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

The way we solve problems is broken. We are 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 Future'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.

An 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.

John Bielenberg, Mike Burn, and Greg Galle work together at the Silicon Valley innovation products and services company Future Partners. Along with the Future team they provide cultural outlaws, frustrated by their attempts to jailbreak the status quo, with the language, frameworks, tools, and techniques they need to escape biological and cultural forces so they can drive positive change in their organizations, communities, countries, and the world. They build software, train and coach leaders and teams, run immersive workshops, and partner with creative firms around the world to help them do work that matters and makes a difference. Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is an award-winning journalist and editor who writes about architecture, design, culture, and creativity.