“The founders of Solve Next take readers on a wonderful first hand journey of disruptive innovation. Think Wrong is as inviting as a cookbook by Jamie Oliver and as instructive as a business book by Clayton Christensen. The authors show us how to unlock human ingenuity to build and grow clever, practical, original, and viable solutions to our biggest challenges and most exciting opportunities.”

Rita Gunther McGrath
Professor at Columbia School of Business
Best-selling author of Seeing Around Corners, The End of Competitive Advantage and Discovery-Driven Growth

“Think Wrong rightly challenges enterprise leaders and individuals alike to prioritize ‘why not’ possibilities by providing pragmatic, easy-to-apply tools and techniques to spur—and scale—innovation anytime, anywhere, along with an online community of practice committed to furthering innovation.”

Cathy Benko
Retired Vice Chairman and Managing Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Member of the board, Nike
Best-selling author of The Corporate Lattice and Mass Career Customization

“Think Wrong holds a mirror up to leaders and demands that they do the hard work with their internal entrepreneurs to overcome the orthodoxies, antibodies, and inertia that kill new ideas or, at best, starve them of oxygen.”

Linda Yates
Mach49 CEO and Co-founder
Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute

“Bielenberg, Burn, and Galle show that we can all think wrong in this very engaging, readable, and practical book. With step-by-step guidance, and great stories from a broad range of settings, Think Wrong teaches us how to break through constraints and change the world.”

Lenny Mendonca
Director Emeritus, McKinsey and Company
Chief Economic and Business Advisor to Governor Gavin Newsom and Director of the Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz)

Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters 

The way we solve problems is broken—we’re trapped by techniques and assumptions of a prior era.

Today challenges emerge at an ever-accelerating rate, and we struggle to find the imaginative answers we crave. When we do, biology and culture conspire to obstruct our progress. Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters teaches you how to use Solve Next’s radical problem-solving system to reliably produce surprising, ingenious, and seemingly magical answers to your most wicked questions. This book provides you with new language, frameworks, and tools to conquer the status quo and drive change.

Inside Think Wrong, designers and innovators John Bielenberg, Mike Burn, and Greg Galle show how pioneering teams of people have cultivated ways to challenge both their brains and the culture at large. These people learned to think wrong, and so can you.

The introduction offers the fundamental groundwork of Think Wrong. The subsequent chapters present six practices developed by the authors—Be Bold, Get Out, Let Go, Make Stuff, Bet Small, and Move Fast. Using firsthand case studies of success, and offering Think Wrong Drills that you may use, Think Wrong is a field guide for applying this highly effective problem-solving system to challenges big and small. In addition to the drills provided in the book, Think Wrong readers are provided access to free online resources.

THE AUTHORS