How It All Fits Together
Not sure where to start?
That’s what we’re here for.
Some clients come to us for a single high-impact event, an Adventure Simulation to anchor a leadership offsite, or a keynote to open a conference. Others build multi-year programmes across their whole organisation.
Our products work as standalone experiences or as a connected journey. If you’re not sure which combination fits your challenge, we are. Tell us what you’re trying to solve and we’ll design the right starting point.
Team Alignment & Empowerment
Everest: For Those Who Dare
The Outcome
Your team leaves with a shared operating model they built together, and actually believe in.
How we do it
Participants join a simulated Everest expedition, making real-time decisions as a team against actual summit footage. The simulation surfaces alignment gaps as they happen - who leads, who defers, who goes rogue - and uses those moments to build the ABCDE framework: Aligned, Bold, Collaborative, Decisive, Empowered. Available face-to-face or virtually.
Half-day to full-day
Best for
- Senior leadership teams preparing for a high-stakes period
- Organisations going through structural change
- Leadership offsites and team effectiveness programmes
Watch Trailer →-
Mindset and Bold Unique Goals
Into The Unknown - The Tasman Crossing
The Outcome
“Your organisation leaves with a shared belief in something that hasn’t been achieved yet.”
How we do it
Built around the world-first Tasman row, completed in 2025 after 11 years and three failed attempts by EP co-founder Grant ‘Axe’ Rawlinson. Participants experience the mindset required to pursue a Bold Unique Goal against all odds, following Grant’s journey: the planning, the failures, the decisions made mid-ocean, and the eventual breakthrough.
Half-day to full-day
Best for
- Transformation launches and growth initiatives
- Conferences where belief is the missing ingredient
- Any moment where a team needs to commit to something not yet done
Watch Trailer → -
Leading Self & Personal Performance
Human Power - Bay of Bengal
The Outcome
“Your high performers leave knowing exactly what is limiting them, and with a plan to change it.”
How we do it
Built around the human-powered crossing of the Bay of Bengal - Thailand to India. Seven principles for sustaining peak performance under pressure, covering purpose and accountability through to energy management and difficult decisions.
Half Day
Best for
- High-potential programmes
- Senior leaders showing signs of burnout or plateau
- Any programme where personal effectiveness is the central theme
Watch Trailer → -
Essentialism - achieving more with less
Peak 2 Peak - Essentialism
The Outcome
“Your leaders leave having made the hard choices, not just identified them.”
How we do it
A high-altitude traverse simulation that forces the most fundamental leadership question: what do we stop doing? You can only carry what you need, and every extra kilogram costs you. The simulation builds the habit of essentialism - identifying the vital few things that move the needle and cutting everything else.
Half Day
Best for
- Leadership teams drowning in competing priorities
- Strategy refresh moments
- High-performing teams who need to get sharper
Watch Trailer → -
Communicating & Influencing
Waves of Impact - Swimming Phuket Island
The Outcome
“Your leaders leave able to land their message with people who weren’t ready to hear it.”
How we do it
Open water swimming requires constant adjustment - reading currents, communicating with a crew who can’t always hear you, adapting as you go. The simulation surfaces default communication patterns and builds flexibility to reach different audiences differently. The ACT framework - Acknowledge, Choices, Tell a Story - comes directly from the field.
Half Day
Best for
- Leaders moving into more senior roles with greater stakeholder complexity
- Cross-functional or client-facing cohorts
- Sales and account management teams
Watch Trailer → -
ESG & Systems Thinking
Cyclone Alley - ESG and Systems Thinking
The Outcome
“Your leaders leave treating ESG as a strategic advantage, not a reporting obligation.”
How we do it
Open ocean sailing through the world’s most volatile weather systems is a natural systems thinking laboratory: every decision has second and third-order consequences, nothing operates in isolation, and the cost of ignoring complexity arrives without warning. The simulation builds the mental model and applies it to the organisation’s real ESG and strategic decisions.
Half-day to full-day
Best for
- Senior leadership teams with ESG accountability
- Organisations embedding sustainability into leadership development
- Any cohort where systems thinking is on the agenda
Watch Trailer →
Coming Soon
Paragliding Programme
A new expedition programme currently in development. Leadership theme to be confirmed. Register your interest below.
Award-Winning Culture Programme
Charting Your Future
The Outcome
“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.”
Most culture programmes produce a values poster. Charting Your Future produces something that cannot be stuck on a wall, because it’s already inside the organisation. It defines who you are, shows people what that means in practice, and builds the structures that keep it alive as you scale. This is the programme that won Explore Performance a Brandon Hall Gold Award for Best Learning and Development Programme 2025, recognised for the culture work with UBS, delivered to 20,000 leaders across 5 continents in 8 months. It is also the methodology behind EP’s ongoing culture work with Trafigura across 8 countries.
Brandon Hall Gold
Best L&D Programme 2025
Brandon Hall Silver
Best Leadership Development 2025
How We Do It - Three Phases
Define → Introduce → Embed
Charting Your Future is a sustained culture transformation methodology, not a single session. Three connected phases take a culture from undefined to owned at every level of the organisation.
Phase 01
Define: Uncover what already exists
Culture cannot be invented. It can only be discovered, articulated, and amplified. The Define phase surfaces the culture that already exists, not the one leadership assumes is there.
01
Qualitative interviews and listening sessions across geographies and seniority levels
- Qualitative interviews and listening sessions across geographies and seniority levels
- 1:1 interviews with C-level leaders to understand the culture they want to carry forward
- Facilitated Steerco session to define a purpose statement in 17 words or fewer
- ExCom presentation and refinement until the output is genuinely owned at the top
Phase 02
Introduce: Make it real through experience
A purpose statement on a slide changes nothing. Phase 2 introduces the defined culture through an emotionally engaging experience that makes it memorable and shared across the whole organisation.
02
Milestone event to align messaging and craft the introduction experience
03
Tailored Adventure Learning Simulation mapped directly to the organisation’s purpose and values
04
Available for any audience size, from senior leadership cohorts to 20,000+ participants globally
05
Face-to-face, virtual, or hybrid delivery across multiple locations and time zones
Phase 03
Embed: Turn culture into behaviour
The Embed phase turns clarity and energy into lasting change, visible in everyday decisions, conversations, and structures.
06
Team coaching with core leaders to deepen personal ownership of the culture
07
Digital follow-on programme reinforcing key behaviours between live touchpoints
08
Culture as a hiring tool, at graduate fairs, talent events, and recruitment campaigns
09
Culture for onboarding, embedding the experience into the new leader journey
10
Culture with clients, at social impact events, client summits, and external forums
The Expedition Behind It
Navigation is the most honest metaphor for culture work: you have to know where you’re going before any of the other decisions make sense. The footage captures what happens when a team loses its direction mid-ocean, and what it takes to find it again. That moment of recommitment is the emotional anchor for every culture conversation that follows.
Best for
Organisations that have grown faster than their culture can keep up.
Newly merged or restructured teams.
Any organisation that knows its culture is a competitive advantage, but can’t yet articulate why.
Proof
20,000
UBS leaders aligned across 5 continents, 150 workshops, in 8 months. Brandon Hall Gold 2025.
8
Countries. Trafigura: interviews across 8 countries, 17-word purpose statement, CEO sign-off, global rollout in progress.
17
Words. The Trafigura purpose statement, refined until every word was genuinely owned at the top.
More Core Products
Beyond the simulations
Interactive Keynotes
Interactive Keynotes
The Outcome
“Your event ends with the room in a different place than it started.”
How we do it
EP builds each keynote around your specific event theme and business context, using expedition footage as the emotional engine and live facilitation to make the audience part of the story, not observers of it. Available in-person and virtually for any audience size. 45 minutes to 2 hours.
Best for
Annual leadership summits. Global town halls. Strategy launches. Sales conferences. Any event where the opening or closing needs to land and stay.
Skill Curriculum
Explorer’s Mindset Skill Curriculum
The Outcome
“Your organisation has a common language for high performance, and people are actually using it.”
How we do it
A series of 30 to 90 minute facilitated skill modules, each one building a specific leadership capability through a decision-based, expedition-anchored experience. Modules are sequenced into a curriculum over 3 to 12 months. Scalable across geographies and time zones. Topics include: Innovation and Creative Thinking, Resilience and Adversity, Cognitive Diversity, Leading Through Change, Psychological Safety, and High-Performance Habits.
Best for
- Large-scale leadership development programmes
- Organisations building a sustained leadership curriculum
- High-potential cohorts who need consistent challenge over
time
1:1 Coaching
Focused 1:1 Coaching
The Outcome
“Your most important leaders are behaving differently, not just thinking differently.”
How we do it
Sustained 1:1 engagements of 6 to 12 months with coaches who have deep expertise in leadership transition, performance under pressure, executive presence, and transformation leadership. Integrated with programme delivery where relevant. Confidential, challenging, and calibrated to the specific context each leader is operating in.
Best for
- C-suite and senior leaders at step-change moments
- High-potentials in accelerated development
- Leaders with strong performance but limiting behaviours holding them back
Section B
A simulation opens a door. These products make sure your leaders walk through it.
The most common failure mode in leadership development is the Monday morning problem: the energy from a great experience fades, the habits don’t form, and business as usual reasserts itself within weeks. Our follow-on modules exist to prevent that.
Digital Learning
Exploratory Learning Platform
The Outcome
“Your people are still learning six months after the live programme ended.”
How we do it
Self-paced digital modules of 14 to 25 minutes each, placing the learner inside the expedition alongside Grant ‘Axe’ Rawlinson. Maps directly to the Adventure Simulation themes. Accessible on any device.
Best for
Large, globally dispersed cohorts. Blended programmes needing a scalable digital layer. Organisations where learning in the flow of work is a priority.
Assessment
Team Health Assessments
The Outcome
“You know exactly what to fix, and your team does too.”
How we do it
EP uses validated assessment tools - most prominently Belbin Team Profiling - to build a data-driven picture of team dynamics and performance gaps. Tool-agnostic where clients have existing frameworks. Results anchor the coaching and facilitation conversations that follow.
Best for
New or recently restructured teams. Established teams where performance has plateaued. Any EP engagement where data-driven development is part of the brief.
Academy
Powerful Humans Academy
The Outcome
“Your highest-potential people are still at your organisation, and performing at a new level.”
How we do it
A 7-week virtual academy for high performers combining immersive simulation experiences, performance science, and practical skill-building. The curriculum covers mindset, energy management, purpose, influence, and peak performance habits. Cohort-based, participants build a peer network that outlasts the programme.
Best for
High-potential and emerging leader programmes. Retention strategies for top talent. Organisations signalling serious investment in their best people.
Where to Begin
Not sure where to start?
That’s what we’re here for.
Every organisation is different. Every brief we receive is different. We don’t have a standard programme, we have a set of powerful tools and the experience to know which combination will work for you. Tell us what you’re trying to solve and we’ll tell you where to begin.
Start a Conversation
Download Our Overview
Frequently Asked Questions
What is adventure-based leadership development?
Adventure-based leadership development uses the context, emotional reality, and genuine pressure of real expeditions to build leadership capability. Rather than classroom theory or fictional role plays, participants are placed inside the experience of a real expedition - making decisions alongside our team in conditions where alignment, resilience, and judgement actually matter. Explore Performance’s approach is unique in that every expedition is real - planned, executed, and filmed by our own team - making the content proprietary and unlike anything else available in the market.
What is experiential learning in a corporate context?
Experiential learning means learning through doing, not listening. Rather than presenting frameworks on slides, participants are placed inside situations where they make decisions, experience consequences, and reflect on what they’ve learned. Research consistently shows experiential learning produces significantly higher retention and behaviour change than traditional instruction. Explore Performance’s expedition-based simulations are among the most immersive forms of corporate experiential learning available - because the underlying experiences are real, not manufactured.
What leadership themes do your programmes cover?
Our seven expedition programmes are designed around a leadership framework of leading self, leading teams, and leading the future. Individual programmes cover team alignment and empowerment (Everest), mindset and bold goal-setting (Tasman), personal performance and leading self (Bay of Bengal), essentialism and prioritisation (Peak 2 Peak), communicating and influencing (Waves of Impact), culture transformation and purpose (Charting Your Future), and systems thinking and ESG (Cyclone Alley). Each programme can be delivered as a standalone experience or combined into a broader curriculum.
Can a session be standalone or does it need to sit inside a bigger programme?
Either works. Many clients come to us for a single high-impact experience - a conference keynote, a leadership offsite, a team effectiveness session. Others embed our content into a multi-month learning journey where the simulation is one touchpoint in a broader programme of development. Our experiences are designed to work powerfully as standalone sessions and to connect seamlessly into larger curricula. If you’re not sure which approach fits your needs, we’ll help you figure it out.
Can Explore Performance deliver programmes in languages other than English?
Can Explore Performance design a multi-month leadership programme, not just a single session?
Yes - and for many of our clients this is where we create the most sustained impact. We design talent development programmes that span 6–12 months, typically combining one or more in-person or virtual simulation experiences with virtual team coaching, momentum sessions, and digital follow-on modules in between. This structure ensures the learning doesn’t fade after the live event - it compounds over time, with each touchpoint building on the last. We have designed multi-month programmes for high-potential cohorts, senior leadership teams, and large-scale culture transformation initiatives.