Think Wrong Blitz
One bet.
Five days.
Proven.
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 the full methodology, applied across one to five days to the specific capital-building opportunity your team cannot afford to get wrong.
The Commissioned Blitz
One bet your team cannot
afford to get wrong.
A Think Wrong Blitz is commissioned when a team has a specific capital-building opportunity—an AI deployment, a growth initiative, a market entry, a product launch, a transformation decision—where capital is at stake and the assumptions beneath the decision have not been rigorously tested. One to five days, the full Think Wrong methodology applied to your challenge, with your people in the room.
The decisions where value-building opportunities most often hide are specific: an AI deployment where adoption and use case carry the promise of a new operating model. A growth bet where demand is genuinely emergent, not yet legible in the category. A market entry where competitive dynamics reward a different frame. A transformation initiative where the organisation has diagnosed a problem but not yet discovered the opportunity underneath it. These four decision types share a structure: biological and cultural inertia conceals the opportunity until capital has committed to something less. The cost of discovering the real opportunity after commitment is 10–100× the cost of surfacing it before. The Blitz inverts that calculation.
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: the predictable path always feels like the rational one. Growth confirms the old frame until it stops. Governance instruments measure outcomes but were never designed to surface the opportunities hidden inside the inertia that produces them. The Blitz is built to outsmart that inertia—on a specific decision, with your team, before capital commits at scale.
The Blitz produces evidence, not ideas. By the close of the engagement, the team has surfaced the assumptions silently governing the decision, classified them against the evidence that actually exists, identified which assumptions would change the decision if proved wrong, and designed the smallest credible tests to resolve them. The capital-building opportunity remains—what changes is whether you advance on belief or on evidence.
The most expensive innovation failure is not the bet that didn’t work. It is the bet that was built on an assumption no one thought to examine.
A Blitz is not a workshop. Workshops generate ideas. The Blitz generates tested assumptions, a prioritized capital-building opportunity portfolio, a set of Super Vital Assumptions with designed tests attached, and an updated governance conversation—one the CFO or CEO can act on. The stories that follow are what this has looked like in practice, across ten years of commissioned engagements.
Case Evidence · Three Blitzes
The method, in its
concluded form.
Three commissioned Think Wrong Blitzes, delivered across a decade, at three very different organizations facing three very different capital-allocation decisions. Each shows the same method at work on a different challenge—and each produced an output the commissioning organization could act on before the larger capital committed at scale.
A Story of Small Bets and Transformation
Genentech had developed a therapy they believed would trigger the immune system to attack cancer cells. Clinical trial investment would run into the hundreds of millions. Competitive pressure from other labs was real. Regulatory complexity was real. But the assumption everyone carried—that the investigator meetings launching each trial were “just how this is done”—had never been examined. Those meetings set the tone for every doctor, nurse, and coordinator on every trial site. They were also, universally, dull.
The Blitz
Three days. A cross-functional team—executives, scientists, marketers—in one room. First names only, no titles, a meritocracy of ideas. We applied drills from all six Think Wrong practices against one challenge: what if the investigator meeting was not a regulatory checkbox but the moment when every clinician decided whether this trial mattered? The team generated a portfolio of small bets and committed to the ones that would test the hypothesis cheaply before scaling.
The Output
Two months later, in Atlanta, the team replaced the lifeless airport-hotel format with something unrecognisable. The Historic Academy of Medicine as venue. Scientists coached to tell the story behind the medicine. An emcee to hold narrative tension across the day. Protocol documents reframed as patient stories. A closing portrait session so Genentech could thank every clinician personally—and so every clinician had a tangible record of the trial they were about to join.
The Impact
Surveys rated it the best investigator meeting doctors and nurses had ever attended. The format was replicated globally across the trial network. A multi-hundred-million-dollar clinical investment advanced with an engagement model that had been tested and evidenced—rather than assumed.
“Simple changes made it clear that you are not just a cog in the wheel of this great grinding process—you are an integral part of one of the largest experiments in curing a fatal disease. You are a part of history.”
Kathryn Woody · Operations Programme Manager · Genentech
A Story of Making Stuff and a Bubble With a Cause
In 2012, SodaStream was a small newcomer up against an entrenched U.S. soda category. The CEO and his executive team believed the company needed a sharper position—but the brand they had been defending, the arguments they had been making, and the ads they had been planning all carried assumptions about what would break through that no one had tested. The next marketing commitment was significant. The next commitment after that would be a Super Bowl slot.
The Blitz
We commissioned the engagement for CEO Daniel Birnbaum and a small executive team. We brought fine artist Tucker Nichols along as a deliberate outsider—someone whose job was to listen, capture what he was hearing, and reflect it back without the executives’ internal frame of reference. The Think Wrong discipline calls this Get Out—leaving the familiar environment deliberately so the assumptions embedded in the familiar environment become visible. Tucker’s drawings were the mechanism.
The Output
As the team talked, Tucker filled a wall with whimsical illustrations of bubbles and various expressions of freedom. The team looked up at the wall and saw their own idea staring back at them with the distance they could not generate from inside. “Free the Bubbles” was not in the brief. It emerged because an outsider reframed what the executives had been saying all along. The team committed to the position in a single session.
The Impact
SodaStream took the position to the 2013 Super Bowl. A sixty-second ad—Coke and Pepsi delivery trucks racing, plastic bottles exploding, a man making soda at home while a voiceover reminded the viewer that 500 million bottles could be saved on game day alone—was banned from broadcast by the networks. It generated millions of YouTube views, free PR from the Huffington Post to the New Yorker, and positioned SodaStream as the future of a category that Coke and Pepsi had quietly owned for fifty years.
“It is a courageous thing to bring someone in whose mindset right from the start is to try and figure out what is silly and present that back to the group.”
Tucker Nichols · Fine Artist · Think Wrong Collaborator
A Story of Political Engagement
The Obama administration had reinstated the White House Initiative for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders—a demographic group including Indonesian, Indian, Japanese, Samoan, Laotian, Pakistani, Chinese, and many other communities whose political representation had never matched their population. Previous efforts had waxed and waned over decades. The administration wanted to activate lasting political engagement, but every standard convening format—speeches, panels, Q&A—had been tried before and produced little.
The Blitz
One day. One hundred community leaders. The White House as venue. Members of the administration—the secretaries of education, transport, and commerce—delivered presentations. But instead of Q&A, we ran Think Wrong drills designed to surface the shared goals beneath the visible diversity of the group. The focus was on Moonshot drills—practices for defining shared ambitions that are large enough to hold disparate interests in coalition.
The Output
By the end of the day, the group had decided to form an ongoing Leaders Forum that would run independently of any White House commission. They formed both a Democratic and a Republican PAC to advocate for more Asian American and Pacific Islander candidates at all levels of government. A disparate group that had arrived as an audience departed as an alliance with infrastructure.
The Impact
What a decade of intermittent White House convenings had failed to produce, a single day of structured Think Wrong practice produced—a durable political alliance with governance of its own. The assumption that this community was too diverse to unify around shared political action was surfaced, tested against one day of genuine engagement, and proven wrong.
“We were determined to leave the tragically unproductive ‘us vs. them’ structure behind, solving gnarly problems more efficiently because we work together.”
Lorna Randlett · Commissioner · White House Initiative for Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders
The Pattern
What the three
stories share.
Different industries. Different scales. Different timelines. Different kinds of capital at stake. What the three engagements share is not the output—it is the underlying structure of what the Blitz does to an organization that commits to running one.
1
Specific capital-building opportunity per engagement—never a general exploration
6
Think Wrong practices applied across the engagement—never fewer
3
Evidence-generating outputs at minimum—small bets designed and scoped before the team leaves the room
1
Escalation question at the close—which assumption, if wrong, changes a decision only the CFO or CEO can authorise
In Genentech, the assumption was that investigator meetings were a regulatory formality rather than a commercial lever. In SodaStream, the assumption was that brand positioning required internal consensus before external validation. At the White House, the assumption was that political diversity was incompatible with coalition infrastructure. In all three cases, the assumption had been carried forward untested because the cost of examining it felt larger than the cost of simply acting on it. The Blitz inverts that calculation—it makes examining the assumption cheaper than committing capital on the belief that the assumption is correct.
Every Blitz ends in the same place structurally, regardless of scope: the team has named the assumption that, if wrong, would have caused the capital committed afterward to return less than planned. That assumption becomes the governance conversation. It is the bridge from the Blitz to whatever comes next.
What You Practise
The six Think Wrong
practices—applied.
Each commissioned Blitz applies all six practices against your specific challenge. They are not introduced sequentially—they are deployed in the sequence your challenge requires. What follows is what each practice does inside the engagement, illustrated by the case stories above.
Be
Bold
Frame the challenge so the usual answers never show up
The first practice is reframing the problem. Genentech did not frame their challenge as “how do we improve investigator meetings?”—they reframed it as “what if this meeting is the moment that determines whether this trial succeeds?” The right problem, framed boldly enough, produces a different set of candidate answers.
Get
Out
Leave the familiar environment deliberately
SodaStream brought in a fine artist whose job was to listen, capture, and reflect what the team was saying. The team could not generate that distance from inside. Getting Out is not about leaving the office—it is about breaking the cognitive frame that produces the same answers. Every Blitz engineers this departure.
Let
Go
Generate without filtering—hold off on killing the uncomfortable idea
The filter that kills the early awkward idea also kills the one that turns out to matter. Let Go is the structured practice for holding that filter at bay long enough for genuinely unfamiliar possibilities to appear. At the White House, the Moonshot drills were the mechanism—goals large enough that no one in the room could defend them from within their own agenda.
Make
Stuff
Turn the idea into something tangible the same day
A slide deck is not Making Stuff. A proposal is not Making Stuff. An artefact—something real enough that a stakeholder can react to it—is what counts. Genentech prototyped the new investigator meeting format inside the Blitz. The SodaStream team saw their new position as a wall of drawings. Make Stuff is how the idea leaves the room with weight.
Bet
Small
Design the smallest credible test before capital commits at scale
Each Blitz identifies the Super Vital Assumptions—the ones that, if wrong, would change a decision the CFO or CEO would need to authorise. Bet Small is the practice of designing the smallest evidence-generating action that would resolve each assumption. The output is not a plan—it is a set of tests, sequenced by consequence, bounded by affordable loss.
Move
Fast
Cycle faster than the commitment can scale
The Blitz produces tested evidence within weeks, not quarters. Genentech rolled out the new format in Atlanta two months after the engagement. The SodaStream Super Bowl ad ran the following January. The White House alliance was operating within six months. The discipline is to run cycles faster than the capital can commit, so the learning outpaces the spend.
What the Blitz Produces
Four artefacts. One escalation.
A decision you can defend.
Every commissioned Think Wrong Blitz—at every duration—produces the same four artefacts. What varies with duration is the depth and scope of each, not whether it is produced.
Artefact One
A Capital-Building Opportunity Portfolio
A prioritised set of opportunities within the challenge you commissioned, each mapped to a capital domain, each scored for impact, each assigned to a named owner. Not ideas. Opportunities, with the infrastructure to act on them attached.
Artefact Two
A Super Vital Assumption Map
The assumptions beneath the decision, classified as Presumptions, Assumptions, or Knowledge using the PAK framework. Super Vital Assumptions—the ones that would change a capital allocation decision if proved wrong—are identified and ranked by consequence and testability.
Artefact Three
Small Bets Designed and Scoped
Tangible, testable evidence-generating actions—prototypes, interview guides, demand tests, structured stakeholder conversations—one per Super Vital Assumption, bounded by affordable loss and sequenced to produce signal before the next capital decision.
Artefact Four
An Updated Conversation Canvas
The Solve Next Conversation Canvas, marked up with your challenge mapped across the six capital domains, the named opportunities located in the capital they build, and the Super Vital Assumptions visible where they sit. The canvas is the artefact that carries the Blitz output into your organisation’s next governance conversation.
The Escalation Question—Asked at the Close of Every Blitz
“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 question is the bridge from the Blitz to the organizational governance conversation that should follow. The assumptions that answer it—the ones with the highest capital consequence—are the entry point to the Growth Gap Diagnostic.
Who Commissions a Blitz
Leaders with authority
and a specific bet.
A Blitz is commissioned by the person whose decision the engagement will serve. That person is not always the most senior in the room—but they are always the one who can act on what the Blitz produces. Four typical commissioning profiles below.
CEO or Division President
Facing a growth, transformation, or market-entry decision where the capital commitment is significant and the underlying assumptions have never been tested. Commissions the Blitz to produce evidence before the board conversation.
Chief Strategy or Innovation Officer
Responsible for a specific portfolio decision—an AI deployment, a new-venture launch, a category reset—where the team’s conviction has outpaced the evidence. Commissions the Blitz to recalibrate before scaling.
Head of Function
HR, Marketing, Product, Operations—facing a specific capital-building opportunity inside their domain. Commissions the Blitz to build the evidence case before requesting the full capital commitment from the C-suite.
Certified Serious Capital Activator
A graduate of the Think Wrong Intensive commissioning a Blitz inside their own organisation on a challenge they own. This is the most common commissioning profile after Year 1 of Activator certification—and the subject of the next section.
Chief of Staff
Operating on behalf of a CEO or board-level sponsor, commissioning the Blitz to produce a specific artefact—an assumption map, a capital opportunity portfolio—that will inform a decision already scheduled on the governance calendar.
Partner-of-Record
An external advisor—consultancy, agency, investment firm—commissioning the Blitz on behalf of a client who needs evidence before committing to the next stage of an engagement. Solve Next has partnered with advisory firms in this pattern for over a decade.
For Certified Activators
The Blitz is what you’ll
design, run, and report on.
The Certified Serious Capital Activator™ credential, conferred by the Think Wrong Intensive, signals that the holder has trained in the full Think Wrong methodology and can apply it to capital-allocation assumptions in their own organisation. The Blitz is the tangible form of that capability. What the Intensive trains you to do, the Blitz is what you do.
Design
You scope the engagement
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. The Think Wrong Intensive develops this scoping capability directly.
Run
You facilitate the practices
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.
Report
You produce the readout
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.
This is the architectural logic that makes the Intensive’s value proposition concrete. 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.
Solve Next commissions Blitzes for clients who want the method run by its originators—and certifies Activators to run their own inside their organisations. Both are the same engagement, the same four artefacts, the same methodology. The difference is who is in the facilitator’s seat.
What Comes Next
The Blitz produces
the opening move.
The architecture follows.
A Blitz inside the Solve Next architecture leads somewhere specific. The assumptions surfaced are not a workshop takeaway—they are the entry point to the governance conversation the CFO or CEO needs to have. What follows depends on what the Blitz surfaced and what the organisation commits to act on.
The Escalation Question—The Bridge From This Blitz to What Follows
“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 it—the ones with the highest capital consequence—are the entry point for the Growth Gap Diagnostic. They are where organizational belief meets organizational risk. They are what Capital Symmetry Governance is designed to govern.
1
The Blitz readout—to the CFO or CEO
Within 14 days of the Blitz close, the commissioning team produces the readout—the four artefacts, framed for the sponsor who will act on them. The readout is not a deliverable. It is the governance conversation in written form. The Super Vital Assumptions, the Opportunity Portfolio, the designed small bets, and the escalation question sit on the sponsor’s desk.
2
Take the Growth Gap Diagnostic to the organization
If the escalation question surfaced assumptions with capital consequences beyond the single challenge the Blitz addressed, the Growth Gap Diagnostic is the next move. The Diagnostic applies the same discipline—surface, classify, prioritise—systematically across all six capital forms, producing a Capital Symmetry Stage score and a map of cascade risk. This is the primary organizational entry to the full Solve Next architecture.
3
Build the Activator cohort—Think Wrong Intensive
If the Blitz succeeded because the methodology fits the organisation’s challenges—and the organisation wants the capability to run this repeatedly—the next move is the Think Wrong Intensive. Either a public cohort registration for one or more leaders, or a private commissioned Intensive for a cross-functional cohort from the enterprise. The Intensive trains Certified Serious Capital Activators™ who design, run, and report on Blitzes inside your organisation thereafter.
This Engagement · Commissioned
Think Wrong Blitz
1–5 days · Your challenge
One capital-building opportunity, proven.
Organizational · Primary Entry
Growth Gap Diagnostic
6 weeks · Board-level
The escalation question, systematically.
Cohort · Public or Private
Think Wrong Intensive
3–4.5 days · Certified Activators
The capability, scaled.
Take This Back To Your Team
Resources for
the internal conversation.
Four resources to help you make the case for commissioning a Blitz—to yourself, to your sponsor, and to the organisation that will benefit from the engagement. Share freely.
01
The Blitzes Kit
The canonical Think Wrong Blitzes resource. The full description of the engagement, what it produces, the cases that have set the precedent, and the architecture for commissioning one inside your organisation. The reference document for any internal conversation about whether a Blitz is the right next move.
View →·Download →
02
Commissioning One-Pager
A single-page summary you can forward or print for a quick read. Useful when someone needs the essentials before they commit time to the full kit.
Download PDF →
03
Internal Selling Kit
For the individual who wants to commission a Blitz and needs to make the case to their executive sponsor. Frames the capital-building opportunity, the evidence the Blitz will produce, and the questions a sponsor is likely to ask before authorising the engagement.
View →·Download →
04
Organisational Selling Kit
For the leader sponsoring a Blitz on behalf of the organisation. Frames the engagement as a capital-allocation discipline, the methodology as governance infrastructure, and the four artefacts as the bridge to the next governance conversation.
View →·Download →
Commission a
Blitz.
A thirty-minute scoping call produces a written proposal within one week. The proposal specifies the challenge, the cohort, the duration, the artefacts, the timeline, and the investment. No obligation. Pricing is confirmed in the proposal, scoped to the engagement.
