We took the four lenses into a room of twenty-four founders and operators at Venture Café Warsaw. What they showed us in the first two minutes was the whole reason the tool exists.
On 11 June 2026 we ran a workshop at Venture Café Warsaw, Thursday Gathering #258: “From Technology Initiatives to Business Outcomes.”
Venture Café gatherings are where solo entrepreneurs, founders, freelancers and the ecosystem of people supporting them meet, network, learn and grow. Technology is very present, but the room is open to everyone trying to build something, or already succeeding at it, in any field.
Being successful does not mean the absence of friction or tension, or that outcomes have already materialised at the scale of the effort. To illustrate that, we opened with a quick show of hands among our twenty-four participants.
- “Hands up if you have ever worked on something that took real effort and did not deliver what you hoped.” Most hands went up.
- “Keep them up if it was not because the work was bad, but because of something else.” They stayed up.
That gap between effort and outcome is a pattern, and it is why a pragmatic tool such as the four lenses matters.
The room became six leadership teams
For the first ten minutes, we introduced the four lenses we use to read any initiative: Value, Flow, Quality, and Experience. Then the room became the leadership team of six fictional but realistic small businesses.
For twenty minutes, each table took a case, looked at it through the four lenses, chose one tension to address, and defined a single experiment to try. We closed with a lens-by-lens debrief across the tables, and one essential question: what do you put in place this time, from the start, to know whether the experiment is working?
Not a framework to adopt
The four lenses are not a framework to adopt. They are a way to create a better context for success. By identifying the tensions constraining Value, Flow, Quality or Experience, leaders and doers alike can make better decisions and trade-offs on what to try next, and on how to keep improving their system of work.
Thank you to Venture Café Warsaw for the opportunity, and to everyone who joined us in the room. The feedback we valued most: “this was a very practical, informative session I can use straight away.” The session was a learning opportunity for us too, and we have since tuned the workshop and its deck.
Try it yourself
The workshop deck is available to download, including the four-lens signals, the six case tensions, and the experiments each one suggests: Why Good Initiatives Stall.
If you would like to read more about the four lenses behind the workshop, and how to use them to read your own system of work, see The Four Lenses.