Quick Win: A better way to make big decisions (with total confidence)

The bigger the decision, the harder it feels to make. We overthink, second-guess ourselves, and sometimes freeze entirely. But what if there was a simple framework designed to cut through the noise and help you confidently choose the best path forward? 

In this Quick Win episode, Jake Knapp—bestselling author and creator of the Design Sprint process—shares his Magic Lenses framework, a structured way to weigh different perspectives without getting stuck in analysis paralysis. 

Jake and I discuss: 

• Why big decisions often lead to overthinking—and how to break the cycle 

• How the Magic Lenses framework helps you make complex choices in just 48 hours 

• The 4 essential lenses every great decision-maker uses 

Listen to the full interview with Jake here. 

Connect with Jake via his website, Instagram, LinkedIn, or preorder his new book Click here. 

  

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/ 

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber) 

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai) 

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe 

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. 

Get in touch at [e-mail] 

  

Credits: 

Host: Amantha Imber 

Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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

(00:24):
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

(00:44):
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.

(01:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
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,

(01:58):
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.

(02:20):
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.

(02:43):
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

(03:03):
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.

(03:26):
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

(03:49):
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

(04:09):
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

(04:30):
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,

(04:54):
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

(05:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
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

(06:13):
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

(06:33):
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

(06:56):
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

(07:18):
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,

(07:40):
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

(08:01):
of in the right mode and it's easy to make
one or two or three more.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
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.