I've been reading Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at Berkeley, and she describes two modes of consciousness that have reframed how I think about everything I do. She calls them lantern and spotlight. The spotlight is focused, efficient, pointed at the task — it's how most adults operate, how businesses run, how things get done. The lantern is how children see: wide open, taking in everything from every direction. It looks unfocused, but it's actually a more expansive form of awareness. I love her line about what lantern consciousness feels like — "like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos." That I've never seen like this before feeling.

Gopnik calls children "the R&D department of the human species" — because they don't just play randomly. They form theories and test them. Play is experimentation. Adults exploit what we know; children explore what they don't. Play isn't a break from learning. Play is how the learning happens.

The shift from spotlight to lantern is intuitive, simple, and — as adults, in life and business — incredibly challenging. It's the way of seeing that's needed in startup, at inflection points, when things change. The lantern lets us see more, see things anew, then experiment and test new theories in the new context — before doing the work of spotlighting. It's a cycle, and it's how we thrive.

The magic isn't in working harder in spotlight mode. It's in learning how to open the lantern when the spotlight has stopped finding anything new.

Lantern thinking lets you find something in an entirely different field that, looked at from a different angle, applies to the field you're standing in. And the discovery itself is proof the process works.

Practical examples from my own work. A cycling accessories company was selling to people who ride bikes in suits — lantern perspective said colour is part of the emerging urban cycling culture, and that culture is where the product should live, not in bike shops next to reflective vests. A messenger bag company built by couriers discovered the real proposition wasn't messenger culture at all but movement through cities — and that became the platform for twenty years. A denim company knew single-layer motorcycle jeans needed to perform like armour — lantern thinking meant looking at military applications, different fibres, different constructions, until a solution emerged that nobody in fashion or motorcycle gear had tried.

Same pattern every time. Spotlight says solve the problem in front of you. Lantern says look around first and see what connects.

The nature of our connectedness matters more right now because the connections are shifting faster than most businesses can track. Markets, culture, supply chains, customer expectations — they all move, sometimes by degrees, sometimes overnight. The businesses running spotlight-only will miss the shift until it shows up in the numbers, which is always too late.

This is also where AI genuinely excites me — not as a replacement for thinking, but as a lantern machine. These systems surface connections you didn't know to look for and hold more in view than a single brain can manage. They're not creative on their own — but they're extraordinary at widening the field of vision for someone who already knows how to look.

I spoke with an entrepreneur last week who was building the brand first. Logo, palette, photography, website — all considered, all well made, all built before the commercial strategy underneath it. It's a surprisingly common approach, and it comes from spotlight thinking: the brand feels like the task because it's visible and tangible. But a brand without a commercial strategy underneath it has no foundations.

Strategy first means knowing who you're for, what you're actually selling, where the money comes from, and what has to be true for any of it to work. That thinking gives the brand a purpose — and makes every creative decision sharper, because each one serves something specific rather than something general.

The businesses that thrive are the ones whose brand is built on a commercial reality that holds when the world shifts around it — and the world is always shifting. The question isn't whether it will. It's whether you'll notice in time. That takes lantern thinking: deliberately looking sideways when the numbers say look straight ahead.

I've watched businesses transform not because they worked harder but because someone turned the lantern on and saw a possibility that was already there. A business planning a major renovation discovered the real opportunity was a different property entirely. A brand trying to crack a new category realised the answer wasn't in the category at all, but in understanding who their customer had become. The thread is always there. Pay attention. Look up.