Permanent decline
in demand.

Demand is shrinking.
The strengths are not.

World wine consumption fell 2.7% in 2025, to its lowest level since 1957 and 14% below 2018. Nine of the ten largest markets declined, France and the United States among them. The International Organisation of Vine and Wine describes long-term structural change—generational habits, moderation, and pressure on spending—not a cycle, and the spread of GLP-1 medication adds to it. France is now paying growers to pull vines out permanently. The product is shrinking. What the industry owns underneath it is not.

A domaine holds land and cellars, crews and families who know the vines, winemaking know-how, an appellation and an estate name, standing with regional authorities, and a village and its visitors. That is capital in all six domains—financial, human, intellectual, reputational, political, and social. The question the cohort works is which of those strengths, taken apart from a shrinking market, can be recombined into capital worth building—and what should stop being funded to pay for it.

Reported results hold longest. The erosion starts in the five leading capital domains—human, intellectual, reputational, political, and social—and the financial result reports it last, years after the allocation decisions that caused it. That is the Growth Gap. Governing all six domains, not only the one on the income statement, is what Solve Next calls Capital Symmetry Governance™. Think Wrong is its activation discipline, and the Intensive is where you learn to run it.

Four days.
One capability at a time.

Each full day follows the same rhythm: reflect on yesterday, an expert talk and discussion, an introduction to the Think Wrong frameworks and tools, application in the field, a share of what you found, then a reflection that applies it to your own challenge—closing with a daily reception. Half-day arrival Monday; full days Tuesday through Friday. 1:AI runs through every capability day—AI as a third party in the room, and a daily read on where its answer is simply the category’s answer repeated back with confidence.

½

Monday

Arrival · the Six Capital Domains · the activator role

Arrival, welcome, and industry immersion

Afternoon arrival at Château de Beaupré, our home base in the Pays d’Aix, about twenty minutes from central Aix-en-Provence. Welcome and industry immersion, then an introduction to the six capital domains—financial, human, intellectual, reputational, political, and social—that sits inside Capital Symmetry Governance™—and to the capital activator role you’ll step into for the week. Opening reception with wine-industry hosts.

Six Capital Domains Industry Immersion Opening Reception

01

Tuesday

Identify · Deflection Point

Identify and frame the capital-building opportunities

Using Think Wrong to identify and frame capital-building opportunities—and to engage and align the people who matter most. Morning: an expert talk and the Deflection Point in the classroom. Afternoon: application in the field with a multigenerational domaine and structured market interviews. You run the reframe twice—once in the room, once 1:AI—and compare where the model reproduces the answer the category already believes. Evening: reflect and map the day’s practice onto a challenge you own.

Deflection Point 1:AI Domaine Visit Field Interviews Daily Reception

02

Wednesday

Imagine · Make Stuff + Bet Small

Generate the capital-building solutions

Using Think Wrong to generate capital-building solutions—and to engage and align the people who matter most. Generate widely, converge deliberately, and make the strongest option tangible. 1:AI supplies divergent volume against the frame you set; convergence stays yours. Application in the field with a new-model producer who has broken the category’s rules, then a share and a reflection onto your own challenge.

Make Stuff Bet Small 1:AI New-Model Producer Daily Reception

03

Thursday

Test · Super Vital Assumptions

Prioritize and test the assumptions that change the call

Using Think Wrong to prioritize and test Super Vital Assumptions—and to engage and align the people who matter most. Certainty Map and PAK in the morning, run as a PAK Lab with AI as a third party—useful for surfacing candidate assumptions, useless for deciding which one is vital. A field test of the vital assumptions in the afternoon in front of real stakeholders, where a guided tasting becomes the instrument: sensory evidence against a claim, which is judgment training of the oldest kind.

Close of Day 3—the escalation question. Each participant is asked one question about their own organization: “Of the assumptions we surfaced—which ones, if wrong, would change a capital allocation decision that only your CFO or CEO can authorize?” Responses are documented. It is the designed bridge to the governance conversation that can follow.

Certainty Map + PAK PAK Lab · 1:AI SVA Drill Stakeholder Field Test Escalation Question

04

Friday

Align · Transfer

From wine to your own—the transfer day

A full day. A panel discussion with wine-industry experts opens it, then you turn the week on your own organization: the Activator Capability Read reads your readiness across the four capabilities, the capability ladder maps your path of progress, and the 30-Day Habit Builder in Next Lab | Activator™ sets up your first thirty days back. The transfer includes the AI decision you arrived with: which of its assumptions are Super Vital, and where a person on your team must stay decisive once the deployment lands. Departure Friday evening.

Expert Panel Activator Capability Read Transfer Workshop Protect the Human Edge 30-Day Habit Builder

Four artifacts
and a readiness read.

Every Capital Activator Intensive—open or commissioned—produces the same four artifacts. The week is not documentation of insight; it is the production of specific, capital-consequential material you carry back into your organization.

On Day 4 you complete a Activator Capability Read—a read across the four capabilities on the same scale a commissioning sponsor sees (Not yet → Starting → Working → Reliable). It isn’t a fifth artifact; it’s the instrument that evidences your readiness to carry the credential and shows where to keep building. You also leave with a 30-day commitment—a first internal session, a live challenge to run it on, and a dated first bet—operationalized by the 30-Day Habit Builder in Next Lab | Activator™.

For organizations that commission a cohort, the sponsors also receive a Cohort Capability Read: how far the group moved on each of the four capabilities (Not yet → Starting → Working → Reliable), so the leadership team can see what capability now lives inside the organization.

Ten years.
The method at work.

Think Wrong has been used inside some of the most demanding organizations in the world—across technology, government, finance, aerospace, and healthcare.

Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters was published in 2016 and is in its third printing (2025), available in English, Spanish, and Arabic. The book’s own case studies are separate from the client list above; the method is ten years old this year, and the problems it was built for are not.

The people in the room with you.

The Capital Activator Intensive is designed and facilitated by a team with direct experience applying the methodology inside some of Europe’s most complex organizations—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 organizations: visible metrics that look healthy while something underneath remains fragile. He co-founded Solve Next and co-authored Think Wrong with John Bielenberg and Mike Burn—building the structured discipline that gives leaders a rigorous practice for surfacing and testing that fragility before it becomes expensive. His practitioner background spans brand strategy, organizational transformation, and leadership development across private, public, and civil sectors. He holds a BFA from the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. As the architect of the Think Wrong methodology, Greg brings both the intellectual framework and the facilitation depth that makes Friday’s transfer session the most consequential session of the week.

Louise Kyhl-Triolo

European Program Lead · Senior Facilitator

Louise Kyhl-Triolo brings more than twenty-five years of international leadership experience—across L’Oréal, Airbus, VMware, and Heidrick & Struggles—to the design and delivery of the Capital Activator Intensive across Europe. She works at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and leadership: coaching senior leaders, designing group experiences that shift how organizations actually work, and facilitating transformation that requires both directional clarity and genuine human change. Louise is the European program lead—the person who knows how Think Wrong translates across cultures, sectors, and the gap between a week in the field and a Monday morning back in the office. She is a Solve Next Partner and Board Member (Europe) of the Human Impacts Institute.

Romain Gravier

Senior Facilitator · Integral Master Coach

Romain Gravier spent more than twenty years inside Airbus as a coach, facilitator, and leadership trainer embedded in some of the organization’s most complex innovation and culture transformation programs—including FCAS and Smart Collab at Airbus Defense and Space. He has been surfacing and working with assumptions inside a large, complex engineering organization from the inside for two decades, which means he understands the forces that make organizational change genuinely difficult rather than theoretically challenging. Romain is a certified Integral Master Coach (Integral Coaching Canada) and a Certified Wrong Thinker credentialed by Solve Next. He brings the facilitation rigor that turns a week in the field into a practice participants can run themselves when they return.

Cornelia Wagner

Facilitator · Transformation Architect

Cornelia Wagner spent sixteen years inside Airbus in a sequence of roles that gave her an unusually complete picture of how large organizations learn, change, and resist change—from learning systems implementation and HR transformation to culture change management and, most recently, engineering transformation at Airbus Defense & Space. She founded Connecting Waypoints to bring transformational coaching and innovation facilitation to leaders navigating complexity. She brings to the Intensives something very few facilitators can: direct experience of what it costs when large-scale change is built on assumptions that were never tested—and the practical knowledge of what it actually takes to make a new discipline stick inside a complex organization.

The escalation question—and the ladder beyond it.

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

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

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

Resources for the
internal conversation.

Almost nobody joins or commissions an Intensive alone. There is a manager, a CFO, or a board to convince—and increasingly the budget being argued over is the AI budget. These are the materials built to carry that conversation when you are not in the room.