Think Wrong
About the Arts.

The decisions where untested assumptions are most expensive.

The performing and visual arts are not the point. They are the laboratory. The four decisions where capital-building opportunities most often hide—an AI deployment, a growth bet, a market entry, a transformation initiative—appear in the arts in forms unusually visible to an outsider. The artistic directors, producers, and institution leaders the cohort meets are navigating exactly that structure: capital and reputation committed on premises that decades of success confirmed, now under a pressure the planning assumptions never absorbed. The capability built in Paris is not arts expertise. It is the practiced discipline for surfacing those opportunities and developing the ones that build capital rather than erode it.

Those four decisions share a structure. An AI deployment rests on beliefs about adoption and use case that were never tested. A growth bet commits before the demand is verified. A market entry assumes competitive dynamics the team has never actually encountered. A transformation initiative sets out to solve a problem the organization diagnosed without evidence. In each, capital commits before the most consequential assumptions are examined—and the cost of discovering a wrong assumption after commitment runs ten to a hundred times the cost of testing it before.

The status quo is not a management problem. It is a neuroscience problem. The brain’s efficiency—the synaptic shortcuts that let you drive to work without thinking—returns the same answers to every new problem, and the predictable path always feels like the rational one. Growth confirms the old frame until it stops. Governance instruments measure outcomes; they were never built to surface the opportunities hidden inside the inertia that produces them. Organizations commit capital on beliefs they have never formally tested—not from carelessness, but because the system was never built to separate what is known from what is merely assumed.

Paris is the right city for this—not because it is the romantic home of the arts, but because the institutions are oldest, the assumptions most deeply held, and the disruption already well underway. The lab is open.

What goes home with you.

The laboratory is the arts at a visible Deflection Point. The capabilities are what leave with you—directly transferable to the AI deployments, growth bets, market entries, and transformation initiatives you are navigating when you return. By Friday you will have practiced all four against real stakeholders. Most participants run their first internal session within thirty days of returning.

The Think Wrong methodology—applied.

Every practice is introduced in the classroom and immediately applied in the field. By Day 4, participants are facilitating their peers through the tools they met on Day 1. The arts are the medium; the capability goes home with you. The four capabilities run on six practices.

Paris is the city where
the pattern is easiest to see.

Fieldwork in Paris means access most programs cannot provide: backstage, in ateliers, in galleries, in the street—where the crisis is not a case study but the daily reality. Each excursion is a structured session with a specific practice to apply, specific questions to bring, and a specific output to produce. Access is arranged for each cohort; confirmations are in progress.

Theater and opera backstage

Deflection Point applied backstage—finding where institutions have framed their crisis as an audience problem when it is a relevance problem, or as a funding problem when it is an assumption problem. The reframe you practice here is how you find the right challenge in your own organization before the wrong one gets resourced.

Fashion atelier access

Let Go inside a Paris maison working the tension between craft, heritage, and the economics of attention—the discipline of releasing the assumptions that built a category while still operating inside it. Holding your own founding assumptions lightly enough to question them is the practice that compounds most after the week.

Gallery and collector conversations

Certainty Map interviews with gallerists, collectors, and buyers—separating what the arts market knows from what it assumes about value, audience, and where demand is actually moving. The same interview structure, applied to your own market the following week.

Street and venue consumer interviews

Past-behavior anchoring in the streets and venues of Paris—not “do you like the arts?” but “walk me through the last time you chose how to spend a free evening.” The structured interview surfaces what your own customers actually decide, rather than what they say they believe.

Digital-native encounter

A structured session with the platforms and creators winning the attention the arts are losing, used to reframe what the real competition actually is. The same reframe changes how you define who you are competing with in your own market.

Stakeholder panel

Small Bets presented to Paris arts and culture stakeholders for structured feedback—Make Stuff and Bet Small practiced in front of people with real skin in the outcome. The panel format is the one you run with your own stakeholders the week after the program.

Built with the people who teach and host the work.

The program is designed and delivered by Solve Next with European faculty who have applied Think Wrong inside some of the continent’s most demanding organizations, and hosted by a Paris fieldwork network of arts institutions and practitioners living the crisis the week examines.

The people
in the room with you.

The Intensive is designed and facilitated by a team with direct experience applying the methodology inside some of Europe’s most complex organizations—at Airbus, across Heidrick & Struggles, and through the leadership-development work where assumptions are most deeply embedded and most expensive when wrong. It is led by Greg Galle, co-author of Think Wrong and a principal of Solve Next.

Greg Galle

Methodology Architect · CEO, Solve Next

Greg Galle has spent more than thirty years watching the same pattern accumulate inside organizations: visible metrics that look healthy while something underneath stays 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, organizational 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 methodology, he brings both the framework and the facilitation depth that make Friday’s transfer session the most consequential of the week.

Louise Kyhl-Triolo

European Program Lead · Senior Facilitator

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 Capital Activator Intensive across Europe. She works at the intersection of strategy and leadership: coaching senior leaders, designing group experiences that shift how organizations actually work, and facilitating change that requires both directional clarity and genuine human commitment. She is the European program lead—the person who knows how Think Wrong translates across cultures, sectors, and the gap between a week in the field and a Monday morning back in the office. She is a Solve Next Partner and a Board Member (Europe) of the Human Impacts Institute.

Romain Gravier

Senior Facilitator · Integral Master Coach

Romain Gravier spent more than twenty years inside Airbus as a coach, facilitator, and leadership trainer embedded in some of the organization’s most complex transformation programs—including FCAS and Smart Collab at Airbus Defense and Space. He has surfaced and worked with assumptions inside a large, complex engineering organization from the inside for two decades, which means he understands the forces that make organizational change genuinely difficult rather than theoretically challenging. He is a certified Integral Master Coach (Integral Coaching Canada) and has trained in the Think Wrong discipline with Solve Next. He brings the facilitation rigor that turns a week in the field into a practice participants can run themselves when they return.

Cornelia Wagner

Facilitator · Transformation Architect

Cornelia Wagner spent sixteen years inside Airbus in a sequence of roles that gave her an unusually complete picture of how large organizations learn, change, and resist change—from learning-systems implementation and HR transformation to culture-change management and, most recently, engineering transformation at Airbus Defense & Space. She founded Connecting Waypoints to bring transformational coaching and facilitation to leaders navigating complexity. She brings 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 takes to make a new discipline stick inside a complex organization.

What you need
to know.

Design. Run. Report.

The week trains the capability. What you run when you return is the Think Wrong arc on a live capital-building opportunity you own—designed in the room, run at home, reported to the executive who can act on it. After Paris you do not leave with a general sense of the method. You leave able to stand it up on the specific opportunity in front of you.

The capability is what carries the week from trained to operational: after the Intensive, you design, run, and report the Think Wrong arc on the capital-building opportunity you own.

The escalation
question.

The assumptions you surface in Paris about the arts’ most consequential bets—that cultural authority is a sufficient answer to the attention economy, that audience erosion is cyclical rather than structural, that heritage institutions can outlast platforms built to replace them—are structurally identical to the assumptions your own organization carries into its AI deployments, growth bets, market entries, and transformation initiatives. Paris is the rehearsal. What happens at home is the performance.