#47 - Introducing Expansum
Leadership development for leaders at the frontier
TL;DR: I’ve rebranded my company to Expansum. Read on to find out why.
“I can’t do X, until I’ve done Y.”
Have you ever caught yourself saying this? I can’t put myself forwards for that promotion until I’ve become more strategic, or maybe I need more data before I can make that decision.
Usually this is your fear of uncertainty talking. We have a natural bias to prefer the things we know, even if they are painful or worse, than the things we do not know, even if they could be better.
Up until recently I caught myself saying this to myself:
I can’t pivot my company into the space sector, because I will lose the brand equity I’ve built in tech (particularly Product).
At the heart of it was a fear — of going backwards in my business, losing clients, failing at what I really wanted to do (which feels big and scary).
Even though I knew at some point I would need to do just that — pivot. I’ve been building up my network in space through Linkedin, UK Space Agency mentoring, joining Women in Aerospace network and going to their events, and tapping into the Space East network (one of the national space clusters). I know I need to do more (on the cards is going to space conferences and another analogue mission in 2027 as part of my masters), and I need to be super strategic about it.
I remember sitting at a roundtable at Trajectory last November, hearing from Doug Liddle that building a company in space is a 10-15 year endeavour. He challenged me: what’s my plan? I didn’t have one at the time, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
What I do know is that I don’t want to wait 10-15 years before pivoting — that would be way too late. So what is the optimal time? Five years? Two years? (after my masters). Next year?
The answer, of course, is now.
Last month I was at a masterclass within MicDrop1, the speaking community I joined a year ago. The speaker shared how she had landed a 7-figure training deal with one of the world’s biggest consultancies, and all because of one conversation at a BBQ.
She had followed Dorie Clark’s advice (who I absolutely LOVE, and read her book The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in A Short-Term World after hearing Doug’s advice) — tell everyone what it is you’re building anytime someone asks how you are.
And I’ve also taken that advice to heart, and now any opportunity I get I’m telling people that my mission is to be part of the team that lands astronauts on Mars by 2040. I want to be a space psychologist, supporting with the selection, training and in-mission support of the team who will go to Mars. The big government space agencies will clearly play a key role here, but so too will private and commercial space companies.
And my big prediction is that space tourism will become affordable to the average person within the next 20 years too. Currently it’s about £250K for a seat on Blue Origin, putting it out of most people’s reach. But I expect it will drop 10X as launch capability gets even cheaper through reusable components, and use of automated processes that don’t require pilots, such as in New Shepard (i.e. Moore’s law comes into play). And those people, like you and I, will need psychological support to both prepare for and integrate their experience afterwards, particularly if they experience what’s known as the Overview Effect.
I sat down a couple of weeks ago and played through an imaginary exercise in my mind. If NASA was in a procurement meeting, and the minutes were going to be typed up, would they be green lighting ‘Caroline Clark Leadership and Performance’ on their supply chain? I cringed… no, they probably would not. I realised at that point I had a mismatch between my long term ambition, and my current company brand.
Caroline Clark is very much a B2C brand. I needed a name to reflect my B2B ambitions. So I started brainstorming and looking around at what was already out there.
I’ve been rewatching For All Mankind (if you haven’t seen it yet, we can’t be friends I’m sorry), and character Dev Ayesa’s company Helios is loosely based on Space X. That gave me some inspiration — I wanted a word that sounded ‘spacey’, so Googled Helios, Polaris, Cosmos, even Ad Astra (a Latin saying popular in space circles that means to the stars). And I found many versions of this were unsurprisingly already taken.
I went round in a few circles, Googling what if I added different suffixes (Institute, Academy, Centre, Leadership Institute, etc etc) and checking if the domains were available on Namecheap. It was a very frustrating and fruitless search.
Have I ever told you how much I hate naming things?
(As my partner, a systems engineer, reliably informed me, there are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors).
So then I went down a rabbit hole of Latin and Greek gods and words related to space. Io, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede — even Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. I went back and forth with Claude, who helpfully told me the many downsides of the names. For instance, Io could be associated with transformation (yay), except she was turned into a heffer by Zeus — possibly not quite the change I was after (I have nothing against cows, they’re just not very spacey).
At one point I came up with a portmanteau — credonautica. Credo is Latin for ‘I believe’, whilst nautica is Greek for sailor or sea (before you come at me, the words television and automobile are also mash ups of Greek and Latin words). An obvious play on astronaut, this would be about a sailor of beliefs. On Namecheap the word was available, but I slept on it and the following morning when I woke I hated it. Would people get it immediately? Probably not. My partner’s reaction was less than lukewarm and that told me all I needed to know to ditch it and start again.
And then it came to me — expansum.
Expansum reflects everything I wanted in a single name: space is an expanse, but it’s also about the inner sense of space, as you grow and develop, you expand your mind, your capabilities. It captures the sense of (inner and outer) exploration, vastness, the unknown.
It’s a name I could see NASA writing down in the minutes.
And following this, I was easily able to draw the line between where I am now to where I want to get to. My clients are leaders at the frontier — defining frontier as the edge of human knowledge and performance. You could be in a tech company, building new tech and solving novel problems — but you could also be a scientist developing vaccines and cures, a surgeon using cutting-edge robotics, an AI engineer developing frontier models, an expedition commander leading a team to the poles, or an astronaut stepping foot on Mars.
What these leaders have in common is that being at the frontier requires a new type of leadership — and followership. Resilience, adaptability, strategic thinking and decision making are all critical survival skills. The context frontier leaders operate in is extreme: fast paced, high levels of complexity and uncertainty, high pressure. I will write more about this in a future article because it’s too important to gloss over in a short note here. Suffice to say, that is the direction, that is the golden thread between now and the future in my work.
Now the next phase begins: defining the product offering. I’ve long wanted to create a leadership development programme, and that is my core goal for 2027 (after TEDx, after the book!). Watch this space…
I’d love to hear what you think of the name - whether you love it, like it or hate it! Please drop a comment below or email me at caroline@expansum.space.
PS. I’ve also started a YouTube channel (yes, I’ve been very busy!). The first video is up, please like and subscribe!
If you want to join MicDrop, Alex will be opening the doors again in June. If you mention my name when you apply (and are successfully invited!) then you will get a discount. Full disclosure - so do I for referring you.
Congrats on the rebrand, Caroline. I really like all of the different angles and interpretations of the name. Good luck with liftoff!