Think Wrong
About the Arts.

The decisions where assumptions are most expensive.

The performing arts are not the point. They are the laboratory. The point is this: the same four decisions where untested assumptions are most expensive—AI deployments, growth bets, market entries and transformation initiatives—appear in the performing arts in forms that are unusually visible to an outsider. The artistic directors, producers, and institution leaders who meet this group are navigating exactly this structure: capital and reputation committed on premises that success confirmed for decades, now under a pressure that has not been absorbed into the planning assumptions. The capability built in Paris is not arts expertise. It is the practiced discipline for examining premises before commitment, not after.

The decisions where untested assumptions are most expensive are specific: an AI deployment built on beliefs about adoption and use case that were never tested. A growth bet committed before the demand premise was verified. A market entry that assumed competitive dynamics the team had never actually encountered. A transformation initiative designed to solve a problem the organisation had diagnosed without evidence. These four decision types share a structure: capital commits before the most consequential assumptions are examined. The cost of discovering a wrong assumption after commitment is 10–100× the cost of testing before it.

The status quo is not a management problem. It is a neuroscience problem. The brain’s efficiency—the synaptic shortcuts that allow you to drive to work without thinking—produces the same answers to every new problem. Biology and culture conspire together: the predictable path always feels like the rational one. Growth confirms assumptions until it stops. Governance instruments measure outcomes but were never designed to interrogate the premises that produce them. The result is that organisations commit capital on beliefs they have never formally tested—not because they are careless, but because the system was never built to surface the difference between what is known and what is assumed.

Theatre

Aging audiences. Rising production costs. Competing against the living room. The assumption that live presence is self-evidently valuable is no longer self-evident.

Ballet & Opera

Institutions built for permanence in an era that prizes immediacy. Funding models dependent on states that are questioning the return.

Fashion

The fastest-moving art form. Under attack from fast fashion, creator culture, and AI-generated design. The assumption that craft and heritage are defensible moats is collapsing at speed.

Fine Arts

The market bifurcated: ultra-premium for the few, invisible for everyone else. The assumption that gatekeepers produce quality and quality produces audiences is empirically failing.

The Challenger

The attention economy does not hate the arts. It is simply better at delivering something that feels like them. Understanding why is the first step to thinking wrong about the response.

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

What goes home with you.

The industry is the laboratory. The competencies 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 practised all four against real stakeholders in a live industry. Most participants run their first internal Think Wrong Blitz within thirty days of returning.

The 4.5-day arc.

Each day is structured around one Think Wrong practice and one art form. The morning introduces the tool. The afternoon applies it in the field. By Day 4, participants are facilitating their peers through the tools they learned on Day 1.

Four artefacts.
One credential.

The arts are the laboratory precisely because their governance failure is so visible—and so long in the making. The institutions under the most pressure built their value on cultural authority, artistic excellence and the assumption of public necessity while the forces that determined whether that authority survived drifted without anyone measuring them. The week in Paris makes that pattern legible. Not because you work in the arts, but because the same pattern—building confidently on assumptions that growth or prestige once seemed to confirm—appears in every organisation that cannot see what is being quietly depleted while the numbers still look fine.

Every participant leaves with four specific artefacts. They are what makes the capability operational the week after the programme ends—and what gives the CFO or CEO something concrete to engage with when the escalation question arrives on their desk.

The Think Wrong
methodology—in practice.

Every tool is introduced in the morning and applied in the field the same afternoon. By Day 4, participants are facilitating their peers. The arts were the medium. The capability goes home with you.

The methodology at work.

Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters 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. Every participant who completes the Intensive joins that practitioner network through the Certified Serious Capital Activator™ credential.

The people in the room with you.

The Think Wrong Innovators Intensives are designed and facilitated by a team with direct experience applying the methodology inside some of Europe’s most complex organisations—at Airbus, across Heidrick & Struggles and throughout the leadership development contexts where assumptions are most deeply embedded and most expensive when wrong.

Greg Galle

Methodology Architect · CEO, Solve Next

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 Friday’s transfer session the most consequential session of the week.

Louise Kyhl-Triolo

European Programme 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 Think Wrong Innovators Intensives 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 week in the field 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

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 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 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 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 Intensives 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.

For the leader who keeps
asking the question the
room is not authorised to answer.

You are someone who keeps bringing the uncomfortable question forward and finding it killed—not by bad faith, but by the accumulated weight of a system that was built to optimise what it already does well. The arts crisis is not about audiences or streaming or government funding. It is about excellent execution of an unexamined premise. Paris exists as a laboratory because it is the clearest available demonstration of what that looks like—visible from the outside in ways it cannot be from within.

The escalation question
is the bridge.

Resources for
the internal conversation.

Four resources to help you make the case for the Intensive—to yourself, to your sponsor, and to the organisation you will bring the capability back to. Share freely.