Strategy is clear at the top. Transformation succeeds or fails at Director level.

NetApp’s Customer Success organisation was undergoing one of the most significant structural transformations in its recent history: five distinct functions integrating into a single, unified operating model - enabled by AI and focused on delivering a seamless customer experience.

The strategy existed. The direction was clear. But transformation of this kind doesn’t succeed because of org charts and process documents. It succeeds - or fails - in the moments when leaders choose to operate as one team rather than five separate functions. Those choices happen at Director level, and they require a specific kind of readiness: not just understanding the new operating model, but genuinely owning it.

The brief for the two-day Las Vegas offsite was precise: help Directors align around NetApp’s Customer Success North Star, understand how their roles would evolve, shift from an execution mindset to a leadership mindset, and leave with the accountability and commitment to lead the change - not just manage through it.

What EP Did

Into The Unknown - woven across two days.

Rather than delivering a standalone session, Explore Performance designed the Into The Unknown experience as the narrative red thread running through the entire two-day offsite. The Tasman crossing became the shared language through which every strategic conversation - alignment, accountability, AI, integration, customer focus - found its most honest expression.

The programme was built around five transformation imperatives, each one anchored in the expedition and mapped directly to what NetApp’s Directors needed to take back to their functions:

Align around the North Star

Every great expedition needs a destination that everyone believes in. The simulation gave Directors a visceral experience of what misalignment costs - and what collective direction enables.

Understand how roles will evolve

The shift from five functions to one unified model is not just structural. It is personal. The expedition surfaced each leader’s default operating mode - and where it would serve or limit them in the new model.

Shift from execution to leadership mindset

Execution gets a team up the mountain. Leadership gets them through the storm. The Into The Unknown scenarios were designed specifically to surface this distinction - placing Directors in situations that rewarded thinking over doing.

Strengthen enterprise accountability

In a unified model, accountability crosses functional boundaries. The simulation made this literal: decisions made in one part of the team had consequences for everyone. The lesson arrived through experience, not instruction.

Operate as one integrated leadership team

By the end of day two, the five functions had a shared story, a shared language, and a shared reference point. That’s what an expedition does that a strategy session cannot.

The EP facilitation was designed to build across both days - not deliver a complete experience on day one and step back. Each session added a layer: the first establishing the challenge and the shared narrative, the second translating it into specific commitments and actions that Directors would carry back to their functions.

The Outcome

Directors left with more than insight. They left with commitments.

By the close of day two, NetApp’s Customer Success Directors had been through the same journey - struggled with the same decisions, navigated the same pressure, and found alignment in the same moments. The five functions hadn’t just heard about integration. They had experienced what it feels like to operate as one team.

Each Director left with specific, observable commitments mapped to the transformation ahead - a 30/60/90-day leadership intention grounded in what they had just experienced, not what they had been told.

The shared reference point created by the Into The Unknown experience gave the transformation work a foundation it wouldn’t otherwise have had: a moment every Director in the room could point to and say - that’s when we decided to do this differently.

The five functions left Las Vegas as one leadership team.

Why This Matters

AI transformation is a leadership challenge, not a technology challenge.

NetApp’s transformation is representative of what every major technology company is navigating right now: the move to AI-enabled operating models requires not just new processes and tools, but a fundamentally different way of leading.

The leaders who will make it work are the ones who can hold ambiguity, build trust across functions, and make decisions in conditions of genuine uncertainty. Those are exactly the capabilities the Into The Unknown expedition develops - not through instruction, but through experience.

The mountain doesn’t care about your title or your function. It responds to how well you lead.