Ironically, the bigger decision is the more likely we are to freeze and put it off altogether. But what if there was a proven framework specifically crafted to streamline decision making while capturing different perspectives. Jake is the New York Times best selling author of the amazing books Sprint and Make Time. But beyond writing and investing, he also created the design Sprint process, which is a powerful method for tackling complex problems and testing new ideas that's been adopted by Google, Microsoft, Uber, Meta, Lego, and countless other innovative organizations. In Our Conversation Today, Jake explains how we can make our most complex decisions in just forty eight hours with better results compared to weeks of deliberation. His approach might forever change how you handle those high stakes moments. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. In his book Click, Jake introduces the concept of magic lenses, which is a structure that helps you weigh different perspectives without falling victim to different biases. Naturally, I wanted to know how I could apply this method so I asked Jake how he uses it in his day to day life.

Ironically, the bigger decision is the more likely we are to freeze and put it off altogether. But what if there was a proven framework specifically crafted to streamline decision making while capturing different perspectives. Jake is the New York Times best selling author of the amazing books Sprint and Make Time. But beyond writing and investing, he also created the design Sprint process, which is a powerful method for tackling complex problems and testing new ideas that's been adopted by Google, Microsoft, Uber, Meta, Lego, and countless other innovative organizations. In Our Conversation Today, Jake explains how we can make our most complex decisions in just forty eight hours with better results compared to weeks of deliberation. His approach might forever change how you handle those high stakes moments. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. In his book Click, Jake introduces the concept of magic lenses, which is a structure that helps you weigh different perspectives without falling victim to different biases. Naturally, I wanted to know how I could apply this method so I asked Jake how he uses it in his day to day life.

Well, first I should I'll preface by saying, in my day to day life, it's only a big decision that warrants using magic lenses. Because when you hear me describe magic lenses, you might say, WHOA, that's a lot. I don't want to do that when I'm picking my lunch, you know. So if you're looking at the menu at the sandwich shop, this is not the time. But you know, if you're trying to decide, if your kid is trying to decide what to do after they've graduated from school, or if you're trying to decide if you know what to do with your career, or you know, if you're trying to decide what kind of car to buy, or the things of this nature where it's like, well, there are a lot of things to weigh. They are real life issues, but they're big. Here's what magic lenses is. It's a simple idea, which is that you make a two y two chart for every perspective that you think is an important perspective for thinking about a question. So, to use the example of the car that I just described, you're trying to decide what kind of car should I get? It can be very overwhelming. There's so many options, you know. So one way of thinking about the decision is cost. What's the cost of purchasing the car? What do I anticipate the ongoing maintenance or fuel or lack thereof, if it's electric, costs might be. And so you can imagine a two y two chart of cost with you know, upfront costs and ongoing costs, and then you might have five or ten different cars you're thinking about. You to sign each one a color stickynoe and you put them on there. And we do a lot of this stuff in Mirro, which is an online whiteboard, but you might do this in real life. Okay, so now I've got one chart, and maybe there's one in the top right or someone one or two or three up there look pretty good. Well, now we look at something else, like maybe reliability or maybe which one's the most fun to drive. When I'm working with a startup, there are consistently four lenses that are always a good idea for any kind of project they might be working on. And the first one of those is the pragmatic lens. So if you imagine your stereotypical engineer who perhaps is concerned with what's the fastest thing to build, what's the most expensive thing to build? So we want it, We want the cheap to build and you know, fast to build. That would be the top right of the pragmatic lens. And then a startup should think about growth. So where are there the most customers that this solution might reach, and how easy is it for people to adopt this thing? And we could chart all the options there, and then we might think about money. Which of these has the highest long term value and the most potential paying customers. Then we of course should think about the customer and in fact, this might be the most important lens. Which best solves the problem that we believe customers have, and which one of these is the easiest to use and adopt. And so this set of charts, if we plot all of our options in color, on those we can see like maybe one maybe the green one is always in the top right, Well, great, maybe we should do that, or maybe it's a mix, but one of those feels the most right. And when we're doing this with a startup, once we've gone through some basic ones, the obvious ones, we start to create some new custom fine tune perspectives. Anyway, it's a lot to hold in your head you even be describing it. But the point of this is that I bounce from one thing to another. It's like I'm a pinball machine in my head. And the same thing happens with teams. And when you have a whole team of people, even if you just have two founders or three founders, they're pinballing around between these things. So when we make it plain and we think, if you had a team of advisors who had these different perspectives, what would each one of them say? And then what are the other viewpoints that you think might be interesting. Let's craft a chart for those. It's so helpful. It's like if you're a Harry Potter fan, there's the pen Seve where they take the memories out of their minds and then you can see you can kind of go into the story.

Well, first I should I'll preface by saying, in my day to day life, it's only a big decision that warrants using magic lenses. Because when you hear me describe magic lenses, you might say, WHOA, that's a lot. I don't want to do that when I'm picking my lunch, you know. So if you're looking at the menu at the sandwich shop, this is not the time. But you know, if you're trying to decide, if your kid is trying to decide what to do after they've graduated from school, or if you're trying to decide if you know what to do with your career, or you know, if you're trying to decide what kind of car to buy, or the things of this nature where it's like, well, there are a lot of things to weigh. They are real life issues, but they're big. Here's what magic lenses is. It's a simple idea, which is that you make a two y two chart for every perspective that you think is an important perspective for thinking about a question. So, to use the example of the car that I just described, you're trying to decide what kind of car should I get? It can be very overwhelming. There's so many options, you know. So one way of thinking about the decision is cost. What's the cost of purchasing the car? What do I anticipate the ongoing maintenance or fuel or lack thereof, if it's electric, costs might be. And so you can imagine a two y two chart of cost with you know, upfront costs and ongoing costs, and then you might have five or ten different cars you're thinking about. You to sign each one a color stickynoe and you put them on there. And we do a lot of this stuff in Mirro, which is an online whiteboard, but you might do this in real life. Okay, so now I've got one chart, and maybe there's one in the top right or someone one or two or three up there look pretty good. Well, now we look at something else, like maybe reliability or maybe which one's the most fun to drive. When I'm working with a startup, there are consistently four lenses that are always a good idea for any kind of project they might be working on. And the first one of those is the pragmatic lens. So if you imagine your stereotypical engineer who perhaps is concerned with what's the fastest thing to build, what's the most expensive thing to build? So we want it, We want the cheap to build and you know, fast to build. That would be the top right of the pragmatic lens. And then a startup should think about growth. So where are there the most customers that this solution might reach, and how easy is it for people to adopt this thing? And we could chart all the options there, and then we might think about money. Which of these has the highest long term value and the most potential paying customers. Then we of course should think about the customer and in fact, this might be the most important lens. Which best solves the problem that we believe customers have, and which one of these is the easiest to use and adopt. And so this set of charts, if we plot all of our options in color, on those we can see like maybe one maybe the green one is always in the top right, Well, great, maybe we should do that, or maybe it's a mix, but one of those feels the most right. And when we're doing this with a startup, once we've gone through some basic ones, the obvious ones, we start to create some new custom fine tune perspectives. Anyway, it's a lot to hold in your head you even be describing it. But the point of this is that I bounce from one thing to another. It's like I'm a pinball machine in my head. And the same thing happens with teams. And when you have a whole team of people, even if you just have two founders or three founders, they're pinballing around between these things. So when we make it plain and we think, if you had a team of advisors who had these different perspectives, what would each one of them say? And then what are the other viewpoints that you think might be interesting. Let's craft a chart for those. It's so helpful. It's like if you're a Harry Potter fan, there's the pen Seve where they take the memories out of their minds and then you can see you can kind of go into the story.

So how do you know that you've got the right or the best lenses when you're thinking through you know, cost and pragmaticism and growth and anything else with any kind of decision, how do you get to that point where you're like, yes, these will be the themes or the lens or the criteria for these two by twos.

So how do you know that you've got the right or the best lenses when you're thinking through you know, cost and pragmaticism and growth and anything else with any kind of decision, how do you get to that point where you're like, yes, these will be the themes or the lens or the criteria for these two by twos.

Those four that I mentioned come from our experience working with a lot of startups, and it just these perspectives would always be useful in every case. So those I feel comfortable. If you're talking about a business question, thinking about the customer, thinking about pragmatism, thinking about money, you're running a business, and thinking about growth, you're not going to go wrong thinking about those perspectives. But for the others, and again this is going to get a little nerdy, but what we do is have every possible approach. We list as many as we can, and then we choose the top few. So you know, if we're working with a startup, we have one person who's the decider, the CEO, and they they'll choose. Okay, we'll vote, everybody votes, and then the CEO will say, these are the top, say five approaches I want to consider, and then we'll divide up and we'll say, okay, somebody needs to take a sheet of paper and write a sentence or two about why this is a good idea and maybe draw a doodle of it, you know, right, Okay, for this approach, here's what I think is good about it, and here's just a back of the napkin sketch of what I have in mind how it would look. We all then look at those approaches, and we'll take a note underneath with sticky notes. What's the criteria this is good at? What does this do well at? Often founders will put on a sticky note, this is exciting to build. I'm excited about building this. And that's often a really important consideration because there's a lot that goes into that. There's a lot of maybe intuition about something, and often after you've gone through the more rational logical progression of the standard ways of looking at it, you find that, well, excitement is really important. Often there's might be something like we can find a partner who will do this with us, you know, a company partner who can help us distribute this, so things that might be particular to the kind of business that a startup is in. But I always trust that the team themselves are going to have good insights into what makes a good lens. And once we've gotten warmed up by doing those classic ones, that's kind of the key. You warm up a bit, then you're kind of in the right mode and it's easy to make one or two or three more.

Those four that I mentioned come from our experience working with a lot of startups, and it just these perspectives would always be useful in every case. So those I feel comfortable. If you're talking about a business question, thinking about the customer, thinking about pragmatism, thinking about money, you're running a business, and thinking about growth, you're not going to go wrong thinking about those perspectives. But for the others, and again this is going to get a little nerdy, but what we do is have every possible approach. We list as many as we can, and then we choose the top few. So you know, if we're working with a startup, we have one person who's the decider, the CEO, and they they'll choose. Okay, we'll vote, everybody votes, and then the CEO will say, these are the top, say five approaches I want to consider, and then we'll divide up and we'll say, okay, somebody needs to take a sheet of paper and write a sentence or two about why this is a good idea and maybe draw a doodle of it, you know, right, Okay, for this approach, here's what I think is good about it, and here's just a back of the napkin sketch of what I have in mind how it would look. We all then look at those approaches, and we'll take a note underneath with sticky notes. What's the criteria this is good at? What does this do well at? Often founders will put on a sticky note, this is exciting to build. I'm excited about building this. And that's often a really important consideration because there's a lot that goes into that. There's a lot of maybe intuition about something, and often after you've gone through the more rational logical progression of the standard ways of looking at it, you find that, well, excitement is really important. Often there's might be something like we can find a partner who will do this with us, you know, a company partner who can help us distribute this, so things that might be particular to the kind of business that a startup is in. But I always trust that the team themselves are going to have good insights into what makes a good lens. And once we've gotten warmed up by doing those classic ones, that's kind of the key. You warm up a bit, then you're kind of in the right mode and it's easy to make one or two or three more.

I hope you enjoyed this quick Win episode with Jake and if you would like to listen to the full interview, you can find a link to that in the show notes. If you like today's show, make sure you get follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warringery people, part of the cool And Nation.

I hope you enjoyed this quick Win episode with Jake and if you would like to listen to the full interview, you can find a link to that in the show notes. If you like today's show, make sure you get follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warringery people, part of the cool And Nation.