Think Wrong
About Drone Warfare.

The decisions where assumptions are most expensive.

Drone warfare is not the point. It is 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 infrastructure security, supply chain resilience, and operational continuity planning in a form the Ukraine conflict has made undeniable. The threat landscape changed faster than the planning assumptions. The technologists, analysts, and operators at NATO CCDCOE and in the Estonian defence ecosystem who meet this group are navigating exactly this structure. The capability built in Tallinn is not defence expertise. It is the practiced discipline for classifying which assumptions underlying current planning are still sound—before the next capital decision depends on one that is not.

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.

What goes home with you.

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

The pattern behind
the challenge.

The drone warfare challenge is not a defence problem. It is the most visible current example of a pattern that appears in every sector where assumptions about physical security, operational continuity, and infrastructure resilience were formed in a different threat environment. The organisations that will navigate this well are not the ones with the best threat intelligence. They are the ones that tested their assumptions before the threat made testing unavoidable. By Day 4, most participants can name at least one assumption in their own organisation that belongs to the same category. For those who can, the next conversation is about whether that assumption warrants a more structured look. That is what the diagnostic is for.

If that pattern sounds familiar before you’ve even attended—the conversation starts here.

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 encountered on Day 1. The drone warfare challenge was the medium. The capability goes home with you.

Design. Run.
Report.

Before the Think Wrong 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 Tallinn, 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 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.

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 whose planning
assumptions were formed in a
different threat environment.

You are someone who knows the threat landscape has changed and suspects the planning assumptions have not kept pace. This is not an intelligence failure. It is the predictable result of assumptions that stability and growth have never forced anyone to update—confirmed by the absence of incident, normalised by years of operation without consequence. Tallinn is where we develop the structured practice of classifying which assumptions are still sound and which have quietly become wrong—before the next capital commitment depends on them.

Resources for the
internal conversation.

Four documents designed for the conversations that follow this page. The first two are downloadable PDFs—the Programme Brief and the One-Pager—built for forwarding to colleagues, finance, and the people who will be in the room when the decision to attend is made. The second two are interactive selling kits—one for the internal champion making the case to themselves, one for the leader making the case to the organisation. Take what you need.

The escalation
question.

The assumptions you surface in Tallinn about drone proliferation and infrastructure resilience—that physical supply chains are insulated from hybrid threats, that density is a settled strategy, that the gap between threat intelligence and planning assumptions will close on its own—are structurally identical to the assumptions your own organisation carries in its AI deployments, growth bets, market entries, and transformation initiatives. The Tallinn week is the rehearsal. What happens at home is the performance.