Nearly everyone has 'aha' moments of sudden clarity. They can and do change our lives.
—John Kounios & Mark Beeman
Founders who make it to Series A are rarely short on focus. They have spent years proving they can execute under pressure that would break most people, and that is precisely what got them this far. What gets harder to see, the deeper into execution a founder goes, is the shape of the business itself. Focus solves the problem in front of you. It was never built to ask whether that problem is still the right one, and a founder who has been heads-down long enough to reach Series A has had less and less occasion to ask.
A Century-Old Observation
This is not a new observation, though it is usually treated as one. In 1926, the psychologist Graham Wallas proposed that creative thought moves through four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. The stage that mattered most was the one that looked like nothing was happening. Incubation, in Wallas’s model, was the period when a problem left conscious attention entirely and was worked on regardless. He had no way to prove this was happening inside the brain. He only had the pattern, observed closely enough across enough cases to name it.
It took most of a century for the proof to catch up to the observation. Working separately, the cognitive scientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman began studying insight directly, using EEG to track the millisecond timing of a thought and fMRI to map where in the brain it occurred. What they found confirmed Wallas almost exactly. At the instant a solution arrives as a sudden insight rather than a worked answer, a distinct spike in gamma-wave activity occurs above the right ear, a signature that does not appear when the same kind of problem is solved analytically instead. Incubation was never a metaphor for rest. It was a separate, identifiable mode of cognitive work, and it left a signature in the brain precise enough to photograph.
Two Modes, Two Jobs
Functionally, the two modes divide cleanly: focused mode executes, diffuse mode reassesses. Proximity produces execution. Distance produces judgment. This holds true no matter what part of the business is in question. Herbert Simon, in his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial, argued that devising a strategic plan for a business, in product, in operations, in finance, in revenue, is intellectually the same kind of work as moving any situation from what it is to what it should be. A founder who never leaves focused mode is not being more rigorous than one who does. They are simply too close to see the pattern they are in.
The Fix for Both
This is the premise York Effect is built on, and it is why every Sprint pairs both modes rather than choosing one. Neither mode is a break from the other. They require different instruments, built for different jobs, both necessary and neither sufficient alone.
The focused-mode instrument is AI-native. It draws on a business’s own data, its real, factual signals, and measures a company’s goals against them rather than against instinct.
The diffuse-mode instrument is human. It cannot be replicated by data alone, because what it corrects is not a data gap. It is a proximity problem. A founder who has spent years inside a business cannot see that business the way a stranger would, because the data is being interpreted by a mind that has already decided what it means. You cannot think your way out of a perceptual habit while sitting in the chair that built the habit.
Used separately, each instrument produces half a picture. The digital layer alone tells a founder whether their numbers support their goals, and says nothing about whether the goals were the right ones to begin with. The human layer alone produces clarity about the shape of a problem, and says nothing about whether the business can execute against that clarity. Used together, they do what Wallas’s stages always implied and Kounios and Beeman later confirmed: evidence and judgment are separate operations, and a decision built on only one of them is a decision built on half a method.
Why Neither Works Alone
Internal alignment and external validation are what every Sprint already tests for: whether the people inside a company agree on what’s true, and whether the market agrees with them. The technology behind that work is never finished. We refine it continuously, checking what a company says about itself against what the data and exercises actually surface.
What is already established, by a psychologist in 1926 and confirmed by neuroscientists eighty years later, is that a founder’s own perspective on their business is not a neutral instrument, and that no amount of focused effort inside that perspective corrects for its blind spots. Only distance does that. Our technology is built to supply both halves of the fix: the evidence a business already has, and the distance to see past it.
The Cost of Skipping It
Companies that skip this do not fail loudly. They keep re-answering the same unresolved question with better and better data, and mistake the improvement in the data for progress on the question.
