storyline is the most prescient business case in the entire series. The next time you're tempted to centralise decision-making away from the people doing the actual work, ask yourself: are you building Earth, or are you building something more equitable?

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2. Holden's Leadership Style: Principled but Costly

James Holden, captain of the Rocinante, is not your typical charismatic CEO. He's idealistic, often infuriating, and has a maddening habit of telling the truth at precisely the worst possible moment. He also makes some genuinely terrible tactical decisions — all in the name of doing the right thing.

And yet, his crew follows him. Every time.

Why? Because his values are legible. His team always knows where he stands and what he stands for. There's no hidden agenda, no political manoeuvreing, no saying one thing and doing another. In a galaxy full of institutional deception, Holden's transparency is his greatest leadership asset.

• Psychological safety is built on predictability. People don't need their leader to be perfect. They need them to be consistent.
• Principled leadership attracts principled people. The Rocinante crew are fiercely loyal not because Holden pays well (he often can't) but because they trust his compass.
• Moral clarity is a competitive advantage. In complex, high-stakes situations, teams that trust their leader's intentions make faster, better decisions.

The flip side, of course, is that Holden's idealism occasionally puts the ship in the path of an incoming torpedo. Principle without pragmatism is its own risk. The best leaders I've worked with hold their values firmly and their tactics loosely — they know what they won't compromise on, but they're agile about how they get there.

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3. Chrisjen Avasarala: The Art of Political Realism

If Holden is the idealist, Avasarala is his perfect foil. The UN Deputy Secretary-General — and later Secretary-General — is one of the most authentically rendered political operators in fiction. She is calculating, occasionally ruthless, and laser-focused on outcomes. She swears like a docker and dresses like royalty. She is magnificent.

And she's a lesson in how to actually get things done in large organisations.

• She understands that power flows through relationships. Avasarala never underestimates who knows whom. She plays the long game with alliances, knowing that today's adversary might be tomorrow's necessary ally.
• She distinguishes between stated positions and actual interests. When she's negotiating, she's not listening to what people say — she's listening for what they want. This is foundational to any serious enterprise negotiation.
• She is comfortable being unpopular in the short term. Many of her best decisions look terrible in the moment and vindicated in hindsight. She's not managing optics — she's managing outcomes.

In complex stakeholder environments — and every large organisation is a complex stakeholder environment — Avasarala's playbook is remarkably applicable. Know your stakeholders' real motivations. Build alliances before you need them. And don't mistake noise for signal.

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4. The Protomolecule: Innovation Without Governance is Dangerous

The protomolecule is an alien-engineered substance of extraordinary power. It is transformative, unpredictable, and potentially civilisation-ending. And the first human organisation to get their hands on it — the Protogen Corporation — immediately decided to run covert experiments on a civilian population.

Because: profit.

This is not subtle. The protomolecule is a stand-in for any sufficiently powerful, poorly understood technology — and The Expanse is unflinching about what happens when innovation governance fails.

• Moving fast and breaking things is survivable at small scale. At civilisation-scale, it is catastrophic. The same principle applies to enterprise technology decisions — the blast radius matters.
• Ethical frameworks need to precede deployment, not follow it. Protogen didn't lack intelligence. They lacked governance. They had no ethical review process, no escalation model, and no accountability structure. The result was the destruction of Eros Station.
• Commercial incentive without oversight creates monsters. This is not an anti-business argument — it's an argument for proper governance structures. The companies in The Expanse that survive are the ones that operate within frameworks of accountability.

If you're leading any kind of digital transformation or AI adoption programme, the protomolecule storyline should be required viewing. The question isn't whether the technology is powerful. The question is: what's your governance model?

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5. The Three-Body Problem of Competing Priorities

One of The Expanse's structural brilliances is that it never gives you a clear villain. Earth wants to maintain power. Mars wants sovereignty and respect. The Belt wants survival and recognition. Every faction has legitimate grievances. Every faction makes decisions that range from understandable to monstrous.

This is, almost exactly, the experience of leading in a large enterprise with multiple competing business units.

• Everyone has a rational reason for what they're doing. The business team wants revenue. The security team wants compliance. The operations team wants stability. The finance team wants efficiency. These goals are structurally in tension — and they all have merit.
• Optimising for one faction at the expense of others is a temporary win. Earth's dominance model worked — until it didn't. Prioritising revenue at the expense of security, or efficiency at the expense of resilience, follows the same pattern.
• Genuine collaboration requires acknowledging that other people's priorities are legitimate. The moments in The Expanse when factions actually cooperate — and there are some remarkable ones — all begin with someone choosing to see the other side's position as valid rather than inconvenient.

The best service architects and leaders I know are the ones who can hold the competing priorities of their stakeholders in mind simultaneously, without collapsing into either false harmony or unnecessary conflict.

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6. Drummer's Integrity: Leading When It Costs You Something

Camina Drummer is arguably the most complex leadership character in the series. She starts as a station administrator, rises through the OPA, and consistently finds herself in situations where doing the right thing puts her at direct odds with those she's loyal to.

The moments that define her are the moments when she chooses integrity over convenience — and pays the price for it.

• Real integrity is only visible under pressure. Anyone can have values when they're not inconvenient. Drummer's leadership authority comes from the fact that her crew watches her make costly choices and knows she'd do it again.
• Loyalty to people versus loyalty to values is one of leadership's hardest tensions. She loves the Belt. She loves her crew. She does not always love what they ask her to do. Navigating that tension with grace is genuinely difficult, and The Expanse shows the emotional cost honestly.
• Leaders who model difficult choices give their teams permission to make them too. When Drummer draws a line, her team doesn't always like it — but they know where the line is.

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7. The Rocinante as a High-Performing Team

Beyond the individual characters, the crew of the Rocinante is a case study in team dynamics. Naomi, Amos, Holden, and Alex — and later Clarissa — are wildly different people with very different backgrounds, motivations, and communication styles. They bicker, they disagree, they hold painful secrets. And they function as one of the most effective small teams in the story.

Here's what makes them work:

• Complementary strengths, genuinely respected. Naomi is the intellectual backbone. Amos is the force of nature. Alex is the precision operator. Holden sets the direction. Nobody pretends to be something they're not, and nobody dismisses what someone else brings.
• Conflict is handled directly. There's very little passive-aggression on the Rocinante. When there's a problem, it surfaces. The conversations are hard, but they happen.
• Shared purpose trumps individual preference. The crew don't always agree on tactics or even goals. But when it matters, they rally around a shared north star — usually "don't let the bad thing happen to the people who can't defend themselves."
• Psychological safety enables extreme performance. Amos, in particular, is an outlier. He's violent, blunt, and morally detached in ways that would disqualify him from most workplaces. The Rocinante works because Holden doesn't try to change who Amos is — he creates an environment where what Amos does is directed well.

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8. Information Asymmetry is the Root of Nearly Every Crisis

Step back and look at the major crises in The Expanse, and you'll find the same root cause over and over: someone had critical information that wasn't shared with the people who needed it.

• Protogen knew what the protomolecule did. They didn't tell anyone.
• Earth and Mars knew the Belt was on the verge of collapse. They chose not to address it.
• Characters repeatedly make catastrophically bad decisions because they're working from incomplete pictures.

This is a near-perfect description of how major organisational failures happen.

• Information hoarding is a power play that destroys systems. People hide information to maintain leverage or avoid accountability. The short-term benefit is almost always outweighed by the systemic cost.
• Transparency isn't just ethical — it's operationally critical. The organisations in The Expanse that survive the longest are the ones with the best information flows.
• Siloed data produces siloed decisions. Whether you're talking about CMDB completeness, cross-functional reporting, or simply keeping your team informed — the quality of your decisions is bounded by the quality of your information.

If you're running service operations, this should resonate immediately. Incident response, problem management, change governance — they all depend on information flowing to the right people at the right time.

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Final Thoughts

The Expanse is, at its core, a story about what happens when systems built on inequality, short-termism, and information asymmetry finally break under the weight of their own contradictions — and about the small groups of people who try to do the right thing in the middle of the chaos.

That's a story that plays out in organisations every day.

The lessons aren't obscure. Listen to your workforce before they stop asking. Lead with legible values. Govern your innovations before they govern you. Acknowledge that competing priorities are legitimate. Build teams that can hold together under pressure. And for the love of all things operational — share your information.

Science fiction at its best doesn't predict the future. It illuminates the present. The Expanse does that as well as anything I've read or watched. If you haven't seen it, you should. And if you have — you might never look at a stakeholder map the same way again.

The Expanse is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. The novel series by James S.A. Corey that inspired it is equally brilliant, and arguably even richer in its organisational and political detail.