Think Wrong is the discipline for discovering and developing value-building opportunities. You will learn to outsmart the biological and cultural inertia that can erode human, intellectual, political, reputational, social, and financial capital—through four specific capabilities applied to the live organisational challenge you bring to the room.
Your own organisation is the laboratory. The biological and cultural inertia that drives every organisation—the synaptic shortcuts that let experienced teams act quickly, the cultural muscle memory that rewards defending what already works—is the same inertia that conceals the value-building opportunities your growth depends on. The Activator Intensive is the practised discipline for surfacing those opportunities, classifying them against what is actually known, and developing the ones that build value rather than erode it.
An AI deployment, a growth bet, a market entry, a transformation initiative—four decision types where the value-building opportunity is most often hidden by the confidence the organisation has in its own frame. The cost of discovering the hidden opportunity after capital has committed to the visible one is 10–100× the cost of discovering it before. The three days develop the discipline for changing that sequence—applied directly to the live organisational challenge you bring with you, not a simulated case.
The status quo is not a management problem. Biology and culture conspire: the brain’s efficiency produces the same answers to every new problem, and the organisation’s culture rewards doubling down on what has already worked. Governance instruments were built to measure outcomes, not to surface the value-building opportunities concealed inside the inertia. Organisations commit capital to protect what they already have while the value-building opportunity drifts past—visible only in retrospect, when it has become someone else’s advantage.
The Think Wrong Activator Intensive develops the specific practices that interrupt this pattern deliberately—applied to a live organisational challenge where the cost of interrupting it is orders of magnitude less than the cost of not.
Most organisations are now three generations into AI deployments that have delivered less than the business case promised. The fatigue that produces is real—and it conceals the fact that the genuine value-building opportunity is still there, mis-scoped and mis-framed by the first-generation assumptions that drove the original bet. Think Wrong is the practice that surfaces what the deployment should have been solving for.
Organisations with a decade of transformation programmes behind them arrive at a characteristic plateau: the transformations have delivered incremental improvements, the culture has learned to absorb them, and the organisation has become more efficient at doing what it was doing before. The value-building opportunity is in the category below the transformation—what the organisation should be doing that it isn’t. Think Wrong surfaces it.
The governance instruments that kept the organisation disciplined through the last decade were built to measure the outcomes of bets already made. They were not built to surface the bets the organisation has not yet recognised as available. The discipline is to widen what governance can see—without dismantling what it is already good at.
Execution capability and opportunity recognition are not the same skill. The same forces that make an organisation good at deploying capital against known opportunities make it slow at recognising unknown ones. Think Wrong gives leaders the practice and the permission to surface what the room is not yet seeing—without it reading as a lack of conviction in what the room is currently doing.
The status quo is not a management problem. It is a neuroscience problem—rooted in how the brain works. The shortcuts that let us act quickly on experience tend to produce the same answers to every new problem. Growth reinforces assumptions, often until it stops. Governance systems measure outcomes, but are not designed to question the premises that produce them.
Think Wrong belongs to a wider picture we call the Growth Gap—the widening distance between reported financial performance and the state of the capital foundations that actually produce it. Financial capital is the lagging indicator. Human, intellectual, reputational, political, and social capital are the leading ones. The Activator Intensive develops the capability to identify value-building opportunities that strengthen all of them, and to test the assumptions underneath before resources commit at scale.
Participants typically report up to the CEO or CFO. The work in the room is on their behalf: thinking wrong so the organisation can invest rightly.
The Think Wrong Innovators Intensives (Wine, Arts, Irish Whiskey, Surf) use an external industry as the learning laboratory—a real challenge at a visible turning point, where you test the methodology against the people living it over 4.5 days. This programme is the alternative for leaders who want the same practice without the field-based industry context, without the 4.5-day commitment, and without travel to a specific location. Three days. Your own live challenge. The work is real, and it is yours.
Participants select a live challenge from their organisation before arriving—a growth bet, a portfolio decision, a transformation initiative, an AI deployment—where capital is at stake and the assumptions beneath it have not been rigorously tested. The three days are structured to surface those assumptions, classify them by evidence quality, identify which are most consequential to the capital decision, and design the smallest credible evidence-generating action that can reduce uncertainty before commitment is locked in.
By Day 3, participants leave with a tested assumption map for their live challenge, the facilitation capability to run this discipline inside their own organisation, and the credential that marks them as a Certified Serious Capital Activator™—the first level of the Serious Capital Leadership Ladder. The Think Wrong Activator Intensive is the category parent of the field-based Innovators Intensives (Wine, the Arts, Irish Whiskey, Surf, Automotive, Mobility, Drone Warfare)—extended-format variants that use a live external industry at a visible deflection point as the laboratory instead of the participant’s own challenge.
Your live organisational challenge is the laboratory. What leaves with you are four specific capabilities—developed and applied across three days, ready to run with your own team from the week you return. The same four capabilities organise the Think Wrong Blitz: a Blitz commissions one of them for a specific decision; the Intensive develops all four as a durable individual capability you can apply to any significant capital decision.
See the moves others have not yet seen. The first capability is reading the opportunity space clearly—the adjacencies, the structural openings, and the deflection points in your industry where the incumbent logic is about to stop working. Applied to your live challenge on Day 1 with the Deflection Point and Get Out & Get practices, which interrogate what your organisation has assumed about where value actually lives.
Move from a possibility to a concrete solution your organisation can actually build. Make Stuff and Bet Small produce tangible artefacts—prototypes, interview guides, demand tests, structured conversations—that put a solution in front of real people the same day it is made. Evidence before investment. Learning before scale.
Separate belief from evidence. The Certainty Map and PAK classification—Presumptions, Assumptions, Knowledge—give you a rigorous way to map every significant belief underlying your challenge. Super Vital Assumption prioritisation then identifies which beliefs, if wrong, would change a capital allocation decision only the CFO or CEO can authorise.
Make the delivery system visible before the bet depends on it. Ecosystem alignment is the discipline of mapping which functions, partners, and external stakeholders a value-building solution depends on, surfacing implicit commitments, and producing a named stakeholder plan with explicit commitments. A solution that depends on an unaligned ecosystem is not a solution—it is an optimistic plan.
The four capabilities develop across the three days, with each day anchored to a specific part of the work. Day 1 frames the right problem and surfaces value-building opportunities. Day 2 develops the solutions and identifies the assumptions that matter most. Day 3 tests, aligns the constituents who have to execute, and transfers the capability home.
You submit a one-page brief on your live challenge in advance: a growth initiative, portfolio decision, transformation programme, or AI deployment where capital is at stake. The brief is reviewed before Day 1. The arrival evening includes a shared dinner where challenges are introduced without solutions—the discipline of staying with the problem longer than feels comfortable begins here.
Most organisations begin with solutions and work backward to the problem. Day 1 reverses this. You apply the Deflection Point practice to map the from/to transformation your challenge requires, and ask whether the problem you are trying to solve is the actual one. Get Out & Get takes the question into live fieldwork: structured conversations with real people anchored in what they have actually done, not what they say they might do. By the end of Day 1 you have a reframed challenge statement and a first map of the value-building opportunities your current framing was hiding.
Day 2 builds in two movements. First, solution-hypothesis development: you generate candidate solutions for the opportunity you framed on Day 1—moving from a possibility to a concrete proposition someone could actually build. Then Make Stuff and Bet Small convert the most promising hypothesis into tangible artefacts: prototypes, interview guides, demand tests. Second, the Certainty Map and PAK classification (Presumptions, Assumptions, Knowledge) make explicit every significant belief underneath the solution. Super Vital Assumption prioritisation then identifies the few that, if wrong, would change a capital allocation decision that only the CFO or CEO can authorise. By Day 2 close you have a solution concept, a ranked assumption map, and at least one small test designed to resolve the highest-consequence unknown.
Day 3 opens with the escalation question, then moves into two connected sessions. You map the ecosystem your solution depends on—the functions, partners, and external constituents whose alignment is not optional—and design the structured conversation that converts implicit commitments into explicit ones. You then present your assumption map, your small bet, and your alignment plan to a facilitated peer panel: real feedback on real work, without case-study distance. The closing Transfer session moves the discipline from the room to your own team. You leave with the facilitator’s notes, the materials to run a Deflection Point or Certainty Map yourself, and the Certified Serious Capital Activator™ credential that marks you as someone trained in the full practice.
“Of the assumptions we surfaced this week—which ones, if they turned out to be wrong, would change a capital allocation decision that only your CFO or CEO can authorise?”
This is not a closing exercise. It is the diagnostic question that connects the work of the three days to the Serious Capital Building conversation that should follow. The assumptions that answer it are the entry point to the Growth Gap Diagnostic.
The six Think Wrong practices—Be Bold, Get Out, Let Go, Make Stuff, Bet Small, Move Fast—are how the methodology is applied. The four competencies are what participants leave with: the capabilities that make the Activator a Certified Serious Capital Activator™ and equip them to design, run, and report on a Think Wrong Blitz inside their own organisation.
The competency to recognise when an organisation is solving for the wrong shift—when the stated transformation is not the one the environment requires. Bias interrupted: normalcy bias. Practices applied: Be Bold, Get Out.
The competency to sort every significant belief underlying a challenge as Presumption, Assumption, or Knowledge—and to hold the discipline of not confusing the three. Bias interrupted: familiarity bias. Practice applied: Let Go.
The competency to design the smallest credible action—prototype, interview guide, demand test, structured conversation—that converts an untested assumption into evidence before capital commits at scale. Bias interrupted: loss aversion. Practices applied: Make Stuff, Bet Small, Move Fast.
The competency to escalate what the evidence actually shows—including when it contradicts the dominant view in the room—in the language and format that makes a CFO, CEO, or board sponsor consequential rather than defensive. Bias interrupted: conformity pressure. Beyond the book—architecture without this competency stays episodic.
The Think Wrong Blitz is the named engagement a Certified Serious Capital Activator™ takes back and runs inside their own organisation. Three phases—Design, Run, Report—map to three capabilities developed across the Intensive. The Blitz is how the methodology becomes operational the week you return.
The Activator selects the capital-building opportunity, identifies the stakeholders whose evidence will be needed, and structures the Blitz arc—duration, sequence of practices, fieldwork requirements, stakeholder engagement points. This Intensive develops the scoping capability directly.
The Activator runs the Blitz inside their own organisation—framing the challenge boldly enough, engineering the Get Out, holding the Let Go discipline through generation, driving the team to Make Stuff the same day, designing the small bets, moving fast enough that the cycle outpaces the commitment. All six practices, applied against the live challenge the Activator owns.
The Activator delivers the four artefacts—Opportunity Portfolio, Super Vital Assumption Map, designed small bets, updated Canvas—to the CFO, CEO, or board sponsor. The escalation question is the Activator’s bridge to the governance conversation. The Blitz readout is what opens it.
Before the Blitz existed as a named product, the Activator’s capability was abstract—“you will be able to run this inside your organisation.” With the Blitz named, the capability becomes specific: after the Intensive, you design, run, and report on a Think Wrong Blitz on the capital-building opportunity you own. The Blitz is the engagement that carries the Activator’s capability from trained to operational.
The Activator Intensive—and every Blitz a Certified Activator runs afterwards—produces the same four artefacts. They are what the CFO, CEO, or board sponsor reads. They are the evidence that the discipline has been applied and that the capital-building decision is now grounded in classified evidence rather than untested belief.
The structured set of opportunities the Activator has surfaced, scoped, and sequenced for capital allocation—each one grounded in the evidence it requires and the assumption it is predicated on.
The assumptions that, if wrong, would change a capital allocation decision only the CFO or CEO can authorise—ranked by consequence and testability, with the evidence-gathering sequence designed.
The live record of where the Activator’s organisation sits on each Super Vital Assumption—what is Presumption, what is Assumption under active test, what is Knowledge. The document that makes the governance conversation possible.
You carry the certification conferred by the Intensive: Certified Serious Capital Activator™. The role is Value Activator™—the person inside the organisation who scopes, runs, and reports on the Blitz that converts capital exposure into capital readiness.
Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo was published in 2016, is now in its third printing, and has been translated into Spanish and Arabic. The methodology has been applied at Genentech, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Airbus, the White House, NATO, Starbucks, Deloitte, and Stanford University. The participants who attend the Activator Intensive leave with the same methodology that produced these results.
Simple changes made it clear that you’re not just a cog in the wheel of this great grinding process—you’re an integral part of one of the largest experiments in curing a fatal disease. You’re a part of history.
Following a Think Wrong Blitz that redesigned Genentech’s global clinical trial investigator meetings—producing the highest-rated meetings doctors and nurses had ever attended.
We were determined to leave the tragically unproductive ‘us vs. them’ structure behind, solving gnarly problems more efficiently because we work together.
Following a Think Wrong Blitz at the White House that convened 100 community leaders and produced an independent Leaders Forum and two bipartisan PACs within a single day.
The Think Wrong Activator Intensive is designed and facilitated by a team with direct experience applying Think Wrong inside some of Europe’s most complex organisations—at Airbus, across Heidrick & Struggles, and in the leadership development contexts where assumptions are most deeply embedded and most expensive when wrong.
Greg Galle has spent more than thirty years watching the same pattern accumulate inside organisations: visible metrics that look healthy while something underneath remains fragile. He co-founded Solve Next and co-authored Think Wrong with John Bielenberg and Mike Burn—building the structured discipline that gives leaders a rigorous practice for surfacing and testing that fragility before it becomes expensive. His practitioner background spans brand strategy, organisational transformation, and leadership development across private, public, and civil sectors. He holds a BFA from the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. As the architect of the Think Wrong methodology, Greg brings both the intellectual framework and the facilitation depth that makes the transfer session on Day 3 the most consequential session of the programme.
Louise Kyhl-Triolo brings more than twenty-five years of international leadership experience—across L’Oréal, Airbus, VMware, and Heidrick & Struggles—to the design and delivery of the Think Wrong Activator Intensive across Europe. She works at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and leadership: coaching senior leaders, designing group experiences that shift how organisations actually work, and facilitating transformation that requires both directional clarity and genuine human change. Louise is the European programme lead—the person who knows how Think Wrong translates across cultures, sectors, and the gap between a three-day intensive and a Monday morning back in the office. She is a Solve Next Partner and Board Member (Europe) of the Human Impacts Institute.
Romain Gravier spent more than twenty years inside Airbus as a coach, facilitator, and leadership trainer embedded in some of the organisation’s most complex innovation and culture transformation programmes—including FCAS and Smart Collab at Airbus Defence and Space. He has been surfacing and working with assumptions inside a large, complex engineering organisation from the inside for two decades, which means he understands the forces that make organisational change genuinely difficult rather than theoretically challenging. Romain is a certified Integral Master Coach (Integral Coaching Canada) and a Certified Wrong Thinker credentialled by Solve Next. He brings the facilitation rigour that turns a three-day intensive into a practice participants can run themselves when they return.
Cornelia Wagner spent sixteen years inside Airbus in a sequence of roles that gave her an unusually complete picture of how large organisations learn, change, and resist change—from learning systems implementation and HR transformation to culture change management and, most recently, engineering transformation at Airbus Defence & Space. She founded Connecting Waypoints to bring transformational coaching and innovation facilitation to leaders navigating complexity. She brings to the programme something very few facilitators can: direct experience of what it costs when large-scale change is built on assumptions that were never tested—and the practical knowledge of what it actually takes to make a new discipline stick inside a complex organisation.
You are someone who has attended programmes where the insight was real but the application was hypothetical—and found that the gap between the classroom and Monday morning was wider than the programme design acknowledged. The Activator Intensive exists for the person who is done with simulations. Your live organisational challenge—the growth bet, the AI deployment, the transformation initiative where capital is genuinely at stake—is the laboratory. Three days. No case study. No predetermined conclusion. The methodology is Think Wrong. The work is real.
The Think Wrong Activator Intensive is Stage 1 of the Solve Next product ladder—the cognitive ignition layer. The capability developed here is not an end in itself. It is the foundation for Serious Capital Building—the discipline that allows organisations to build, test, and govern the capital their growth depends on: the ability to distinguish what an organisation knows from what it assumes, and to act on that distinction before capital commits.
“Of the assumptions we surfaced this week—which ones, if they turned out to be wrong, would change a capital allocation decision that only your CFO or CEO can authorise?”
The assumptions that answer this question are not hypothetical. They are the entry point for the Growth Gap Diagnostic—the organisational entry product that applies the same structured discipline systematically across all six capital forms, determines the Capital Symmetry Stage from the lowest-scoring domain, and maps the cascade pathway that connects where your organisation is to where the risk will reach the income statement.
The Certified Serious Capital Activator™ is Level 1 of the Serious Capital Leadership Ladder. You have developed the discipline to surface what your organisation believes, classify it against what it actually knows, and identify the assumptions most consequential to capital allocation decisions. You are now equipped to design, run, and report on a Think Wrong Blitz inside your own organisation—the engagement that carries this capability from trained to operational. This is the foundation for every product that follows in the Solve Next system.
This programme applied the assumption-classification discipline to your live challenge. The Growth Gap Diagnostic applies it systematically across all six capital forms of your entire organisation—producing the Capital Symmetry Stage determination (set by the lowest-scoring domain, not the average), the evidence quality audit per capital domain, the cascade pathway analysis, and the entropy force assessment. It is the primary organisational entry product. It is what happens when the Activator’s discipline meets the full Serious Capital Building infrastructure of the organisation.
The Architect designs the system that makes the Activator’s discipline structurally consequential across the full organisation. The Serious Capital Architect Intensive is a five-day programme that develops the capability to build the eight structural components of a Serious Capital Building system—including evidence-gated stop criteria, entropy-resistant design, and the Create / Protect / Liberate discipline that makes the discipline durable rather than dependent on individual commitment. It is Level 2 of the Serious Capital Leadership Ladder, and the prerequisite for the Serious Capital Governor designation at Level 3.
The Activator Intensive is a decision. The four resources below exist to help that decision get made inside your organisation—whether you are the one attending, the one sponsoring, or the one the sponsor has asked to evaluate it.
The full programme description in a single PDF—dates, fee, curriculum, faculty, logistics. The canonical reference document. Share it with anyone who needs the complete picture.
A single-page version for quick circulation—the framing, the arc, the outcome, and the fee in a format that fits in a calendar invitation or Slack thread.
For the individual who wants to attend and needs to make the case to their manager or whoever holds decision-making authority. Frames the capability you’ll develop, the ROI you’ll take back, and the questions your sponsor is likely to ask.
For the sponsor or HR/L&D lead evaluating the programme for a cohort or commissioning the work on behalf of the organisation. Frames the organisational case—why this discipline, why now, and how it connects to the governance conversation that should follow.
Twenty-four participants. Three days. Your live organisational challenge. The methodology is Think Wrong. The credential is Certified Serious Capital Activator™. If this is the way you already think about your work—you are already a Wrong Thinker. The Intensive develops the practice.
Private cohorts start at €51,000 for up to 15 participants, with €3,750 per additional. Scoped to your organisation’s challenge.