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 four specific capabilities that transfer directly to the AI deployments, growth bets, market entries, and transformation initiatives you are navigating when you return.
The European mobility transition 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 Amsterdam’s mobility system in a form that no other city makes visible: two generations of the same challenge simultaneously, the first far enough along to examine, the second forming in real time. The infrastructure operators, logistics innovators, and urban planners who meet this group are navigating exactly this structure. The capability built in Amsterdam is not mobility expertise. It is the practiced discipline for identifying the embedded assumptions in long-horizon decisions before they become constraints.
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.
European rail infrastructure was designed to compete with aviation on long distance and cars on medium distance. Neither frame survived the arrival of coach networks, micro-mobility, shared autonomous vehicles, and the 15-minute city. Every rail investment decision made in the last decade rests on assumptions formed before the competitive landscape was visible.
Amsterdam completed the post-car transition a generation ahead of every other European city. The result is not a solved problem—it is a new set of assumptions under pressure. Bicycle infrastructure built for one pattern of use is overwhelmed by e-bikes, cargo bikes, and delivery robots. Every solution embeds the next set of assumptions to be questioned.
The rise of e-commerce and same-day delivery has turned the final 500 metres of every supply chain into the most contested, most expensive, and most assumption-laden portion of the mobility network. Vans, drones, cargo bikes, and autonomous pods are all betting on different versions of what ‘fast’ and ‘convenient’ mean to the next generation of urban consumers.
Hydrogen or electric? Shared or owned? Urban or interurban? Rail or road? Every infrastructure operator is committing capital to platforms before the technology assumptions underlying those platforms have been validated. The European Green Deal has created a policy urgency that is compressing the assumption-testing window to near zero.
Five days in Amsterdam. Half the time in sessions, half the time in the field—on rail networks, in logistics hubs, on cycle infrastructure, in mobility startups, with the operators and planners who are living the transition. The European mobility challenge is the case. The practice you develop is what goes home. By Friday you’ll have tools you can use the following week—for making better investment decisions, generating stronger ideas, and building the buy-in that actually moves things forward.
The Innovators Intensive is a Think Wrong Blitz—the immersive, multi-day format the methodology was designed for—extended to four and a half days, taken into the field, and built around a live industry at a visible Deflection Point.
There is a specific reason Amsterdam is the laboratory for this programme. Get Out—the Think Wrong practice of leaving the environments where your own industry’s assumptions feel like physics—is most powerful when the destination is a city that has already lived through the transition your own sector is debating in the present tense. Amsterdam’s mobility decisions are not theoretical. They have already been made, deployed, and stress-tested. You can see what held, what failed, and what the next generation of assumptions looks like—precisely because you didn’t make those decisions and don’t have to defend them. The patterns visible here—infrastructure bets made before technology was settled, solutions that solved one problem while embedding the next—are the same patterns running in every capital-intensive sector right now. The canal is not the point. Getting out is.
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.
Most consequential decisions fail not because the team executed poorly, but because they were solving the wrong version of the problem. The Deflection Point practice produces a structured from–to shift: the current frame of the challenge and a better-founded alternative. Applied to the industry on Day 1. Applied to your own live challenge on Friday. The most important question before any capital commits is not “what should we build?”—it is “are we solving the actual problem?”
Every significant growth initiative contains beliefs masquerading as facts. The Certainty Map and PAK classification—Presumptions, Assumptions, Knowledge—give you a rigorous instrument for mapping every significant belief underlying a decision as either untested assumption, testable hypothesis, or validated knowledge. No AI deployment, market entry, or transformation initiative should advance based on Presumptions alone. Participants leave able to run this classification for any challenge, with any team, in any governance context.
Not all assumptions carry equal capital consequence. The Super Vital Assumption discipline identifies which beliefs are Tackle First—the ones that, if false, would change a capital allocation decision that only the CFO or CEO can authorise. Participants develop the diagnostic capability to identify SVAs quickly, prioritise them by consequence and testability, and sequence evidence-gathering to resolve the highest-risk unknowns before capital commits at scale.
The smallest credible evidence-generating action bounded by affordable loss. Participants design concrete, testable actions—prototypes, interview guides, demand tests, structured conversations—that put the Super Vital Assumption in front of real people the same day they are made. The discipline: build to learn what you do not know, not to persuade an audience that you do. Evidence before investment. Learning before scale. The week ends with a small bet designed for the participant’s own live challenge—executable within thirty days of returning.
Each day is structured around a core Think Wrong practice applied first in the classroom and then immediately in the field. The city is the campus. The mobility challenge is the curriculum. Your organisation is where it compounds.
Arrival in Amsterdam. The opening session is a structured bicycle tour of the city’s mobility infrastructure—not as sightseeing but as fieldwork. Participants observe the assumptions embedded in every design decision before any framework has been introduced. Dinner with the programme partners follows.
Morning classroom: Deflection Point—framing the mobility challenge correctly before solutions are attempted. Participants map the from/to shifts the transition requires and challenge whether they are being framed as technology problems when they are assumption problems. Afternoon fieldwork: NS rail operations and planning leadership. Where is the assumption about what rail is for being questioned most urgently?
Morning classroom: Certainty Map applied to the mobility transition. Which assumptions about how people and goods move are evidence-based? Which are bets the industry is treating as facts? Afternoon fieldwork: Amsterdam Smart City and the city’s own mobility innovation infrastructure—working on the questions no other city has had to answer yet.
Morning classroom: PAK framework and Super Vital Assumptions applied to the mobility investment landscape. Participants classify the industry’s beliefs by evidence quality. Afternoon fieldwork: Port of Rotterdam logistics and a Dutch mobility startup betting on a different version of the future. The incumbent’s assumptions versus the challenger’s.
Morning: teams build prototypes of their highest-confidence hypotheses. Afternoon: stakeholder panel—a rail operator, a city planner, a logistics director, a mobility startup founder, and a commuter who represents the user the industry is most worried about losing. Evening: the escalation question: “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?”
Half-day. Each participant maps the Think Wrong practices from the week to a live challenge they own—a growth bet, a product decision, an infrastructure investment, an AI deployment. The mobility challenge provided the pattern. The transfer session is where it becomes yours.
The European mobility transition’s challenge is not unique to transport. The pattern—infrastructure commitments made before technology is settled, competitive frames formed before the competitive landscape was visible, solutions that solve one problem while embedding the next—appears in identical form in every capital-intensive sector making long-horizon bets right now. 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.
Each fieldwork session has specific Think Wrong frameworks to apply, specific questions to bring, and specific outputs to produce. The European mobility transition is the curriculum. Amsterdam—the city where the post-car future has already arrived and where the next set of assumptions are already under pressure—is the campus.
Structured access to NS (Dutch national rail) operations and planning leadership. Where is the assumption about what rail is for being questioned most urgently? Participants bring their Certainty Maps and test them against what they find.
The city’s own mobility innovation team, working on the infrastructure questions no other European city has had to answer yet. The world’s most advanced post-car laboratory, run by the people who built it.
The continent’s largest logistics hub—where every mobility assumption eventually shows up as a cost or a bottleneck. Structured fieldwork on the last-mile assumptions embedded in the world’s busiest port.
A Dutch or European startup betting on a different version of the mobility future. The assumptions they are building on versus the ones the incumbents are defending. The fastest way to see what the existing frame is missing.
Structured past-behaviour interviews with Amsterdam residents, commuters, and delivery workers. What does ‘getting somewhere’ actually cost now—in time, money, and convenience? The signal that planning models miss.
A rail operator, a city planner, a logistics director, a mobility startup founder, and a commuter who represents the user the industry is most worried about losing. Real small bets. Real feedback. Real signal.
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 mobility challenge was the medium. The capability goes home with you.
The programme is designed and delivered with partners who have direct access to the European mobility transition at every level—from the infrastructure operators who are making the long-horizon bets to the startups who are building on different assumptions about what mobility means.
ALSTOM is building the infrastructure that the next version of European mobility runs on. As a current Solve Next partner—with an active Think Wrong programme delivered in Paris—ALSTOM brings both the institutional depth and the direct industry access that anchors the programme’s fieldwork.
NS is simultaneously the best-performing rail system in Europe and the one under the most intense pressure to transform. Their operational leadership brings the assumption questions that no other rail operator has had to answer yet.
The city of Amsterdam’s own innovation infrastructure—the most advanced post-car urban laboratory in the world. Access to the planners and technologists who have already stress-tested the assumptions that the rest of Europe is only now beginning to question.
The architects of Think Wrong bring the full curriculum, the facilitation framework, and eight years of European enterprise application. The ALSTOM partnership is the direct entry point into the European mobility network.
Think Wrong has been applied across some of the world’s most demanding organisations—in aerospace, financial services, technology, life sciences, defence, and education. The participants who attend the Innovators Intensives leave with the same methodology that produced these results.
Simple changes made it clear that you’re not just a cog in the wheel of this great grinding process—you’re an integral part of one of the largest experiments in curing a fatal disease. You’re a part of history.
Following a Think Wrong Blitz that redesigned Genentech’s global clinical trial investigator meetings—producing the highest-rated meetings doctors and nurses had ever attended.
We were determined to leave the tragically unproductive ‘us vs. them’ structure behind, solving gnarly problems more efficiently because we work together.
Following a Think Wrong session at the White House that convened 100 community leaders and produced an independent Leaders Forum and two bipartisan PACs within a single day.
Think Wrong has also been delivered as intensive training and Blitzes at Columbia Business School’s Executive Leadership Program, Stanford, USC, Maryland Institute College of Art, California College of the Arts, University of Kansas School of Architecture, Boise State, Loyola Maryland, and San Jose State.
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 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 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 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 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.
You are someone responsible for decisions whose consequences will not become visible for years. Long-horizon bets have a specific problem: the assumptions embedded in them calcify before anyone has had to test them. And every solution eventually embeds the next set of assumptions to be questioned. Amsterdam is the only city where you can study two generations of that pattern simultaneously—the first transition far enough along to examine objectively, the second live enough to study in real time. The mobility challenge is the laboratory. The capability is for anywhere the previous solution has become the constraint.
The Intensive develops the scoping capability; the Think Wrong Blitz is the engagement a Certified Serious Capital Activator™ designs, runs, and reports on inside their own organisation. Three moves, in sequence.
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. This Intensive develops the scoping capability directly.
The Activator runs the Blitz—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.
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.
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.
Every Think Wrong Intensive—public or private—produces the same four artefacts. In the public cohort you attend in Amsterdam, each one is tied to your own organisation.
A focused portfolio of capital-building moves tied to your own organisation, each scored for capital impact and assigned to a named Activator inside your enterprise.
The underlying beliefs that, if wrong, would change a capital allocation decision only your CFO or CEO can authorise. This is the bridge from the Intensive to the governance conversation that follows.
Your personal Canvas marked up with the Activators, opportunities, and state markers that name—for your organisation—where capital is being built, protected, or put at risk.
You leave holding the Certified Serious Capital Activator™ credential, trained in the full Think Wrong methodology and able to apply it to capital-allocation assumptions in your own organisation.
The assumptions you surfaced in Amsterdam about mobility’s most consequential bets—that the post-car transition is solved, that bicycle infrastructure is a durable platform, that last-mile economics are settled—are structurally identical to the assumptions your own organisation carries about its most consequential decisions. The bridge from the week to the work is one question.
Conferred by the Intensive. (Pre-Intensive participants can also self-designate through the free Solve Next assessment—a starting point, not the credential.)
$125K–$200K depending on scale. The systematic organisational entry—the escalation question, applied across the enterprise’s capital picture.
Level 2 · $12,500 · 5 days. Designs the governance system that makes Activator capability durable.
The capability the Intensive develops. Four artefacts, the six practices, and the role itself—Value Activator™—ready to run inside your organisation.
The escalation question, systematically. Takes the assumptions you surfaced in Amsterdam and runs them across every capital domain your organisation is accountable for.
Designs the governance system that protects, restores, and compounds the six forms of capital. The Architect’s system is what keeps the Activator’s work from decaying.
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.
The full programme description in a single PDF—dates, fee, curriculum, faculty, logistics. The canonical reference document. Share it with anyone who needs the complete picture.
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 brief.
For the individual who wants to attend and needs to make the case to their manager or whoever holds decision-making authority. Frames the capability you’ll develop, the ROI you’ll take back, and the questions your sponsor is likely to ask.
For the leader sponsoring one or more participants on behalf of the organisation. Frames the week as a capability investment, the credential as an asset, and the Think Wrong methodology as infrastructure for the decisions where assumptions are most expensive.
Twenty seats. One city that has already lived through the transition. Four and a half days in the European mobility capital. The methodology is Think Wrong. The laboratory is Amsterdam. If this is the way you already think about your work—you are already a Wrong Thinker. The Intensive develops the practice.
Private cohorts start at €51,000 for up to 15 participants, with €3,750 per additional participant. Scoped to your organisation’s challenge, delivered at a commissioned industry location or your own campus.