Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland · 4.5 Days
Think Wrong
About Irish Whiskey.
Think Wrong is the discipline for governing uncertainty before capital commits. The Innovators Intensive applies it to a live external industry at a visible deflection point—developing four specific capabilities that transfer directly to the AI deployments, growth bets, market entries and transformation initiatives the participant is navigating when they return.
Why Irish Whiskey
The decisions where assumptions
are most expensive.
The Irish whiskey industry 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 here as forty parallel capital commitments on one shared, untested premise. The distillers, investors and brand builders who meet this group are navigating exactly this structure in real time. The capability built on the Wild Atlantic Way is not whiskey expertise. It is the practiced discipline for identifying which shared assumptions an entire sector is building on—and testing them before the capacity exceeds the demand the assumption predicted.
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.
Irish whiskey is not a category in crisis—it is a category in inflation. The assumptions built during growth are the most dangerous ones, because they have never been tested against adversity. The Innovators Intensive brings Think Wrong to the moment before the test arrives.
01
The growth assumptions have never been stress-tested
Irish whiskey grew on the back of a global super-premium spirits boom, a favourable comparison to Scotch, and a diaspora connection that made Irish identity a global commercial asset. All three tailwinds are moderating simultaneously. The assumptions built during the boom have never been tested against a headwind.
02
Every new distillery is making the same bets
Over 40 new distilleries have opened in Ireland in the last decade, most of them making remarkably similar bets: premium price point, heritage narrative, terroir story, visitor experience, direct-to-consumer sales. The market cannot absorb 40 premium heritage Irish whiskeys. The assumptions underlying most of them are not differentiated.
03
The next generation is approaching spirits differently
Under-30 spirits consumers are the most researched, most values-driven and most health-conscious cohort in the category’s history. The assumptions about what a whiskey drinker is and why they drink—built on the boomer and Gen X experience—are not transferring cleanly to the generation that will determine the category’s next decade.
04
The Scotch comparison is a double-edged sword
Irish whiskey defined its position largely in contrast to Scotch—smoother, more accessible, more approachable. That contrast strategy worked brilliantly during Scotch’s prestige peak. It now anchors Irish whiskey to a frame that the most interesting new producers are trying to escape, and that the next generation of consumers does not find meaningful.
“Irish whiskey is the only spirits category growing at double digits while building on assumptions that no one has tried to break. That is not safety. That is a most important to test assumption waiting to be tested by the market.”
The Programme
From pot still
to the Atlantic cliff.
Five days on the Wild Atlantic Way. Half the time in sessions, half the time inside the Irish whiskey industry—in distilleries, at the bar, in the landscape, working on a real challenge with the people building it. The whiskey industry is the case. The practice you develop is what goes home. By Friday you’ll have tools you can apply immediately—for making better investment decisions, surfacing the assumptions underneath your most important bets, and designing evidence-generating actions that reduce risk before budget locks in.
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 Irish whiskey industry makes such an effective laboratory—and it is not the whiskey. Get Out—the Think Wrong practice of deliberately leaving the environments where your own industry’s assumptions feel like facts—is most powerful when the destination is one where you carry none of the investment, none of the identity, and none of the politics. The Wild Atlantic Way offers something unusual: an industry that is both genuinely fascinating and genuinely easy to read from the outside. You can see immediately what forty-plus distilleries making the same confident bet on untested assumptions looks like—because you did not build those bets. That clarity is the mechanism. The patterns you identify here—how growth conceals assumption risk, how heritage becomes a trap, how an entire category can be confidently wrong together—are not Irish problems. They appear in identical form in every fast-growing sector, including yours. The pot still is not the point. Getting out is.
4.5
Days of methodology, distillery fieldwork and landscape immersion on the Wild Atlantic Way
40+
New distilleries opened in Ireland in the last decade—all making remarkably similar assumptions
12%
Annual category growth over the last decade—the number that has made every assumption feel safe
20
Maximum participants—capped for distillery access and facilitation depth
The methodology is not applied to Irish whiskey. Irish whiskey is the laboratory in which the methodology produces the most commercially transferable signal.
The participant profile for this programme is deliberately senior. The Irish whiskey challenge is a CFO-level question disguised as a marketing problem—which assumptions about premiumisation, terroir, and heritage justify the capital investment being made across 40+ new distilleries simultaneously? The escalation question at the end of Day 4 is the most commercially consequential question in the programme portfolio.
Four capabilities. One week.
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.
01
Frame the right challenge before solutions take hold.
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.
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.
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 smallest credible test that converts belief into evidence before capital commits.
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.
Day by Day
The 4.5-day arc.
Each day applies one Think Wrong framework to a specific dimension of the Irish whiskey challenge, anchored by fieldwork inside the production, distribution and consumption chain of the industry. The Wild Atlantic Way is the campus. The pot still is the curriculum.
Orientation
Arrival, first pour, and first encounter with the challenge
Afternoon arrival at the Wild Atlantic Way base—Connemara, Dingle Peninsula, or County Clare, depending on partner availability. The programme opens not with a briefing but with a guided sensory introduction to the category—a tasting session designed to surface assumptions rather than build appreciation. Opening dinner with Irish whiskey industry hosts. Debrief: what do you already believe about Irish whiskey—and why? These are your Day 0 assumptions. We will test them across the week.
Opening DinnerGuided TastingIndustry Hosts
Be Bold / Deflection Point
What kind of industry is Irish whiskey pretending to be?
Morning classroom: Deflection Point applied to the Irish whiskey category. What is the from/to shift that defines the challenge? Participants challenge the dominant narrative (“Irish whiskey is on a decade-long growth trajectory”) and find the more accurate framing—a category building on assumptions that have never been tested against adversity. Afternoon fieldwork: visit to Midleton Distillery or Jameson’s Dublin experience—the incumbent. Structured interviews with the production and commercial teams using the Deflection Point frame. What assumptions about their consumer has the market leader never questioned?
Deflection PointNext CycleMidleton / JamesonProduction Interviews
Get Out & Get / Certainty Map
What does the category actually know about why people drink it?
Morning classroom: Certainty Map—what does the Irish whiskey industry believe it knows about its consumers, its competition and its own differentiation? Mapping beliefs versus evidence. Afternoon fieldwork: structured consumer interviews at a pub in the nearest town, at a whiskey bar, and at a visitor centre. Past-behaviour anchored, story-extracting—what do people who drink Irish whiskey remember about the first time they chose it over Scotch? What do people who drink Scotch remember about why they never switched? The stories are the signal.
Certainty MapConsumer InterviewsVisitor CentrePub Fieldwork
Let Go / PAK & SVA
The craft producer as the edge case—where assumptions go to be tested
Morning: PAK and Super Vital Assumptions applied to the challenge hypotheses from Days 1–2. Which assumptions about premiumisation, terroir, and heritage are most important to test—low certainty, high capital impact? Afternoon fieldwork: visit to a new craft distillery that has made a fundamentally different bet on what Irish whiskey can be—a producer that has broken the premium heritage template and is building on different assumptions entirely. Participants bring their SVA maps and test the craft producer’s most important to test assumptions against what they find. Evening: a conversation with the distillery founder about which assumptions they chose to break—and why.
PAK + this practiceCraft DistilleryFounder Conversation
Make Stuff / Bet Small
Small bets on the next decade of Irish whiskey—tested with the people building it
Morning: Teams prototype their highest-confidence hypotheses about the category’s future—tangible artefacts put in front of real stakeholders the same afternoon. Afternoon: Teams present their small bets to a curated panel of Irish whiskey stakeholders—a distillery commercial director, an independent bottler, a whiskey retailer, a bartender who shapes on-trade consumption and a consumer who represents the next generation the category needs to convert. Real feedback.
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
Move Fast / Transfer
From the pot still to your organisation—the transfer session
Half-day. Each participant maps the Think Wrong practices used across the week to a challenge they own in their own organisation. Irish whiskey was the laboratory. The capability is what leaves with you. Closing session: what do you do in the first 14 days back? Facilitated by the European partner team.
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 Capital Symmetry 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 the week produces
The pattern behind
the challenge.
The Irish whiskey industry is the laboratory precisely because its vulnerability is hidden in plain sight. The distilleries under the most risk are not failing at making whiskey. They built their value on a decade of double-digit growth—and in doing so, built an entire category on assumptions that growth never forced anyone to test. The next generation of drinkers is arriving on entirely different terms. The heritage narrative that justified premium pricing is becoming a liability with the consumers it most needs to attract. The forty-plus distilleries making the same bet have not yet encountered the adversity that will separate the ones with real foundations from the ones built on overconfidence that growth confirmed. The financial results have not yet reflected any of this. They rarely do until they must. The week on the Wild Atlantic Way is designed to make that pattern legible. Not because you are in the whiskey industry. But because the same pattern—growth masking the quiet erosion of the capital forms that determine whether growth lasts—appears in every organisation that has been building with confidence on assumptions it has never stress-tested. 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.
The pot still doesn’t teach you about whiskey. It teaches you to see the assumptions your own organisation has stopped questioning.
If that pattern sounds familiar before you’ve even attended—the conversation starts here.
In the Field
Inside the industry
at every level.
The fieldwork network spans the full Irish whiskey value chain—from the great pot stills at Midleton to the craft producers who are building on entirely different assumptions, and from the bartenders who shape on-trade consumption to the consumers the category needs to convert. The Wild Atlantic Way is the landscape. The industry is the curriculum.
You didn’t come to the Wild Atlantic Way to learn about whiskey. 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.
Incumbent distillery visit
Deflection Point and Certainty Map applied inside a major Irish whiskey producer—finding where scale has made the wrong challenge feel like the only challenge, and where confident growth has displaced the discipline of testing. The diagnostic goes home: where has your own organisation’s confidence become a liability?
Craft distillery encounter
Be Bold and Let Go applied together—a structured session with a craft producer who abandoned the category’s central assumptions about heritage, presentation and price, and built differently on what they found. The discipline of treating a different starting assumption as signal rather than threat is the one that changes your next strategic bet.
On-trade consumer fieldwork
Past-behaviour anchoring in pubs and whiskey bars across the Wild Atlantic Way—not what people say they drink, but what they actually remember choosing, and the real reasons why. The same structured interview technique surfaces genuine decision-making patterns in your own customers the week you return.
Landscape as method
Get Out made fully physical—walking sessions on the Atlantic coastline as Deflection Point practice, with the landscape as the reframe mechanism. The discipline of seeing a challenge from genuinely outside the system that built it is among the most transferable skills of the programme.
Distribution and retail fieldwork
Certainty Map interviews with a specialist whiskey retailer and a distributor—separating the industry’s assumptions about where growth is coming from from the signal the channel actually holds. The same discipline applied to your own distribution and growth data the following week.
Stakeholder panel
Small bets presented to a cross-value-chain panel for structured feedback—Make Stuff and Bet Small with a distillery director, an independent bottler, a retailer, a bartender and a collector at the table. The panel format is the one you run with your own stakeholders the week after the programme.
What You Learn
The Think Wrong
methodology—applied.
Every framework is introduced in the classroom and immediately applied inside the Irish whiskey industry. By Day 4, participants are facilitating their peers. The pot still was the medium. The capability goes home with you—directly transferable to the investment decisions assumptions in your own organisation.
1
Deflection Point—what kind of problem is Irish whiskey really facing?
2
Certainty Map—what the industry believes versus what the evidence supports
3
PAK + Super Vital Assumptions—which assumptions are most important to test?
4
Make Stuff + Bet Small—building to learn, not to present
5
The Next Cycle—advancing systematically, not on brand conviction alone
What You’ll Run When You Return
The Think Wrong Blitz—
inside your own organisation.
Before the Blitz existed as a named engagement, 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 against the capital-building opportunity you own. The Blitz is the engagement that carries the Activator’s capability from trained to operational.
Design
Scope the Blitz
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.
Run
Facilitate the six 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
Deliver the four artefacts
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.
The Four Artefacts
What the week
produces.
Every Think Wrong engagement produces the same four artefacts. They are what an Activator carries into the governance conversation—evidence the CFO can authorise against, not narrative the CFO has to interpret.
Artefact 01
A Capital-Building Opportunity Portfolio
The moves the organisation could not see yesterday, now specific enough to act on and mapped to the capital domain each one builds, restores or protects.
Artefact 02
A set of Super Vital Assumptions
The beliefs underneath each opportunity that, if wrong, would change a capital allocation decision only the CFO or CEO can authorise. Classified, prioritised and sequenced for evidence-gathering.
Artefact 03
An updated Conversation Canvas
The single-page governance instrument that carries the challenge, the assumptions, the bets, the evidence and the decision status forward across the organisational conversation.
Artefact 04
You, as a certified Value Activator™
The role the Intensive installs—counterpart to the Governor role trained in Leaders of Next. Where Governors manage and protect capital, Activators build and restore it. Certification is conferred on completion.
European Partners
Eight years of Think Wrong
in European enterprise.
Co-designed and co-delivered with European partners who have applied the Think Wrong methodology inside some of the world’s most demanding organisations—working with senior leaders across aerospace, enterprise and executive leadership development—and with Irish whiskey industry practitioners who bring real access to every layer of the value chain.
Irish Whiskey Industry Partners
Distilleries, Retailers, Distributors—Ireland
The fieldwork network—major and craft distilleries who open their production floors and commercial teams for structured interviews, retailers and distributors who provide on-trade and off-trade consumer signal and the Day 4 stakeholder panel who deliver the real feedback that makes the small bets rigorous.
European Leadership Partners
Executive Leadership Development—Paris, Dublin & Europe
Eight years of Think Wrong application at the executive leadership layer across European enterprise. Our partners have worked with senior leaders in some of the world’s most demanding organisations. The European partner team co-facilitates the classroom methodology sessions and the Day 4.5 transfer session—ensuring the learning transfer from Irish whiskey to organisational context is rigorous, specific and commercially actionable.
Airbus / A-cubed
Innovation Lab—Toulouse & Hamburg
Think Wrong at industrial scale—demonstrating that the same assumption failure modes appear in a craft Irish distillery and a €70 billion aerospace manufacturer. The Airbus connection brings a participant base whose investment decisions assumptions are among the highest-value targets for the Day 4 escalation question.
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 investment durable rather than episodic in the organisations participants lead.
Methodology in Action · Ten Years · Three Printings
Ten years.
Three printings.
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.
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 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.
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.
Selected clients
Genentech·JP Morgan·Microsoft·Airbus·White House·NATO·Starbucks·Deloitte·Stanford
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 has watched
a confident category make
the same bet forty times.
You are someone who has watched assumption inflation happen in real time—in your own industry, in your own organisation—and found that growth makes it politically impossible to name, let alone test. Forty distilleries. One shared premise. A category still growing, which means no one has been forced to find out whether the premise is actually true. The Wild Atlantic Way is where we develop the discipline of testing before the market does it for you—and the practice for making that discipline survive contact with the organisational immune system when you bring it home.
You should attend if
- You can see the shared assumption your industry is making—and you want the structured practice for testing it before the environment does
- You lead or own a significant capital commitment and want to be more rigorous about the premises it rests on
- You are ready to work in live fieldwork conditions with real producers, distributors and consumers—not simulated stakeholders
- You want to develop the facilitation capability to run this practice inside your own organisation
- You are drawn to the Wild Atlantic Way not as scenery but as the most honest available mirror for assumption inflation in a growing category
You should consider waiting if
- You are looking for a whiskey tourism experience—the fieldwork is structured assumption-testing, not a tasting tour
- You are not prepared for physical fieldwork across distillery and consumer interview locations over four days
- You need predetermined right answers—this programme produces tested hypotheses, sharper questions, and transferable capability
- You have no current responsibility for innovation, transformation, or growth investment decisions
The absence of evidence against an assumption is not evidence for it. Irish whiskey is learning this. Every fast-growing category does—usually too late. This week is about developing the practice of not waiting.
Practical Details
What you need
to know.
Location
Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland
Connemara, Dingle Peninsula, or County Clare—exact venue TBC based on partner and distillery scheduling
Format
4.5-day immersive intensive
Arrival Sunday evening. Departure Friday midday.
Daily Structure
8:30am–5:30pm daily
~50% classroom, ~50% distillery fieldwork
Evening sessions on Days 1–3
Group Size
Maximum 20 participants
Limited for distillery access quality and the depth of conversation the facilitation design requires
Language
Instruction in English
Fieldwork and stakeholder sessions in English. Ireland is the most English-language accessible programme in the portfolio.
Programme Fee
€4,250 per seat
Includes all sessions, materials, facilitation, the four artefact deliverables, certification and meals during the programme.
Accommodation and transit: participant’s own arrangement.
First-come, first-served. Deposit required to hold place. Full payment 30 days before programme start.
Dates
Autumn 2026
Exact dates TBC—timed for optimal Wild Atlantic Way conditions and distillery access windows
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. Paris reference cohort, expanding to additional studio locations. €4,250 per seat. Contact
natalia@solvenext.com.
What Participants Receive
Certified Serious Capital Activator™
Capital-Building Opportunity Portfolio tied to a live industry challenge
Super Vital Assumption map with designed small bets
Updated Conversation Canvas
Facilitation capability to run Think Wrong Blitzes inside your own organisation
Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo—third printing, 2025
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.
Download PDF →
02
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 brief.
Download PDF →
03
Internal Selling Kit
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.
View →·Download →
04
Organisational Selling Kit
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.
View →·Download →
What Comes Next
The week is the capability.
What follows is the architecture.
The Wild Atlantic Way trains the discipline. What you do in the first ninety days back is what makes it operational inside your organisation. The canonical pathway has three steps—each one builds on what the Intensive developed.
The Escalation Question · Day 4 close
“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 you surface along the Wild Atlantic Way about whiskey’s most consequential bets—that heritage is a sufficient counter to commoditisation, that premiumisation is a durable response to the next generation, that forty near-identical bets can all be right—are structurally identical to the assumptions your own organisation carries into its AI deployments, growth bets, market entries and transformation initiatives. The bridge from the programme to the governance conversation is the escalation question.
1
Claim the Certified Serious Capital Activator™ designation
Conferred by the Intensive. Certifies completion of the methodology and confirms the holder has trained in the full Think Wrong discipline—the same certification framework the Think Wrong Instigator Intensive has run since 2016.
2
Take the Growth Gap Diagnostic to your organisation
The systematic organisational entry. $125K–$200K depending on scale. Where the Intensive trains the individual, the Diagnostic maps the full exposure—every assumption that could change a capital allocation decision, classified and prioritised across the enterprise.
3
Attend the Serious Capital Architect Intensive
Level 2 · $12,500 · 5 days. Designs the governance system that makes the discipline durable—the architecture the Activator capability plugs into once more than one person inside the organisation is trained to run it.
This week
Certified Serious Capital Activator™
The capability developed on the Wild Atlantic Way. Carried back to your own organisation within thirty days.
Next step
Growth Gap Diagnostic
The escalation question, systematically. Full exposure map of the assumptions your organisation is committing capital on.
Level 2
Certified Serious Capital Architect™
Designs the governance system. The architecture that makes the Activator capability compound inside the enterprise.
Ready to Think Wrong
about Irish whiskey?
Twenty seats. One industry at a visible deflection point. Four and a half days on the Wild Atlantic Way. 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. Contact natalia@solvenext.com · +1 415 209 5065.