Think Wrong
About Emergency Response.

The assumptions under your response plans were written for a different world.

Disaster and fire response is governed by plans, and plans rest on assumptions: how fast a fire moves, how many events arrive at once, who answers when you call, what the mutual-aid network can actually surge. Most of those assumptions were formed in a calmer threat environment, and most have never been deliberately surfaced—let alone tested. The instruments a response organization runs on track resources obligated and exercises completed. They do not register the gap between today’s hazard intelligence and yesterday’s planning assumptions until an event forces the issue, when the correction is expensive and public.

The exposure does not start in financial capital. Of the six capital domains—financial, human, intellectual, reputational, political, and social—financial is the best resourced, and its result is where damage surfaces last, in training costs not avoided and rework not prevented. Its structure, the appropriation cycle and the obligation calendar, sets how fast a readiness shortfall becomes a capability gap. The exposure lives in the other five: human (the specialist responders, planners, and support crews you cannot replace mid-season), intellectual (the planning assumptions and the technology behind them), reputational (your standing with the public and with civil authorities the day it matters—and, for an all-volunteer force, the recruiting and retention that standing drives), and political and social (the interagency, mutual-aid, and partner relationships a response depends on). A response system can look fully funded and still be quietly fragile.

This Intensive treats that fragility as the work. A joint New York–Sweden cohort brings its own live challenges—national disaster and fire response among them—and runs them through the full Think Wrong arc: surfacing the assumptions that silently govern each plan, testing the ones that would change a command decision, and building the partnership on tested capability rather than activity. The challenges are co-authored, not assigned: a discovery call with the partner surfaces three to five structured challenge statements from their own priorities, and the partner chooses and shapes them—because authorship is what produces ownership.

What goes home with you.

The laboratory is Sweden’s response ecosystem. The capabilities are what leave with you—directly transferable to the disaster plans, mutual-aid agreements, AI deployments, and modernization bets you are navigating when you return. By Friday you will have practiced all four against real stakeholders. Most participants put the practice to work on a live decision—on their own, with their team, and with AI—within thirty days of returning.

The Think Wrong methodology—applied.

Every practice is introduced in the classroom and immediately applied in the field. The national-resilience challenge is the medium; the capability goes home with you. The four capabilities run on six practices, and the drills and tools you meet in the room live inside them.

Five ways to use it. The capabilities and drills are practiced across five modalities, so the method fits how you actually work—facilitation is one way to use Think Wrong, not the whole point.

Sweden rebuilt civil preparedness in the open.
That is the classroom.

Few countries have reconsidered national resilience as visibly as Sweden—reviving total defense, standing civil-contingencies capability back up, and absorbing the lessons of the 2018 wildfire season into doctrine. That makes the assumptions of emergency response unusually legible here, and the practice of testing them unusually learnable. The fieldwork puts the cohort in front of the institutions and operators living the work. Access is arranged for each cohort; confirmations are in progress.

Total defense, rebuilt in public

Sweden revived total defense and stood its civil-contingencies capability back up in the open. The cohort works that record through the Deflection Point—reframing what a response system is for before naming what it has to build.

The 2018 wildfire lessons

The assumptions that broke in the 2018 wildfire season, and the doctrine written afterward. A structured read of where the plan diverged from the hazard—the gap the Certainty Map exists to surface.

Rescue services in the field

An encounter with rescue-service operators running live response. Where their plans rest on beliefs about speed, simultaneity, and surge—and which of those they have already put to the test. Confirmations in progress.

Critical-infrastructure operators

Energy, telecommunications, and logistics operators who have updated their continuity assumptions under pressure. The cohort isolates the Super Vital Assumption: the one belief that, if it turned out to be wrong, would change the decision. Confirmations in progress.

Mutual aid and interagency coordination

The partner relationships a response depends on the day it matters, examined across the New York–Sweden engagement. Who acts, who decides, who can block—and how assent becomes a dated commitment.

Practitioner panel

Analysts and planners living the work close the week. Each participant leaves with one tested assumption to carry back to their own command—the moment the practice transfers home.

Built with the people who run the response.

The program is designed and delivered with partners who have direct access to the civil-preparedness and emergency-response landscape—from national civil-contingencies institutions to the operators who have already updated their assumptions in response to it.

The people in the room with you.

The Intensive is led by Greg Galle, co-author of Think Wrong and a principal of Solve Next, with Solve Next faculty and—joining for the fieldwork—Swedish civil-preparedness practitioners who run the response. The room is small by design: twenty seats, two instructors, one shared challenge.

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 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, 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 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 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 Intensives™ in the field across Europe. She works at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and leadership: coaching senior leaders, designing group experiences that shift how organizations actually work, and facilitating transformation that requires both directional clarity and genuine human change. Louise 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 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 innovation and culture transformation programs—including FCAS and Smart Collab at Airbus Defense and Space. He has been surfacing and working 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. Romain is a certified Integral Master Coach (Integral Coaching Canada) and a Certified Wrong Thinker credentialed by 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 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 organization.

What you need to know.

Design. Run. Report.

The week does not end in Stockholm. Each participant leaves with a small bet designed for a live capital-building opportunity they own, built to run within thirty days. You design it in the room, run it at home, and report what moved—the moment certainty actually shifts. The discipline travels; the evidence is generated where the work is.

The escalation question—and the ladder beyond it.

The assumptions you surface in Stockholm are structurally identical to the ones your own organization carries into its AI deployments, growth bets, market entries, and transformation decisions. The week is the rehearsal. What happens at home is the performance.

The question closes the week, after the Activator Capability Read—your own read of how ready you are to put the discipline to work, and what will get in its way when you return. It tests whether the work reached assumptions with real capital consequence, and it opens the conversation above the room. Three routes follow from it, and “none yet” is an honest answer.

Where a leadership team needs one live decision worked with everyone who can authorize it in the room, that is a Capital Activation Blitz™—a separate engagement, scoped with Solve Next. The ladder records capability built, not the order in which an organization arrives: any of these can be where it starts. Compare the four ways in.