Clinic A handed you four candidate lenses. Clinic B handed you four more. This one hands you nothing — eleven lenses, six live cases, and the discipline to pick cold is the entire game now.
Run the roll call: L01 dominance test — wins no matter what they do. L02 value the matrix — model their objective, not yours. L03 iterated dominance — cross off what a rational opponent would never do. L04 best response & Nash — the stable pair when nobody has a dominant move. L05 coordination & focal points — when the fight is agreeing, not winning. L06 sequential games & backward induction — someone moves first, the other reacts. L07 commitment & credibility — giving up your own options on purpose. L08 repeated games — the shadow of the future and tit-for-tat. L09 signaling & screening — one side knows more, and either proves it or designs a menu. L10 bargaining & BATNA/ZOPA — your power is your walk-away. L11 mechanism design — you don't play the game, you write its rules.
Below are six situations from your real world, stripped of their labels, drawn from the same live decisions in DECISIONS.md. Three lean on the newest tools. Two are cumulative — the correct lens could be any of the eleven, and the wrong answers on offer are the ones people reach for out of habit. One is a trap: a shape that looks like a deal to be split but isn't one at all. Diagnose first. Solving is the easy part once you've named the shape correctly.
Your particular consult price sits well above what three other clinics in Porto Alegre charge — and instead of just asserting quality, you publish your real GTR and complication rates on your site for anyone to check before they book.
Which lens?
A health-plan administrator offers to add your practice to their network — but before naming a number, you first tally what you already bill self-pay for that same volume, because that's what you'd keep doing if this negotiation goes nowhere.
Which lens?
You pay referring physicians a flat fee per patient they send, no matter whether that patient shows up for a consult — and lately the referrals have skewed toward padded, low-acuity leads chasing the fee rather than genuine cases.
Which lens fixes this?
You publish, in writing, on the SlideCraft pricing page: Expert-tier subscribers keep their $59 rate for life, even after list price rises — and you deliberately make it a public promise, not a quiet internal policy, so you can't walk it back later without visibly breaking your word.
Which lens, now that all eleven are in play?
You raise your Google Ads bid on your shared keyword and leave it running, visible, at the top of the results all month — before the rival clinic sets its own bid for the period — counting on them anchoring their number off whatever they see sitting above them.
Which lens?
A prospective device sponsor for the skull-base course tells you, plainly, that their entire regional marketing line for this quarter is capped at R$12,000 — full stop, no exceptions. You already hold a signed offer from another sponsor for R$18,000.
Which lens?
| If you catch yourself thinking… | Reach for |
|---|---|
| "Wait — which of the first eight tells was this again?" | Clinics A (L01–04) & B (L05–08) hold those fingerprints — this page only adds L09–11 |
| "I know something they don't — words alone won't prove it" | Signaling (L09) — take the costly, hard-to-fake action |
| "They know something I don't — I need them to sort themselves" | Screening (L09) — design the menu, let them self-select |
| "The first question isn't what I want — it's what I get if we don't agree" | Bargaining & BATNA/ZOPA (L10) — find floor, ceiling, surplus |
| "My floor sits above their ceiling — no price beats both outside options" | No ZOPA (L10) — take your BATNA and walk |
| "I'm not really a player here — I get to write the rules" | Mechanism design (L11) — redesign so honest is each player's best move |
Eleven lenses are useless if you can't tell, cold, which one a live situation needs. The tool was never the hard part — recognising the shape before you reach for anything is. That recognition is the actual course.
Do this before you next solve anything. Open DECISIONS.md, pick a row from Live Now or Recurring — the payer matrix, the sponsorship ask, the referral incentive redesign, whichever is most live this week. Before reaching for any matrix, write one line: which of the eleven lenses is it? Not a category from this page — from the whole arc.
Then say why in a sentence, solve it, act on it, and move the row to Resolved once it plays out. Write the REVIEW-*.md — predicted outcome vs. actual, and what the matrix got wrong. That back-half honesty is what turns eleven quiz lenses into one working instinct.