Speaker 1: Ironically, the bigger decision is the more likely we are
Speaker 1: to freeze and put it off altogether. But what if
Speaker 1: there was a proven framework specifically crafted to streamline decision
Speaker 1: making while capturing different perspectives. Jake is the New York
Speaker 1: Times best selling author of the amazing books Sprint and
Speaker 1: Make Time. But beyond writing and investing, he also created
Speaker 1: the design Sprint process, which is a powerful method for
Speaker 1: tackling complex problems and testing new ideas that's been adopted
Speaker 1: by Google, Microsoft, Uber, Meta, Lego, and countless other innovative organizations.
Speaker 1: In Our Conversation Today, Jake explains how we can make
Speaker 1: our most complex decisions in just forty eight hours with
Speaker 1: better results compared to weeks of deliberation. His approach might
Speaker 1: forever change how you handle those high stakes moments. Welcome
Speaker 1: to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and
Speaker 1: strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber.
Speaker 1: In his book Click, Jake introduces the concept of magic lenses,
Speaker 1: which is a structure that helps you weigh different perspectives
Speaker 1: without falling victim to different biases. Naturally, I wanted to
Speaker 1: know how I could apply this method so I asked
Speaker 1: Jake how he uses it in his day to day life.
Speaker 2: Well, first I should I'll preface by saying, in my
Speaker 2: day to day life, it's only a big decision that
Speaker 2: warrants using magic lenses. Because when you hear me describe
Speaker 2: magic lenses, you might say, WHOA, that's a lot. I
Speaker 2: don't want to do that when I'm picking my lunch,
Speaker 2: you know. So if you're looking at the menu at
Speaker 2: the sandwich shop, this is not the time. But you know,
Speaker 2: if you're trying to decide, if your kid is trying
Speaker 2: to decide what to do after they've graduated from school,
Speaker 2: or if you're trying to decide if you know what
Speaker 2: to do with your career, or you know, if you're
Speaker 2: trying to decide what kind of car to buy, or
Speaker 2: the things of this nature where it's like, well, there
Speaker 2: are a lot of things to weigh. They are real
Speaker 2: life issues, but they're big. Here's what magic lenses is.
Speaker 2: It's a simple idea, which is that you make a
Speaker 2: two y two chart for every perspective that you think
Speaker 2: is an important perspective for thinking about a question. So,
Speaker 2: to use the example of the car that I just described,
Speaker 2: you're trying to decide what kind of car should I get?
Speaker 2: It can be very overwhelming. There's so many options, you know.
Speaker 2: So one way of thinking about the decision is cost.
Speaker 2: What's the cost of purchasing the car? What do I
Speaker 2: anticipate the ongoing maintenance or fuel or lack thereof, if
Speaker 2: it's electric, costs might be. And so you can imagine
Speaker 2: a two y two chart of cost with you know,
Speaker 2: upfront costs and ongoing costs, and then you might have
Speaker 2: five or ten different cars you're thinking about. You to
Speaker 2: sign each one a color stickynoe and you put them
Speaker 2: on there. And we do a lot of this stuff
Speaker 2: in Mirro, which is an online whiteboard, but you might
Speaker 2: do this in real life. Okay, so now I've got
Speaker 2: one chart, and maybe there's one in the top right
Speaker 2: or someone one or two or three up there look
Speaker 2: pretty good. Well, now we look at something else, like
Speaker 2: maybe reliability or maybe which one's the most fun to drive.
Speaker 2: When I'm working with a startup, there are consistently four
Speaker 2: lenses that are always a good idea for any kind
Speaker 2: of project they might be working on. And the first
Speaker 2: one of those is the pragmatic lens. So if you
Speaker 2: imagine your stereotypical engineer who perhaps is concerned with what's
Speaker 2: the fastest thing to build, what's the most expensive thing
Speaker 2: to build? So we want it, We want the cheap
Speaker 2: to build and you know, fast to build. That would
Speaker 2: be the top right of the pragmatic lens. And then
Speaker 2: a startup should think about growth. So where are there
Speaker 2: the most customers that this solution might reach, and how
Speaker 2: easy is it for people to adopt this thing? And
Speaker 2: we could chart all the options there, and then we
Speaker 2: might think about money. Which of these has the highest
Speaker 2: long term value and the most potential paying customers. Then
Speaker 2: we of course should think about the customer and in fact,
Speaker 2: this might be the most important lens. Which best solves
Speaker 2: the problem that we believe customers have, and which one
Speaker 2: of these is the easiest to use and adopt. And
Speaker 2: so this set of charts, if we plot all of
Speaker 2: our options in color, on those we can see like
Speaker 2: maybe one maybe the green one is always in the
Speaker 2: top right, Well, great, maybe we should do that, or
Speaker 2: maybe it's a mix, but one of those feels the
Speaker 2: most right. And when we're doing this with a startup,
Speaker 2: once we've gone through some basic ones, the obvious ones,
Speaker 2: we start to create some new custom fine tune perspectives. Anyway,
Speaker 2: it's a lot to hold in your head you even
Speaker 2: be describing it. But the point of this is that
Speaker 2: I bounce from one thing to another. It's like I'm
Speaker 2: a pinball machine in my head. And the same thing
Speaker 2: happens with teams. And when you have a whole team
Speaker 2: of people, even if you just have two founders or
Speaker 2: three founders, they're pinballing around between these things. So when
Speaker 2: we make it plain and we think, if you had
Speaker 2: a team of advisors who had these different perspectives, what
Speaker 2: would each one of them say? And then what are
Speaker 2: the other viewpoints that you think might be interesting. Let's
Speaker 2: craft a chart for those. It's so helpful. It's like
Speaker 2: if you're a Harry Potter fan, there's the pen Seve
Speaker 2: where they take the memories out of their minds and
Speaker 2: then you can see you can kind of go into
Speaker 2: the story.
Speaker 1: So how do you know that you've got the right
Speaker 1: or the best lenses when you're thinking through you know,
Speaker 1: cost and pragmaticism and growth and anything else with any
Speaker 1: kind of decision, how do you get to that point
Speaker 1: where you're like, yes, these will be the themes or
Speaker 1: the lens or the criteria for these two by twos.
Speaker 2: Those four that I mentioned come from our experience working
Speaker 2: with a lot of startups, and it just these perspectives
Speaker 2: would always be useful in every case. So those I
Speaker 2: feel comfortable. If you're talking about a business question, thinking
Speaker 2: about the customer, thinking about pragmatism, thinking about money, you're
Speaker 2: running a business, and thinking about growth, you're not going
Speaker 2: to go wrong thinking about those perspectives. But for the others,
Speaker 2: and again this is going to get a little nerdy,
Speaker 2: but what we do is have every possible approach. We
Speaker 2: list as many as we can, and then we choose
Speaker 2: the top few. So you know, if we're working with
Speaker 2: a startup, we have one person who's the decider, the CEO,
Speaker 2: and they they'll choose. Okay, we'll vote, everybody votes, and
Speaker 2: then the CEO will say, these are the top, say
Speaker 2: five approaches I want to consider, and then we'll divide
Speaker 2: up and we'll say, okay, somebody needs to take a
Speaker 2: sheet of paper and write a sentence or two about
Speaker 2: why this is a good idea and maybe draw a
Speaker 2: doodle of it, you know, right, Okay, for this approach,
Speaker 2: here's what I think is good about it, and here's
Speaker 2: just a back of the napkin sketch of what I
Speaker 2: have in mind how it would look. We all then
Speaker 2: look at those approaches, and we'll take a note underneath
Speaker 2: with sticky notes. What's the criteria this is good at?
Speaker 2: What does this do well at? Often founders will put
Speaker 2: on a sticky note, this is exciting to build. I'm
Speaker 2: excited about building this. And that's often a really important
Speaker 2: consideration because there's a lot that goes into that. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of maybe intuition about something, and often after
Speaker 2: you've gone through the more rational logical progression of the
Speaker 2: standard ways of looking at it, you find that, well,
Speaker 2: excitement is really important. Often there's might be something like
Speaker 2: we can find a partner who will do this with us,
Speaker 2: you know, a company partner who can help us distribute this,
Speaker 2: so things that might be particular to the kind of
Speaker 2: business that a startup is in. But I always trust
Speaker 2: that the team themselves are going to have good insights
Speaker 2: into what makes a good lens. And once we've gotten
Speaker 2: warmed up by doing those classic ones, that's kind of
Speaker 2: the key. You warm up a bit, then you're kind
Speaker 2: of in the right mode and it's easy to make
Speaker 2: one or two or three more.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this quick Win episode with Jake
Speaker 1: and if you would like to listen to the full interview,
Speaker 1: you can find a link to that in the show notes.
Speaker 1: If you like today's show, make sure you get follow
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Speaker 1: How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
Speaker 1: the Warringery people, part of the cool And Nation.