Technology - Madrid & London
What got us here won’t get us there.
AWS built a billion-dollar cloud business by going into the unknown in 2017. Now, with AI rewriting the rules again, EP was brought in to help the Global Financial Services team find that same explorers mindset - and point it at a €500m to €1bn ambition.
€500m→€1bn
Revenue ambition - AWS GFS Europe
2
Cities - Madrid and London
2017vs2026
The parallel that shaped the whole programme
80 - 100
Leaders across Account Management, Solutions Architecture, Customer Success
The Challenge
The team that built a billion-dollar business had stopped exploring.
In 2017, AWS Global Financial Services faced a challenge that looked a lot like the one it faces now: a vast, undefined opportunity, no established playbook, and a client base that couldn’t yet see the full potential of what was being offered. What carried AWS through that moment was an explorers mindset - the willingness to go in without a map, partner deeply with clients, co-create solutions no one had built before, and treat every deal as a first.
That mindset built a business worth hundreds of billions. And then, gradually, it was replaced by something else. By 2026, the team had shifted into sustained exploitation: a mature, clearly defined playbook, hyper-transactional rhythms, KPIs and targets as the primary operating language. The creativity, the risk appetite, the co-creation instinct had been slowly optimised out of daily life.
Now AI was rewriting the rules again. No playbook. No defined product suite. A client base with a narrow line of sight on the potential. The moment demanded exactly the same qualities that had built the original cloud business - and the team needed help reconnecting with them.
The Parallel That Shaped the Programme
2017 and 2026. The same challenge. A different team.
2017
$150m ambition. No playbook. Every deal bespoke.
2026
€500m → €1bn ambition. AI rewrites everything. No playbook again.
2017
Partnership and co-creation with every FI client.
2026
Clients can’t yet see AI’s potential. AWS must lead, not serve.
2017
Explorers mindset. Risk appetite. Curiosity.
2026
Hyper-transactional. Exploit not explore. Survival instinct dominant.
2017
Hiring was easy. Energy was high. Culture was bold.
2026
Cost cuts. Redundancies. Fear and low psychological safety.
What EP Did
Into The Unknown - woven across two days.
Explore Performance designed and facilitated two leader events - Madrid and London - using the Into The Unknown simulation as the anchor experience for both days. The Tasman crossing was not chosen arbitrarily. The parallels between Grant Rawlinson’s 11-year pursuit of a world-first and AWS GFS’s current moment were precise: a bold goal, no playbook, a team that needed to believe in something before the evidence existed.
The programme was built around six strategic growth imperatives, each one surfaced through the expedition and mapped directly to the behaviours AWS GFS needed to rebuild:
01
Explorer’s Mindset in Growth
Reconnecting with the curiosity, risk appetite and co-creation instinct that built the original cloud business.
02
Challenging the Status Quo
Breaking the hyper-transactional patterns that had replaced the exploratory culture - and replacing them with something more honest.
03
Bold Unique Goals
Moving from KPI management to genuine belief in an ambition that hasn’t been achieved yet.
04
Risk and Frugality
The balance between bold action and disciplined judgement - the same balance that defines every great expedition.
05
Ways of Working for Scale
How do you build the team culture and operating rhythms that will sustain a multi-year growth journey?
06
Alignment Under Pressure
The decisions that matter most happen when conditions are worst. The simulation made this real.
The programme was co-designed with the AWS GFS leadership team, with the simulation and debrief calibrated precisely to the six priorities. The ambition for both events was to create a defining moment in the history of AWS GFS - a shared starting point as significant as 2017 had been. Madrid and London as the beginning of something, not a response to something.
“Your culture is defined by the people who live it, introduced through an experience they’ll never forget, and embedded so deeply it shapes how you hire, lead, develop, and grow.”
- AWS Global Financial Services × Explore Performance
The Outcome
A somatic marker. A shared starting point.
The Madrid and London events gave the AWS GFS leadership team something a strategy document cannot: a felt sense of what the next chapter requires. The expedition created the conditions for honest conversations about fear, survival instinct, and the gap between the operating culture of the last few years and the one the ambition demands.
Leaders left with a shared language - the same reference points, the same expedition moments, the same understanding of what it costs to exploit when the moment calls for exploration. The programme didn’t just build mindset. It gave the team permission to operate differently - and a story to tell their own teams about why.
The next step, agreed with the AWS GFS leadership, is for each leader to take their team through
their own Madrid Moment - bringing the ambition, the context, and the ask to their people with the same honesty that shaped the two days.
Why This Matters
Every great growth story begins with someone choosing to explore.
The AWS GFS story is not unique to AWS. Every organisation navigating AI transformation is being asked to do something similar: take a team that has optimised for a world that no longer exists and help them rediscover the qualities that made them exceptional before the playbook arrived.
That is not a strategy problem. It is a leadership and culture problem. And it is precisely the problem that adventure-based learning is designed to solve - because the expedition puts people back in conditions where the playbook doesn’t work, the rules aren’t clear, and the only way forward is genuine curiosity, genuine partnership, and genuine belief in a goal that hasn’t been achieved yet.
Programme Used
Into The Unknown - Tasman Sea Crossing
Co-designed with AWS GFS leadership team across six strategic growth imperatives. Delivered across two cities - Madrid and London.