Think Wrong Innovators Intensive—Wine

Why Wine

Value-building opportunities the category cannot yet see.

The wine industry is not the point. It is the laboratory. The point is this: the same four decisions where value-building opportunities most often hide—AI deployments, growth bets, market entries, and transformation initiatives—appear in the wine industry in forms that are unusually visible to an outsider. The vignerons and négociants who agreed to meet this group are navigating exactly this structure: biological and cultural inertia concealing the opportunity the category has not yet seen. The capability built in Provence is not wine expertise. It is the practised discipline for surfacing those opportunities and developing the ones that build value rather than erode it.

The decisions where value-building opportunities most often hide are specific: an AI deployment where adoption and use case carry the promise of a new operating model. A growth bet where demand is genuinely emergent, not yet legible in the category. A market entry where competitive dynamics reward a different frame. A transformation initiative where the organisation has diagnosed a problem but not yet discovered the opportunity underneath it. These four decision types share a structure: biological and cultural inertia conceals the opportunity until capital has committed to something less. The cost of discovering the real opportunity after commitment is 10–100× the cost of surfacing it before.

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 the old frame until it stops. Governance instruments measure outcomes but were never designed to surface the opportunities hidden inside the inertia that produces them. The result is that organisations commit capital to protect what they already have while the value-building opportunity drifts past—not because leaders are careless, but because the system was never built to outsmart the inertia that hides what is emergent from what is familiar.

Think Wrong is most powerful when the opportunity is genuinely emergent—not yet legible to the category, still obscured by inertia. The future of wine is not a case study; it is a live industry challenge with real stakeholders, real constraints, and no obvious right answer. Participants work on it in the place where it is most viscerally felt.

Intensive participants in conversation with a vigneron in a Provence vineyard, Mont Sainte-Victoire in the background — Day 1 fieldwork: participants in conversation with a vigneron, Mont Sainte-Victoire behind. The industry is the laboratory; the practice is what goes home.

Climate is redrawing the map

The terroirs that defined the category for centuries are shifting. New regions are emerging. Established appellations face existential decisions about identity versus adaptation. The inertia that built the industry is now where the opportunity lives—for the producers and brands willing to outsmart it.

The next generation is not drinking wine

Consumption among 21–34-year-olds is declining across every major market. The beverage landscape has fragmented into hundreds of new choices competing for the occasions wine once owned. The distribution and attention models that sustained the industry are breaking down—which means the category is wide open for whoever discovers how a new generation actually wants to drink.

Complexity is a barrier, not a feature

The expertise required to navigate the wine category—appellations, varietals, vintages, producers—is experienced by most consumers as exclusion, not invitation. The industry has optimised for connoisseurs and is losing everyone else. The value-building opportunity: what the category looks like when it is built for the majority it has been ignoring.

Consolidation is changing what the industry is for

Investment groups and corporate négociants are acquiring family domaines across Provence, Burgundy, and the Rhône at an accelerating pace. The model that replaces them is more efficient, more consistent, and more heavily marketed—and it is built on an entirely different logic about what makes a wine worth drinking. The small and medium family producers who defined the category’s identity are facing an economic logic that their craft cannot easily argue with. The question is not whether consolidation will continue. It is whether a different economic model can be discovered and developed—one in which the biological and cultural inertia of the old model becomes the opportunity for what comes next.

“The wine industry’s most visible opportunity is not in defending quality as the family producers have always defined it—it is in discovering what quality means when the category itself is being remade.”

The Program

Half classroom.
Half field.

Five days in Provence. Half the time in sessions, half the time in the field—in vineyards, cellars, and markets, working on a real industry challenge with the people living it. The wine industry 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, finding the right problem before your team commits to solving the wrong one, and building the kind of 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 these programmes are built around industries you do not work in. Get Out—the Think Wrong practice of deliberately leaving the conforming environments where familiar thinking feels like common sense—works most powerfully when the destination carries none of your legacy positions, your inherited assumptions, or your organisational politics. You have none of those in Provence. The wine industry’s pressures are legible to you precisely because you are on the outside of them. Its assumptions about quality, heritage, and what a wine drinker wants are visible in ways they cannot be to someone who has spent twenty years inside the category. That visibility is not incidental—it is the mechanism. The patterns you surface here about how assumptions get embedded, how problems get misframed, and how growth conceals fragility are structural. They appear in identical form in your own industry. The vineyard is not the point. Getting out is.

4.5

Days of immersive learning, fieldwork, and live application

50%

Of time spent in the field—vineyards, cellars, markets, restaurants

Think Wrong drills applied to a live industry challenge

Maximum participants—intentionally limited for learning quality

Year of Next Lab Professional access included—€999 value

Credential earned – Certified Serious Capital Activator™

The methodology is not applied to the wine industry. The wine industry is the medium through which the methodology is learned.

By the end of the intensive, participants can apply every core Think Wrong framework—from Deflection Point and Certainty Map to PAK and Super Vital Assumptions—in real conditions, with real stakeholders, under genuine uncertainty. The wine industry is the laboratory. The capability is transferable everywhere.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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 is structured around a core Think Wrong practice, applied first in the classroom and then immediately in the field. The fieldwork is not illustration—it is the primary learning surface.

Arrival

Orientation

Arrival, briefing, and first encounter with the challenge

Afternoon arrival in Aix-en-Provence. Group dinner with the European partners and local wine industry hosts. The challenge is framed over dinner—not in a conference room. Participants meet the industry they will be thinking wrong about before any methodology is introduced.

Opening Dinner Industry Hosts

Monday

Be Bold / Deflection Point

Framing the right problem—before solutions take hold

Morning classroom: Introduction to Think Wrong, the Next Cycle, and the Deflection Point framework. Participants map the from/to shifts defining the wine industry’s crisis—and challenge whether those shifts are being framed correctly. Afternoon fieldwork: visit to a multigenerational domaine facing the classic incumbent’s dilemma. Participants interview the vigneron using the Deflection Point frame.

Deflection Point Next Cycle Domaine Visit Vigneron Interview

Tuesday

Get Out & Get / Certainty Map

Going to the edges—where fresh signal lives

Morning classroom: Certainty Map—mapping what is known, unknown, and learnable about the wine industry’s future. The emphasis is on identifying what the industry treats as fact that is actually assumption. Afternoon fieldwork: market day in Aix. Participants conduct structured consumer interviews using past-behavior anchoring—what do people who stopped buying wine actually remember about why?

Certainty Map Assumption Surfacing Consumer Interviews Market Fieldwork

Wednesday

Let Go / PAK & SVA

Generating non-obvious hypotheses—and testing the vital ones first

Morning: PAK and Super Vital Assumptions—participants apply the this practice to challenge hypotheses generated on Day 2. Which assumptions are most important to test? Afternoon: Visit to a new-model producer who has broken the category rules—natural wine, no-label, subscription-only. Participants test their SVA map against what they find in real conditions.

PAK Framework this practice New Model Producer SVA Field Test

Thursday

Make Stuff / Bet Small

Building small bets—and learning before consuming capital

Morning: Teams prototype their highest-confidence hypotheses. Not presentations—tangible, testable artifacts that can be put in front of a real stakeholder the same day. Afternoon: Teams present their small bets to a panel of wine industry stakeholders—producers, distributors, sommeliers, a young-consumer representative. Real feedback. Facilitated debrief using the Think Wrong review protocol.

Evening close—the escalation question: After the debrief, 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. This is not a social exercise—it is the designed mechanism for identifying participants whose organisations have a governance gap that warrants a follow-up conversation. Greg and Dani are briefed within 48 hours on any response that names a specific decision and a specific executive.

Make Stuff Bet Small Stakeholder Panel Live Feedback Escalation Question

4.5

Friday

Move Fast / Transfer

From the wine industry to your own—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. The wine industry was the laboratory. The capability is what you leave with. Closing session: what do you do in the first 14 days back? Facilitated by the European partner team. Departure from midday.

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 Workshop 14-Day Plan Closing Session 30-Day Follow-Up

What the week produces

The pattern behind
the challenge.

The wine industry is the laboratory precisely because its governance failure is visible. The domaines under the most pressure—from consolidation, from a generation that drinks differently, from the slow erosion of the heritage narrative—are not failing at wine-making. They built their value in one place while the forces that determine whether that value lasts drifted without anyone measuring them. The community that used to inherit the habit stopped inheriting it. The political capital sustaining appellation protection weakened. The financial results moved last—a symptom of everything that had already shifted upstream. The week in Provence is designed to make that pattern legible. Not because you are in the wine industry. But because the same pattern—building confidently in one direction while other forms of value quietly erode—appears in every organisation that measures only its financial results while the forces that precede them go ungoverned. 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 vineyards don’t teach you about wine. They teach 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.

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 vineyards
are the classroom.

Each fieldwork excursion is a structured learning session with specific Think Wrong frameworks to apply, specific questions to bring, and specific outputs to produce. The wine industry is the curriculum. Provence is the campus.

You didn’t come to Provence to learn about wine. 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.

Domaine interviews

Past-behaviour anchoring applied in live interviews with vignerons—not “what do you think about the market?” but “walk me through the last decision you actually made.” The same structured interview technique surfaces real assumptions inside your own organisation the week you return.

Cave and cooperative visits

Deflection Point applied inside the caves and cooperatives—finding where the wine industry has framed its own challenge incorrectly and committed resources to the wrong version of the problem. The reframe practice you develop here is what you use with your own team before the next budget commits.

Consumer fieldwork

Certainty Map interviews with wine buyers and non-buyers at market, in restaurants, and in retail—separating what the industry knows from what it assumes about its own customers. Monday: the same discipline, applied to the customers you think you know.

New model encounters

Let Go in practice—a structured encounter with producers who have abandoned the category’s central assumptions about quality, heritage, and who wine is for, and built on what they found instead. The discipline of taking a genuinely different starting assumption seriously is what changes how you approach your next growth bet.

Immersive tastings as research

Guided tastings run as Certainty Map and PAK sessions—classifying what is evidenced from what is believed, using sensory experience as the research instrument. The knowledge-versus-assumption distinction you build here is the foundation of every Super Vital Assumption conversation you run next.

Stakeholder panel

Small bets presented to wine industry stakeholders for structured feedback—the Make Stuff and Bet Small disciplines practised in front of people with real stakes in the outcome. The panel format is the one you take home and run with your own stakeholders the following week.

What You Learn

The Think Wrong
methodology—applied.

Every tool is introduced in the classroom and immediately applied in the field. By Day 4, participants are facilitating their peers through the tools they learned on Day 1.

Deflection Point—framing the right problem

Certainty Map—mapping what is known, unknown, and learnable

PAK + Super Vital Assumptions—testing what matters first

Make Stuff + Bet Small—building to learn

The Next Cycle—advancing innovation systematically

What You’ll Run When You Return

Design. Run. Report.

The industry is the laboratory. What you take home is the capability to design, run, and report on a Think Wrong Blitz on the capital-building opportunity you own—inside your own organisation, with your own team, against your own CFO’s bar for evidence.

01 · Design

Scope the Blitz your organisation actually needs.

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.

02 · Run

Facilitate all six practices against the live challenge.

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

Deliver the four artefacts to the CFO, CEO, or board sponsor.

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

Eight years of Think Wrong
in European enterprise.

The Think Wrong Innovators Intensive is co-designed and co-delivered with European partners who have applied the methodology inside some of the world’s most demanding organisations—working with senior leaders across aerospace, enterprise, and executive leadership development in France and across Europe.

Airbus / A-cubed

Aerospace Innovation—Toulouse

Eight years of Think Wrong application inside one of the world’s most complex engineering and innovation organisations. The European partners bring direct experience applying the methodology to problems where the stakes of a wrong assumption are measured in years and hundreds of millions of euros.

European Leadership Partners

Executive Leadership Development—Paris & Europe

Think Wrong applied at the most senior layer—with the executives responsible for strategy, not just the teams executing it. Our European partners have worked with senior leaders across France and across the continent, bringing deep understanding of how the methodology translates into the boardroom and the C-suite.

European Wine Partners

Domaines, Cooperatives, Négociants—Provence

The fieldwork network—producers, distributors, sommeliers, and industry associations who host the fieldwork sessions and participate in the Day 4 stakeholder panel. Real industry partners, not simulated case studies.

Solve Next

Category Creator—Think Wrong Methodology

The original architects of the Think Wrong methodology bring the full curriculum, the facilitation framework, and the connection to the broader Capital Symmetry Governance architecture that positions Think Wrong as the cognitive ignition layer inside enterprise innovation systems.

Who Has Thought Wrong

The methodology at work.

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.

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

Airbus·Google·JP Morgan·Genentech·NATO·Deloitte·Starbucks

Selected universities and executive programmes

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 can see
what the category cannot
see about itself.

You are someone who has sat in meetings where the same answers get better execution—and felt the specific frustration of knowing the question is wrong. Not the execution. The question. The wine industry is not the point. It is the mirror. You came because you need the practice of seeing that clearly in your own organisation before the next capital commitment locks the wrong frame in place.

You should attend if

You cannot accept the predictable path—and you want a structured discipline that makes the alternative survivable inside an organisation that rewards confidence
You lead or own a growth initiative where the assumptions underneath it have never been tested against the possibility of being wrong
You are ready to work on a genuinely uncertain challenge with real stakeholders—not a case study or simulation
You want to develop the capability to run assumption-surfacing practice inside your own organisation, not just attend a programme
You want to experience Think Wrong in a European context, with partners who have applied it inside aerospace and enterprise leadership at scale

You should consider waiting if

You are looking for a wine tourism experience with workshop content attached—the fieldwork is structured assumption-testing, not a tasting tour
You have no current responsibility for innovation, transformation, or growth investment decisions—the methodology compounds when connected to real capital bets
You need a structured curriculum with predetermined right answers—this programme produces tested hypotheses, sharper questions, and transferable capability
You are not prepared to be in the field, in live conversation with producers, distributors, and consumers, for half of each day

The wine industry spent a decade believing that growth was confirmation. It wasn't—it was assumption inflation. Every industry you have worked in has the same dynamic. This week, you develop the practice of seeing it before it becomes expensive.

Practical Details

What you need
to know.

Location

Aix-en-Provence, France
Base venue within the Pays d’Aix wine region. TBC.

Format

4.5-day immersive intensive
Arrival Sunday 4 October, evening. Departure Friday 9 October, midday.

Daily Structure

8:30am–5:30pm daily
~50% classroom, ~50% fieldwork
Evening sessions on Days 1–3

Group Size

Maximum 20 participants
Intentionally limited to preserve learning quality and fieldwork access

Language

Instruction in English
Fieldwork facilitation available in French
Stakeholder sessions bilingual

Programme Fee

€4,250 per participant—all-in
Includes programme, facilitation, fieldwork access, and meals during programme.
+ Next Lab Professional membership included (€999 value · 1 year)
Accommodation & transit: participant’s own arrangement
Group rate: €3,750 per person for 3 or more from the same organisation

Dates

October 12–16, 2026
Arrival Sunday 11 October. Programme Monday–Friday, 12–16 October. Departure Friday midday.

Registration

First-come, first-served
Deposit required to hold place
Full payment 30 days before programme

Other formats

Think Wrong Activator Intensive—three days in Paris. Your own live challenge as the laboratory. €4,250 per seat. For leaders who want the full methodology without a field-based industry context.

Private Cohort—commissioned for a single organisation. €51,000 base for up to 15 participants, €3,750 per additional participant. Scoped to your organisation’s challenge.

What Participants Receive

Certified Serious Capital Activator™ credential
A Capital-Building Opportunity Portfolio, Super Vital Assumption Map, designed small bets, and updated Conversation Canvas
Facilitation capability to design, run, and report on a Think Wrong Blitz inside your own organisation
Next Lab Professional membership—1-year access (€999 value)
Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo—third printing, 2025

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.

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.

Take the Growth Gap Diagnostic to your organisation.

The assumptions you surfaced in Provence about wine’s most consequential bets—that heritage is a sufficient counter to consolidation, that premiumisation is a durable response to category decline, that the family model can withstand its economic logic—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.

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.

Most people who want to attend this Intensive have to make the case to someone—a manager, a CFO, a board. These are the materials designed to carry that conversation. Download what you need.

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 →

One-Pager

Short-form summary. What the Intensive is, who it’s for, what participants leave with, and when it runs—on a single page. For the moment when you have thirty seconds to explain it to someone.