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

A corporation discovers something extraordinary — an alien substance of almost limitless, poorly understood power — and decides the responsible next step is to release it onto a station full of a million and a half civilians and observe what happens.

That is the inciting catastrophe of The Expanse, and it is worth sitting with the logic of it, because the logic is not insane. The Protogen Corporation did not lack intelligence; it employed some of the most brilliant scientists in the solar system. It did not lack ambition or resources. What it lacked was governance — any ethical review process, any escalation model, any accountability structure capable of stopping a small group of clever people from doing something monstrous in pursuit of a commercial advantage. The protomolecule was transformative, unpredictable, and potentially civilisation-ending, and the first human organisation to get its hands on it ran covert experiments on a civilian population because the upside looked enormous and nobody with the authority to say no was anywhere in the room. The result was the death of Eros Station and the beginning of a war.

I have been a fan of The Expanse for years — the series set in a colonised solar system roughly two centuries from now, ostensibly a story of political intrigue, interplanetary war and the discovery of an alien intelligence — and the more time I have spent in service architecture, large-scale transformation, and the politics of complex organisations, the more convinced I have become that it is one of the most sophisticated explorations of organisational dynamics in any medium. The Eros disaster is the right entry point, because the failure it dramatises is not exotic. It is the most ordinary failure there is, scaled up to catastrophe: a powerful, poorly understood capability deployed without the governance to contain it. And in an era when every organisation is racing to adopt powerful, poorly understood capabilities of its own, that is a lesson worth taking seriously before the station blows.

The protomolecule storyline makes its argument with unusual force, and the argument is not anti-innovation — it is an argument for the governance that has to ride alongside innovation if the innovation is not to destroy you. Moving fast and breaking things is survivable at small scale; at civilisation scale it is annihilating, and the same principle governs enterprise technology decisions, where the blast radius is precisely what determines whether a mistake is a lesson or a disaster. Protogen’s failure was not a failure of capability but of the framework around it: ethical guardrails that should have preceded deployment instead never existed at all, and commercial incentive operating without oversight produced, with grim predictability, a monster. This is not an argument against business; it is an argument for proper structures of accountability, and the organisations that survive in The Expanse are consistently the ones that operate within frameworks of accountability whilst the ones that do not leave craters. If you are leading any kind of digital transformation or AI adoption programme, the protomolecule should be required viewing, because the question it forces is exactly the right one. The issue is never whether the technology is powerful. The issue is what your governance model is — and whether it exists before deployment rather than after the inquiry.

Against that backdrop of institutional failure, the series sets a study in individual leadership that is more instructive than it first appears, in the figure of James Holden, captain of the Rocinante. Holden is not the charismatic-CEO archetype. He is idealistic, frequently infuriating, and has a maddening habit of telling the truth at precisely the worst possible moment, and he makes some genuinely terrible tactical decisions in the name of doing the right thing. And yet his crew follows him, every time, and the reason is the most transferable thing about him: his values are legible. His team always knows exactly where he stands and what he stands for, because there is no hidden agenda, no political manoeuvring, no saying one thing whilst doing another — and in a solar system saturated with institutional deception, that transparency is his single greatest leadership asset. The mechanism underneath is worth naming, because it is precisely how psychological safety is actually built: predictability. People do not need their leader to be perfect; they need their leader to be consistent, because consistency is what allows them to trust the leader’s intentions, and teams that trust their leader’s intentions make faster and better decisions in high-stakes situations. The flip side is real and the series is honest about it — Holden’s idealism occasionally steers the ship directly into the path of an incoming torpedo, and principle without pragmatism is its own kind of risk. The best leaders I have worked with resolve this the way Holden eventually learns to: they hold their values firmly and their tactics loosely, knowing exactly what they will not compromise on whilst remaining genuinely flexible about how they get there.

The series is too intelligent to make legible idealism the only model of effective leadership, and it supplies the perfect counterweight in Chrisjen Avasarala, the UN official who is, to my mind, one of the most authentically rendered political operators in fiction — calculating, occasionally ruthless, laser-focused on outcomes, swearing like a docker and dressing like royalty, and entirely magnificent. She is a lesson in how things actually get done in large organisations, the kind of lesson the idealists rarely want to hear. She understands that power flows through relationships, and never underestimates who knows whom; she plays the long game with alliances on the knowledge that today’s adversary may be tomorrow’s necessary ally. She distinguishes ruthlessly between people’s stated positions and their actual interests, listening in a negotiation not for what people say but for what they want — which is foundational to any serious enterprise negotiation and almost impossible for those who take stated positions at face value. And she is entirely comfortable being unpopular in the short term, because many of her best decisions look terrible in the moment and are vindicated only in hindsight; she is managing outcomes, not optics. In any complex stakeholder environment — and every large organisation is one — Avasarala’s playbook is remarkably applicable: know your stakeholders’ real motivations, build your alliances before you need them, and never mistake noise for signal. Held alongside Holden, she completes the picture, because the series is quietly arguing that effective leadership needs both the legible compass and the political realism, and that a leader with only one of them is dangerously incomplete.

The structural genius of The Expanse — and the source of its richest organisational lesson — is that it refuses to give you a clear villain. Earth wants to maintain its power. Mars wants sovereignty and respect. The Belt, the asteroid mining communities whose essential labour keeps the inner planets alive, wants survival and recognition after generations of being treated as expendable. Every faction has legitimate grievances. Every faction makes decisions ranging from understandable to monstrous. And this is almost exactly the experience of leading in a large enterprise with multiple competing business units, where everyone has a rational reason for what they are doing — the business team wants revenue, security wants compliance, operations wants stability, finance wants efficiency — and these goals are structurally in tension whilst all having genuine merit. The trap the series illustrates again and again is that optimising for one faction at the expense of the others is only ever a temporary win: Earth’s dominance model worked right up until it did not, and prioritising revenue over security, or efficiency over resilience, follows the identical pattern. The moments in the show when factions actually cooperate — and there are some remarkable ones — invariably begin with someone choosing to treat another group’s priorities as legitimate rather than as an inconvenience to be overridden. The best service architects and leaders I know share precisely this capacity: to hold the competing priorities of their stakeholders in mind simultaneously, without collapsing into either false harmony or needless conflict.

There is a particular thread on the Belt that I find the most prescient social commentary in the series, and it is fundamentally a lesson about what happens when you ignore the people who do the essential work. The Belters mine the ice and rock that keeps humanity alive; they are, in every practical sense, essential workers, and for generations Earth and Mars treated them as expendable, and the result was rage, radicalisation, and the rise of an entire resistance movement born from institutional neglect. Sound familiar? Ignored pain becomes organised resistance — the Belters did not begin by wanting revolution; they wanted fair pay, breathable air, and acknowledgement that their lives mattered, and only when those things were refused did they reach for more drastic action. The gap between those who make the decisions and those who do the work is always dangerous, and the Belt makes it literal: Earth’s politicians never set foot there, and that physical and cultural distance made it effortless to forget the human cost of their own resource policies. The lesson for organisations is that engagement is not a nice-to-have. In the show, the cost of disengagement was an interplanetary war; in your organisation the cost is quieter — turnover, disengagement, quiet quitting, the slow erosion of institutional knowledge — but the pattern is identical. The next time you are tempted to centralise decision-making away from the people doing the actual work, it is worth asking whether you are building Earth, or building something more equitable.

The series gives us another leadership study in Camina Drummer, who is, I think, its most complex leader, and who embodies a tension every serious leader eventually faces: the choice between loyalty to people and loyalty to values. Drummer rises from station administrator through the ranks of the Belter resistance, and the moments that define her are the ones where doing the right thing puts her at direct odds with the people she is loyal to — where she chooses integrity over convenience and pays the price for it. The point the series makes through her is that real integrity is only ever visible under pressure, because anyone can hold values when holding them costs nothing; Drummer’s authority comes from the fact that her crew watches her make genuinely costly choices and knows she would do it again. Navigating the tension between loving her people and not always loving what they ask her to do is genuinely difficult, and the show honours the emotional cost of it rather than pretending the right choice is ever clean — and the deeper lesson is that leaders who visibly model difficult choices give their teams permission to make them too. When Drummer draws a line, her people do not always like it, but they always know exactly where the line is, and that clarity is itself a form of leadership.

Beyond any individual, the crew of the Rocinante functions as a sustained case study in team dynamics, and it is worth examining as a unit. Naomi, Amos, Holden, Alex — and later Clarissa — are wildly different people with different backgrounds, motivations and communication styles; they bicker, they disagree, they carry painful secrets, and they operate as one of the most effective small teams in the entire story. What makes them work is a set of things that translate directly. Their strengths are complementary and genuinely respected — Naomi the intellectual backbone, Amos the force of nature, Alex the precision operator, Holden setting the direction — with nobody pretending to be something they are not and nobody dismissing what someone else brings. Their conflict is handled directly; there is strikingly little passive-aggression aboard, and when there is a problem it surfaces, the conversations hard but actually had. Shared purpose consistently trumps individual preference, the crew rallying around a common north star — usually some version of “don’t let the bad thing happen to the people who can’t defend themselves” — even when they disagree on tactics or goals. And the team is, above all, a demonstration of how psychological safety enables extreme performance, nowhere more clearly than with Amos, who is violent, blunt, and morally detached in ways that would disqualify him from most workplaces. The Rocinante works because Holden does not try to change who Amos is; he creates an environment in which what Amos does is directed well. That is a subtle and advanced piece of leadership — accepting a person’s nature whilst shaping their contribution — and it is the difference between a team that merely tolerates its outliers and one that turns them into assets.

If you step back from all of it and ask what actually causes the major crises in The Expanse, you find the same root cause underneath nearly every one, and it is the lesson I would leave a service leader with above all the others: someone had critical information that was not shared with the people who needed it. Protogen knew what the protomolecule did and told no one. Earth and Mars knew the Belt was approaching collapse and chose not to address it. Characters make catastrophically bad decisions over and over because they are working from incomplete pictures. This is a near-perfect description of how major organisational failures actually happen. Information hoarding is a power play that quietly destroys systems — people hide information to preserve leverage or dodge accountability, and the short-term benefit is almost always dwarfed by the systemic cost. Transparency is not merely an ethical preference; it is operationally critical, and the organisations in the series that survive longest are invariably the ones with the best information flows. Siloed data produces siloed decisions, and whether you are talking about CMDB completeness, cross-functional reporting, or simply keeping your own team properly informed, the quality of your decisions is bounded absolutely by the quality of your information. For anyone running service operations this should land immediately, because incident response, problem management and change governance all depend, entirely, on the right information reaching the right people at the right time — which is the exact thing whose absence destroyed Eros.

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 is a story that plays out in organisations every single day. The lessons are not obscure. Govern your innovations before they govern you. Lead with legible values, and pair them with political realism. Treat your competing stakeholders’ priorities as legitimate. Listen to the people doing the essential work before they stop asking. Build teams that hold together under pressure and direct their outliers well. And, for the love of all things operational, share your information. Science fiction at its best does not predict the future; it illuminates the present, and The Expanse does that as well as anything I have read or watched. If you haven’t seen it, you should. And if you have, you may never look at a stakeholder map quite 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.