Here’s something about strategy consultants that non-consultants find either endearing or insufferable: we think in frameworks.
Not because frameworks are inherently superior to other ways of thinking. But because a good framework takes a complex, overwhelming domain and organizes it into categories you can actually work on. It turns “everything is connected to everything and I don’t know where to start” into “here are six specific things, here’s how they relate, and here’s the order in which they matter.”
When I was a young consultant, frameworks saved me. A client would dump a sprawling strategic problem on the table — market decline, organizational dysfunction, competitive pressure, regulatory uncertainty — and without a framework, the problem was a fog. You could stare at it all day and not know where to begin. But put a framework on it — segment the problem, prioritize the segments, address them in order — and suddenly you had a path forward.
I missed having a framework for performing. Badly.
For two years, I’d had a framework for practice. The “Art of Practice” methodology gave me clear principles: adaptation over repetition, difficulty calibration, results-based measurement, the sweet spot above your current maximum. I knew what to do in every practice session and why. The framework was the map, and the practice was the territory.
But performing? Performing was frameworkless. I knew I needed to be “more entertaining.” I knew my technical execution wasn’t translating into audience engagement. I knew something was missing between the bricks. But I had no organized way to think about what that something was, let alone how to develop it.
Then I found Ken Weber’s Six Pillars, and it was like someone turned on the lights in a room I’d been navigating by touch.
The Six Pillars
Weber’s framework identifies six pillars that support successful entertainment. Not magic specifically — entertainment. Any performance that aspires to hold an audience’s attention and create a memorable experience rests on these six foundations.
I’m going to walk through each one briefly here, because future posts will dive deep into each pillar. Consider this the overview — the map before the territory.
Pillar One: Master Your Craft
This is the foundation. The technical bedrock. You must be able to execute your material flawlessly, without conscious effort, so that your attention is free to focus on everything else.
Weber makes a crucial distinction here that I’d never considered: the difference between practice and rehearsal. Practice is the repetition of individual techniques and moves in isolation. Rehearsal is the repetition of everything the audience sees and hears — the full routine, start to finish, including words, gestures, timing, and transitions. Most performers practice. Far fewer rehearse.
I recognized myself immediately. My two years of practice had been exactly that — practice. I’d drilled individual techniques to high consistency. But I’d never rehearsed a complete routine as a coherent performance. The idea of running through not just the moves but also the words, the eye contact, the audience interaction, the transitions, the emotional arc — as a complete, integrated experience — was something I’d simply never done.
Pillar One was the one pillar I’d partially built. I could execute techniques. What I couldn’t do was perform routines. And the gap between those two things, as Weber would demonstrate across the next five pillars, was enormous.
Pillar Two: Communicate Your Humanity
This is the pillar that hit me hardest.
The audience needs to know who you are as a person. Not your resume. Not your credentials. Not your biography. Your humanity. What kind of person are you? Do they like you? Do they trust you? Can they connect with you?
Weber’s point is that the audience’s experience of your magic is filtered through their experience of you. If they feel connected to you as a human being, the magic lands harder. If they feel nothing toward you — if you’re a neutral, interchangeable presenter of effects — the magic lands flat, regardless of how technically impressive it is.
This was my biggest deficit. I’d been performing as a technique-delivery system. The audience knew nothing about me. I revealed nothing about myself. My patter was functional: “Pick a card. Remember it. Put it back.” No personality. No warmth. No humor. No humanity. I was a pair of hands attached to some instructions.
The consulting parallel struck me hard. In client work, I’d learned years ago that the quality of your analysis doesn’t matter if the client doesn’t trust you and like you. Relationships precede results. The same principle, Weber was arguing, applies to performing. The audience’s connection to you as a person precedes their engagement with your material.
Pillar Three: Capture the Excitement
This pillar is about showing the audience why what you’re doing is special. Not just doing it. Framing it. Building anticipation. Creating the context that makes the impossible moment land with full force.
Weber makes a devastating observation: if you treat something as trivial, the audience will too. If you blaze through an impossible moment without pausing, without building, without signaling that something extraordinary is about to happen — the audience receives it as trivial. “Anything you treat as trivial will receive a trivial response.”
I thought about my early performances and cringed. I’d been blazing through effects like a consultant rushing through a slide deck. Effect, effect, effect, effect. No building. No pausing. No framing. A blur of competent technique that the audience had no framework for appreciating because I’d never told them or shown them why any of it was special.
The audience, Weber argues, has no reliable frame of reference for difficulty in magic. Unlike watching a gymnast or a musician, where laypeople have at least a rough sense of what’s hard, watching a magician gives the audience almost no information about what’s difficult and what’s easy. Everything looks either possible or impossible, and the distinction between a simple effect and a technically demanding one is invisible to the untrained eye.
This means the performer must do the work of establishing significance. You must show the audience that this moment matters. That what’s about to happen is extraordinary. That they should pay attention. If you don’t do that work, the moment disappears — swallowed by its own casualness.
Pillar Four: Control Every Moment
Every second of your performance counts. Every word. Every gesture. Every pause. Every transition. There is no downtime. There is no “filler that doesn’t matter.” If the audience is watching you — and they are, for the entire duration of your performance — then every moment either serves the experience or degrades it.
Weber’s standard here is uncompromising: if a moment isn’t producing rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment, it’s filler. And filler is the enemy of entertainment. Every “um,” every hesitation, every fumbled transition, every unnecessary sentence, every moment where you’re sorting props rather than engaging the audience — all of it erodes the experience you’re trying to create.
This was the pillar that connected most directly to my consulting background. In strategy presentations, every slide matters. Every sentence either advances the argument or dilutes it. The discipline of eliminating weak spots in a client presentation — cutting redundancies, tightening transitions, removing anything that doesn’t serve the core message — is exactly the discipline Weber demands for performance.
I’d been applying this discipline to my client work for years. I’d never once applied it to my magic.
Pillar Five: Eliminate Weak Spots
Edit ruthlessly. Every word that doesn’t serve the experience gets cut. Every sentence that doesn’t advance the routine gets deleted. Every routine that doesn’t earn its place in the set gets demolished.
Weber is brutal about this. He describes attending performances where he could identify the exact sentences that should be cut, the exact moments where the performer was treading water, the exact transitions that leaked energy. He ran workshops where he publicly critiqued fellow performers, line by line, moment by moment, identifying every weak spot in their material.
The principle is simple: your performance is only as strong as its weakest moment. An audience doesn’t average their experience — they remember the peaks and the valleys. One dead spot, one awkward transition, one unnecessary minute of setup can undermine an otherwise excellent show.
This resonated with a principle I knew from consulting: the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A brilliant strategy with one critical flaw isn’t ninety percent good. It’s failed. The flaw doesn’t get averaged away by the brilliance. It dominates. The same applies to performance.
Pillar Six: Build to a Climax
Every routine must build internally to its climax. And the entire act — the full performance from opening to closing — must build to its highest point. There is a crucial difference between having a climax and building to one.
Having a climax means your strongest moment exists somewhere in your show. Building to a climax means every moment before the climax is structured to intensify the audience’s engagement, so that when the climax arrives, it lands with maximum force. The trajectory is always upward. The emotional arc always ascends. The audience should feel, at the conclusion of your performance, that they’ve been taken on a journey that reached its highest point at the very end.
Weber uses the phrase “you can take your audience to the mountaintop only once.” The climax of your show is that mountaintop. Everything after it is descent. If your strongest moment is in the middle of your show and you follow it with weaker material, the audience experiences decline. They leave on a downslope, not a peak. The memory they carry is of descent, not of the summit.
This was organizational thinking applied to entertainment, and it clicked immediately. Structure your show the way you’d structure a strategy presentation: build the argument, layer the evidence, and deliver the conclusion at the point of maximum impact. Don’t put your best insight on slide three and then spend the next twenty slides on supporting data. Build to the insight. Make the audience ready for it. And when it arrives, it lands with full force because everything before it was preparation.
Why This Framework Changed Everything
What made the Six Pillars transformative for me wasn’t any single pillar. It was the framework itself — the organizational structure that turned an overwhelming, amorphous challenge (“be more entertaining”) into six specific, workable domains.
Before the Six Pillars, my development as a performer was directionless. I knew I needed to improve but I didn’t know at what. I’d try to improve my “stage presence” (whatever that meant) or my “connection with the audience” (however you measure that). The goals were vague and the path was invisible.
After the Six Pillars, I had a diagnostic tool. I could watch a performance — my own or someone else’s — and evaluate it against six specific criteria. Was the technique solid? Was the performer’s humanity visible? Was the excitement captured? Was every moment controlled? Were the weak spots eliminated? Did it build to a climax?
This specificity was everything. It turned development from a feeling into a process. Instead of “I need to be better,” I could say “My Pillar Two is weak — I’m not communicating enough about who I am as a person.” Instead of “That show didn’t land,” I could say “Pillar Three was missing — I didn’t build enough anticipation before the key moments.”
The framework also revealed, with uncomfortable clarity, where my deficits were. Pillar One was partially built — technique was solid, though rehearsal was not. Pillars Two through Six were essentially untouched. I had one out of six. And I’d been wondering why my performances felt flat.
The Consulting Analogy
In my consulting life, I’d never approach a complex problem without a framework. I’d never look at a company’s competitive position without segmenting the analysis. I’d never evaluate a strategy without criteria for assessment. Frameworks aren’t optional in consulting — they’re how you think.
And yet, for two years, I’d been approaching performance — which is arguably more complex than most consulting problems, because it involves real-time human psychology, physical execution, emotional management, and audience dynamics simultaneously — without any framework at all. I’d been navigating by feel, which for a person who’d discovered magic as an adult and had no intuitive performance instincts, was like navigating by feel in a city I’d never visited.
The Six Pillars gave me the map. Not the complete map — each pillar is deep enough to study for years, and I’m still studying them. But the high-level map that tells you where you are, where you need to go, and what the terrain looks like between here and there.
In the posts that follow, I’ll dive into each pillar in detail. The specific techniques, the mistakes I made, the breakthroughs that came from working on each one systematically. But I wanted to start with the overview, because the overview is where the transformation began.
Not with a specific technique or a specific performance tip. With a framework. A way of organizing the overwhelming complexity of live performance into categories you can actually work on.
If you’re analytically minded and you’ve been struggling to improve your performing without knowing where to focus, a good framework might be the most powerful tool you’ll ever find. It was for me.
It was the roadmap I’d been searching for since the first time I stood in front of an audience and watched technically flawless magic produce emotionally nothing.