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.
Location
Algarve, Portugal
Format
4.5 Days Immersive
Capacity
Capped at 20
Water time
Every afternoon
Included
Next Lab Professional · 1 Year
Credential
Certified Serious Capital Activator™
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Why Surf
Value-building opportunities
the category cannot yet see.
The surf industry is not the point. It is the laboratory. The point is this: biological and cultural inertia—the synaptic shortcuts and the shared conventions of a category—conceal value-building opportunities in plain sight. The shaping bays and lineups and retailers who meet this group are navigating exactly this structure. The capability built in the Algarve is not surf expertise. It is the practised discipline for surfacing opportunities the category has stopped seeing—and developing the ones that build human, intellectual, political, reputational, social, and financial capital rather than erode it.
The four decision types where opportunity most often hides are specific: the AI deployment whose adoption pattern has been assumed rather than tested. The growth bet whose demand premise has never been verified against the market it actually addresses. The market entry that assumes competitive dynamics the team has not encountered. The transformation initiative designed to solve a problem the organisation diagnosed without evidence. These four share a structure: inertia closes the aperture on opportunity before the most consequential premises are examined. The cost of discovering a hidden opportunity after commitment—or discovering a wrong assumption that foreclosed it—is 10–100× the cost of surfacing it first.
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 built to surface the opportunities hidden inside the inertia itself. The result is that organisations commit capital to protecting what they already have while the value-building opportunity drifts past—not because leaders are careless, but because the system was never designed to see it.
The deeper reason surf works as a Think Wrong laboratory is the methodology itself. Surfing is the most visceral possible expression of Lean Customer Development—you do not plan a ride, you read conditions, form a hypothesis, commit to a line, and learn immediately whether you were right. Every wipeout is a data point. Every session produces signal. The physical experience of the methodology reinforces the intellectual one in a way that no classroom setting can replicate.
01
Commodified coaching reveals where value actually lives
The rise of surf tourism, certification programmes, and beginner-focused schools has driven the price of instruction toward zero in the most competitive markets. Inertia reads this as a threat to protect against. The opportunity hidden inside it is the one the category has stopped seeing: new value surfaces—coaching that builds judgement, not just technique; relationships that compound across seasons; capability that travels with the surfer—that the old model was never designed to price.
02
Intensified destination competition opens new value surfaces
The Algarve, Morocco, the Canaries, the Azores, Bali, Sri Lanka, Nicaragua—all competing for the same European surf traveller. Inertia frames this as geographic advantage eroding. The opportunity concealed by that frame is what a destination can build that a break alone cannot: community, continuity, curated access, and the kind of reputational capital that outlasts any individual swell season.
03
Technology disrupts the old model—and exposes a new one
AI video analysis, wave pools, surf simulators, and wearable performance data are restructuring the relationship between coach and learner. Inertia treats this as the commoditisation of expertise. The opportunity the inertia hides is the remaking of what coaching is—an integration of physical presence, data-rich feedback, and human judgement that neither pure tech nor pure tradition can deliver alone.
04
The environmental shift reveals a governance opportunity
Clean ocean, consistent swells, uncrowded breaks, accessible parking—the four conditions the surf industry was built on are all under pressure. Inertia treats this as decline. The opportunity concealed beneath that frame is the governance work the category has never done: designing the social, political, and ecological instruments that make the commons durable. Whoever builds that governance builds the next generation of the industry.
“The surf industry’s most visible opportunity is not in defending the authentic frame—it is in discovering what authenticity means when the category itself is being remade.”
The Program
Morning classroom. Afternoon ocean.
Five days in the Algarve. Half the time in sessions, half the time in the water and in the field—with coaches, shapers, and practitioners working on a real industry challenge. The surf industry is the case. No surf experience required. The practice you develop is what goes home. By Friday you’ll have tools you can use the following week—for making better decisions under pressure, generating stronger ideas, finding the right problem before your team commits to solving the wrong one, 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 the surf industry is the laboratory for this programme—and it is not the ocean. Get Out—the Think Wrong practice of leaving the environments where conforming thinking feels like expertise—is most powerful when the destination is genuinely unfamiliar, when the physical conditions make armchair theorising impossible. The Algarve makes avoidance difficult. The assumptions the surf industry carries about its market, its identity, and what the next generation wants are clear to you precisely because you did not grow up inside them. That outside view is not a disadvantage—it is the entire point. The patterns you surface in the water and in the fieldwork—assumption inflation, misread signals, misframed problems, growth masking the depletion of the commons it depends on—are the same patterns running in your own organisation right now. The ocean is not the point. Getting out is.
4.5
Days of methodology, fieldwork, and water time in the Algarve
50%
Of time in the field—in the water, with coaches, at shaping bays and competition venues
0
Surf experience required—every session is facilitated for all levels, beginner to advanced
20
Maximum participants—intentionally limited for water safety and learning quality
1
Year of Next Lab Professional access included—€999 value
1
Credential earned – Certified Serious Capital Activator™
The methodology is not applied to surf. Surf is the medium through which the methodology becomes physical—and unforgettable.
The surf session is not recreational add-on. It is the primary learning surface for the afternoon. Participants debrief their water session using Think Wrong vocabulary—what was your hypothesis about that wave? What did the conditions tell you? What did you do when the line changed? The physical experience of committing under uncertainty and learning from the result is the most direct possible training for innovation leadership.
Four Competencies. One week.
What the ocean teaches.
Four structural forces make capital commit before premises are examined: inertia of existing frames, overconfidence in what passes for knowledge, aversion to testing what matters most, and conformity pressure that silences the governance conversation. The Think Wrong methodology answers each with a specific competency. 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 session within thirty days of returning.
01
Frame the right challenge before solutions take hold.
Against inertia. 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?”
02
Distinguish what your organisation knows from what it believes.
Against overconfidence. 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.
03
Identify which assumptions, if wrong, change a decision only your CFO can authorise.
Against aversion to uncertainty. 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.
04
Design the governance conversation the decision actually requires.
Against conformity pressure. The competency most organisations are missing is not analytical—it is conversational. The governance rooms where capital commitments are ratified were not designed to surface assumptions; they were designed to ratify them. The conversation that needs to happen before a capital decision is a specific kind of conversation: one where the Super Vital Assumption is named, the evidence for and against it is placed on the table, and the decision is taken with full sight of what is knowledge and what is still belief. Participants leave able to design and facilitate that conversation—with their own executive committee, their board, their investment committee—so the decision gets made on what the organisation actually knows, not what it has agreed to believe.
Day by Day
The 4.5-day arc.
Each morning introduces a Think Wrong framework through the surf industry challenge. Each afternoon applies it—in the water, at the shaping bay, in the competition venue, and in structured conversations with the people whose livelihoods depend on getting the assumptions right.
½
Arrival
Orientation
Arrival, ocean assessment, and first paddle out
Afternoon arrival at the Algarve base. Beach briefing: reading conditions, ocean safety, and the Think Wrong parallel—what does it mean to assess a break before committing? Late afternoon group paddle session at a beginner-friendly break. No instruction, no coaching—just observation and first contact with the medium. Opening dinner with the local surf industry hosts. Debrief: what did you notice about how you made decisions in the water?
Opening DinnerFirst PaddleIndustry Hosts
01
Monday
Be Bold / Deflection Point
What kind of industry is surf—and what has it been pretending to be?
Morning classroom: Deflection Point applied to the surf industry. What is the from/to shift that defines the current crisis? Participants challenge the dominant narrative (“surf is going mainstream”) and find the more interesting, more accurate framing. Afternoon water session: structured surf coaching with a local professional. Debrief framing: your hypothesis about the wave was your Deflection Point. What happened when you committed to the wrong one? Evening: conversation with a surf school operator about the assumptions that built their business and the assumptions that are now breaking it.
What does the surf industry actually know—and what is it pretending to know?
Morning classroom: Certainty Map—what does the surf industry believe it knows about its customers, its competitors, and its own future? Participants map beliefs versus evidence across the six certainty zones. Afternoon fieldwork: structured interviews at a surf competition, a retail shop, and a board shaping bay. Past-behaviour anchored consumer interviews with surfers and non-surfers—what do people who quit surfing remember about why? What do people who never started remember about why not?
Certainty MapCompetition ObservationConsumer InterviewsShaping Bay
03
Wednesday
Let Go / PAK & SVA
Generating non-obvious hypotheses—and surfing the Super Vital Assumptions first
Morning: PAK and Super Vital Assumptions applied to the surf industry challenge hypotheses from Days 1–2. Which assumptions are most important to test—low certainty, high impact on whether the industry survives its next decade? Afternoon water session: an advanced conditions day—participants are taken to a break above their comfort level, with safety supervision. The debrief is structured around the this practice: which assumptions about your own capability did you discover were wrong? Which turned out to be right? This is the most direct possible physical experience of the most important to test discipline.
PAK + this practiceAdvanced SessionSVA Physical Debrief
04
Thursday
Make Stuff / Bet Small
Small bets on the future of surf—built, tested, and escalated
Morning: Teams prototype their highest-confidence hypotheses about the surf industry’s future—tangible artifacts put in front of real stakeholders the same afternoon. Afternoon: Teams present their small bets to a curated panel of surf industry stakeholders—a world-level coach, a surf travel operator, an environmental organisation, a brand representative, and a young surfer who represents the next generation the industry is failing to retain. Real feedback. Facilitated debrief using the Think Wrong review protocol.
Evening close—the escalation question: each participant is asked one question about their own organisation: “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?” Responses are documented. Greg and Dani are briefed within 48 hours on any response that names a specific decision and a specific executive.
Make StuffBet SmallStakeholder PanelLive FeedbackEscalation Question
4.5
Friday
Move Fast / Transfer
From the ocean to your organisation—the transfer session
Half-day. Each participant maps the Think Wrong practices used across the week—and the physical experiences in the water—to a challenge they own in their own organisation. The surf industry was the laboratory. The capability is what leaves with you. Closing session: what do you do in the first 14 days back?
What you practised this week is the thinking layer inside the Capital Symmetry Governance system. For organisations whose most important to test assumptions turn out to require a governance response at the CFO level, the Growth Gap Diagnostic is what produces the full exposure map—and the specific governance actions your CFO and CEO can authorise within 90 days. We will follow up within 30 days with anyone for whom that connection felt real this week.
Transfer Workshop14-Day PlanClosing Session30-Day Follow-Up
What comes next
After the week.
By Day 4, most participants can name at least one assumption in their own organisation that, if wrong, would change a capital allocation decision that only your CFO or CEO can authorise. When that happens, the question is no longer whether the methodology works. The question is what the next structured engagement looks like.
Is there an assumption inside your organisation right now that, if wrong, would change a capital allocation decision that only your CFO or CEO can authorise?
01
Think Wrong Activator Intensive
For teams, in-house. The Innovators Intensive curriculum delivered in your context—adapted to your industry, your live challenge, your people. The same methodology, the same rigour, taught directly to the team that will run it. Two to three days on site. Designed for executive teams committing to the practice as a shared discipline rather than a set of individually certified practitioners.
02
Growth Gap Diagnostic
For a specific decision. A structured engagement that applies the Certainty Map and Super Vital Assumption disciplines to one live capital commitment: an AI deployment, a growth bet, a market entry, a transformation initiative. The deliverable is a governance-ready document identifying which beliefs underlying the decision are Knowledge, which are Assumptions, and which are Presumptions that should be tested before commitment.
03
Serious Capital Architect Intensive
For the CFO conversation. A deeper intensive for leaders whose role is to govern capital allocation under uncertainty—CFOs, CEOs, investment committee chairs, transformation programme sponsors. Fewer seats, more seniority, and the specific competency of architecting governance conversations that produce decisions commensurate with what the organisation actually knows.
Next Lab Professional – Included in every programme
Every participant receives one year of Next Lab Professional access (€999 value)—the platform used during the week to access Think Wrong drills, design sessions and sprints, and track assumptions, learnings, and value-building opportunities through the leader’s view. The Next Lab is where the methodology lives after the week ends. Existing subscribers receive a one-year renewal at no additional charge.
In the Field
The ocean is the classroom.
Every afternoon is structured fieldwork—in the water, at the break, in the shaping bay, at the competition venue, and in structured conversations with the surf industry’s practitioners. The methodology is applied, not illustrated.
You didn’t come to the Algarve to learn about surf. You came because this is the industry where you can finally see the pattern clearly. Get Out is the first Think Wrong practice. This is what it looks like at scale.
Daily surf sessions—all levels
Be Bold made physical—every session facilitated by professional coaches, every level participates, every session debriefed using Think Wrong frameworks. The discipline of committing to a line under genuine uncertainty—and learning from what happens—is the one that transfers directly to high-stakes decisions under incomplete information.
Board shaping bay
Make Stuff inside a shaper’s workshop—the craft of building a physical object that embeds specific assumptions about who will use it, how, and in what conditions. The prototype-as-hypothesis discipline you develop here is the one you apply to your next product, service, or process decision.
Competition observation
Certainty Map and Deflection Point applied at a live surf event—separating what the industry knows about its own competitive future from what it assumes, with access to the coaches, judges, and athletes who hold and test those assumptions in real time. The same diagnostic goes home to your own competitive landscape.
Environmental fieldwork
Super Vital Assumption work with the organisations monitoring what the surf industry depends on and rarely measures—ocean health, swell patterns, coastal access, and regulatory risk. The discipline of identifying the assumption your own organisation has stopped checking is among the most transferable skills of the week.
Surf camp and school visits
Bet Small applied to two contrasting business models built on different assumptions about what a surf customer values—a high-volume beginner school and a premium adult retreat. The practice of comparing assumption sets across competing models goes home to your own portfolio decisions.
Stakeholder panel
Small bets presented to surf industry stakeholders for structured feedback—Make Stuff and Bet Small in practice, with a coach, a brand, a travel operator, an environmentalist, and the next generation of surfers at the table. The panel format is the one you run with your own stakeholders the week after the programme.
What You Learn
The methodology made physical.
Every Think Wrong framework is introduced in the classroom and immediately tested—in the water, at the break, with the practitioners who live the challenge. By Day 4, participants are facilitating their peers. The ocean was the medium. The capability goes home with you.
1
Deflection Point—framing the right problem
2
Certainty Map—beliefs masquerading as facts
3
PAK + Super Vital Assumptions—testing what matters first
4
Make Stuff + Bet Small—building to learn
5
The Next Cycle—advancing systematically, not heroically
Four Artefacts
What you leave with.
Every Think Wrong Intensive—public or private—produces the same four artefacts. They are not handouts. They are the deliverables that carry the work of the week into the governance conversations waiting for you back home.
Artefact 01
A Capital-Building Opportunity Portfolio
A focused portfolio of capital-building opportunities you have developed against your own live organisational challenge. Each opportunity is scored for capital impact and mapped to a specific capital domain—human, intellectual, reputational, political, social, or financial. Not a list of ideas. A prioritised set of moves your organisation could not see last week.
Artefact 02
A set of Super Vital Assumptions
The underlying assumptions that, if wrong, would change a capital allocation decision only your CFO or CEO can authorise. Surfaced through the Certainty Map and PAK classification, prioritised by consequence and testability, and made legible enough that the governance conversation at home can open on the right terms.
Artefact 03
An updated Conversation Canvas
A personal Canvas marked up with your own Activators, the domains where your organisation is most exposed, and the opportunities ready to feed the governance system. The Canvas is the working document participants use to structure the first conversation with their CFO, CEO, or board sponsor on returning.
Artefact 04
The Certified Serious Capital Activator™ credential
Every participant who completes the Intensive leaves as a Certified Serious Capital Activator™. The credential signals the capability to surface capital-consequential assumptions, classify organisational beliefs against validated evidence, and design the small credible actions that produce evidence before capital commits at scale. Consistent with the certification awarded through the Think Wrong Instigator Intensives since 2016.
What you’ll run when you return
Design. Run. Report.
The capability you leave with is specific: you will design, run, and report on a Think Wrong Blitz inside your own organisation, on the capital-building opportunity you already own. Before the Blitz existed as a named engagement, the Activator’s role back home was abstract. With the Blitz named, it is operational—a two-to-five-day structured engagement that carries the methodology from your notebook to your executive team’s decision.
01
Design
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 Intensive develops the scoping capability directly. By Friday you will have designed a Blitz for a live opportunity you own.
02
Run
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.
03
Report
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.
European Partners
The people who make the fieldwork real.
The Think Wrong Surf Intensive is co-designed with European partners and delivered in collaboration with the Algarve’s professional surf community—coaches, operators, shapers, and environmental practitioners who bring real industry access to every session.
Algarve Surf Industry Partners
Coaches, Operators, Shapers—Peniche / Sagres
The fieldwork network—professional coaches who facilitate the water sessions, surf school operators who open their businesses for Certainty Map interviews, board shapers who host the Day 2 workshop, and competition organizers who provide structured access to the competitive circuit.
Environmental Partners
Ocean Health & Coastal Management—Algarve
The organisations monitoring ocean health, swell pattern changes, and coastal governance in the Algarve. The environmental session on Day 2 is the Certainty Map exercise applied to the surf industry’s most fundamental and most unexamined assumption: that the ocean will remain what it has always been.
European Innovation Partners
Think Wrong Methodology—Europe
Eight years of Think Wrong application across European enterprise contexts—working with senior leaders inside aerospace, executive leadership development, and innovation organisations across the continent. The European partner team co-facilitates the classroom sessions and the Day 4.5 transfer session, ensuring the methodology transfer from surf to organisational context is rigorous and specific.
Solve Next
Category Creator—Think Wrong Methodology
The architects of Think Wrong bring the full curriculum, the facilitation framework, and the Capital Symmetry Governance architecture—positioning the Intensive as Layer 1 of the governance system that makes innovation durable rather than episodic in the organisations participants lead.
Ten Years · Three Printings
The methodology
at work.
Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters was first published in 2016. Now in its third printing, available in English, Spanish, and Arabic, the methodology 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.
Kathryn Woody
Operations Programme Manager, Genentech
Following a Think Wrong Sprint 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.
Lorna Randlett
Commissioner, White House Initiative for Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders
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.
Columbia Business School·Stanford·USC·MICA·California College of the Arts
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.
Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters—third printing, 2025. Published in English, Spanish, and Arabic.
The Faculty
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.
Who Should Attend
For the leader who learns best when getting it wrong has real consequences.
You are someone who finds the absence of real stakes quietly maddening. Classroom settings produce conviction without evidence. You know the difference. The Algarve exists as a laboratory because the ocean is the only environment that consistently refuses to validate a premise just because you believe it. The discipline you develop in the water—reading conditions, committing under genuine uncertainty, learning from what happens rather than what you expected—is the discipline you have been trying to develop in the boardroom for years.
You should attend if
You learn through doing, not through frameworks—and you want a methodology that becomes physical and therefore impossible to intellectualise around
You lead or own a growth initiative and want the practice for testing the assumptions underneath it before the capital is committed
You are ready to be genuinely uncomfortable—in the water and in the debrief—and to learn from both
You want to develop the facilitation capability to run assumption-surfacing practice inside your own organisation
You are drawn to a methodology that transfers because it was practised under real conditions, not discussed in a safe one
You should consider waiting if
You are not prepared to be physically active in and around the ocean for part of each day
You are looking for a surf holiday with workshop content attached—the water sessions are structured learning, not recreation
You have no current responsibility for growth, innovation, or investment decisions—the methodology compounds when connected to real capital consequences
You need a predetermined framework—this programme produces the practice of generating and testing your own hypotheses under pressure
There is something about learning a discipline in the water—in conditions you did not choose, with physical consequences for getting it wrong—that makes it stick in a way a classroom cannot replicate. That is the point.
Practical Details
What you need to know.
Location
Algarve, Portugal Peniche or Sagres—exact venue TBC based on seasonal swell and partner availability
8:30am–5:30pm daily ~50% classroom, ~50% water and fieldwork Evening sessions on Days 1–3
Group Size
Maximum 20 participants Limited for water safety, coaching quality, and fieldwork access
Surf Requirement
No experience required All water sessions are facilitated by professional coaches for all levels. Beginner, intermediate, and experienced surfers participate in parallel tracks where appropriate.
Programme Fee
€4,250 per participant—all-in Includes all programme sessions, facilitation, materials, meals during the programme, and the four artefact deliverables. + Next Lab Professional membership included (€999 value · 1 year) Accommodation & transit: participant’s own arrangement
Dates
Spring or Autumn 2027 Exact dates TBC—timed for consistent Atlantic swell and optimal Algarve conditions
Registration
First-come, first-served Deposit required to hold place Full payment 30 days before programme
Shorter format
Think Wrong Activator Intensive—three days, your own live challenge as the laboratory. For leaders who want the full Think Wrong methodology without the field-based industry context, or who need a shorter, venue-flexible format. Contact hello@solvenext.com.
What Participants Receive
Certified Serious Capital Activator™ Certainty Map and Super Vital Assumption map for a live industry challenge Small bet design transferable to the participant’s own organisation Facilitation capability to run Think Wrong sessions internally Next Lab Professional membership—1-year access (€999 value) Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo—third printing, 2025
Methodology in Action · Ten Years · Three Printings
Ten years. Three printings. One discipline.
Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo was published in 2016, is now in its third printing, and has been translated into Spanish and Arabic. The methodology has been applied at Airbus, Google, JP Morgan, Genentech, NATO, Deloitte, and Starbucks.
“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.”
Airbus · Google · JP Morgan · Genentech · NATO · Deloitte · Starbucks
What Comes Next
The escalation question— and the ladder beyond it.
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?”
That question is the bridge from this Intensive to the governance conversation your organisation actually needs to have. The three steps below are how the answer gets operationalised.
1
Claim the Certified Serious Capital Activator™ designation.
The Intensive confers the credential. Pre-Intensive participants can self-designate through the free Solve Next assessment. The designation names the capability: an operator trained to surface untested assumptions and design the evidence-generating actions that resolve them before capital commits.
2
Take the Growth Gap Diagnostic to your organisation.
The assumptions you surfaced in the Algarve about surf’s most consequential bets—that participation growth will continue without intervention, that authenticity is a sufficient defence against industrialisation, that the next generation can be served by the current product—are structurally identical to the assumptions your own organisation carries. The Growth Gap Diagnostic ($125K–$200K depending on scale) is the systematic organisational entry: it produces the full exposure map and the specific governance actions your CFO and CEO can authorise within 90 days.
3
Attend the Serious Capital Architect Intensive (Level 2).
Five days. $12,500. Designs the governance system that keeps the discipline operational after the diagnostic. The Architect Intensive is where the Activator’s capability becomes the organisation’s infrastructure.
Step 1
Certified Serious Capital Activator™
This week develops the capability. You leave trained to design, run and report on a Think Wrong Blitz on the capital-building opportunity you own.
Step 2
Growth Gap Diagnostic
The escalation question, applied systematically. Produces the exposure map and the specific governance actions your CFO and CEO can authorise within 90 days.
Step 3
Certified Serious Capital Architect™
Designs the governance system that holds the discipline in place. The Architect Intensive is where the capability becomes infrastructure.
Take This Back To Your Team
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.
01
Programme Brief
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.
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 ocean. Four and a half days in the Algarve. The methodology is Think Wrong. The classroom is the Atlantic. If this is the way you already think about your work—you are already a Wrong Thinker. The Intensive develops the practice.
