I want to tell you about two very different shows I performed in the same month.
The first was at a corporate event in Linz. About sixty people. A product launch for a mid-size tech company. I had my set dialed in — five strong pieces, well-rehearsed, reliably impressive. I walked on stage, performed piece number one. Applause. I transitioned to piece number two. Applause. Piece number three. Applause. Four. Five. Bigger applause at the end. I thanked them, walked off, and the event coordinator told me it was great.
Two weeks later, I performed at a similar event in Graz. Similar audience size. Similar corporate setting. But I had restructured the set in between. Same five pieces — I had not changed a single effect. What I had changed was everything around them. The transitions. The through-line. The way each piece related to the next. The story that held the whole thing together.
The Graz audience did not clap politely after each piece. They laughed during transitions. They referenced earlier moments during later ones. At the end, several people came up and talked about the show as a whole — not as individual tricks, but as an experience. One woman said, “It felt like you were taking us somewhere.”
Same effects. Same performer. Same skill level. Completely different audience experience. And the difference was this: in Linz, I had performed a list. In Graz, I had performed a journey.
The List Problem
Let me be honest about what a list show looks like, because I performed lists for longer than I care to admit.
A list show is a collection of individual effects performed in sequence. Each effect has its own setup, its own build, its own climax. When one effect ends, the performer resets — physically, verbally, energetically — and begins the next one. The connection between effects is purely chronological: this one comes after that one because that is the order I put them in.
From the performer’s perspective, a list feels fine. Each piece works. The audience reacts to each piece. The transitions are clean. Nothing goes wrong. What more could you want?
From the audience’s perspective, a list feels like watching someone demonstrate skills. It is impressive but not immersive. You are an observer, not a traveler. Each effect exists in its own bubble, and when it pops, you return to neutral before the next bubble begins. There is no accumulation. No momentum. No sense that what you are watching is building toward something larger than any individual moment.
Ken Weber describes this with characteristic directness when he writes about the difference between a show and a series of tricks. A series of tricks, he argues, is like reading a dictionary — each entry is interesting in isolation, but there is no narrative pulling you forward. A show, by contrast, is like reading a novel — each chapter connects to the last, builds on what came before, and makes you want to know what happens next.
When I first read that comparison, I felt a sting of recognition. My set was a dictionary. Alphabetically organized, perhaps. Well-defined entries. But nobody has ever stayed up until two in the morning because they could not stop reading a dictionary.
What Makes Something Feel Like a Journey
I spent a lot of time after that realization analyzing what separates a journey from a list, both in performance and in the business presentations I had been giving for years. And I identified four elements that create the feeling of forward motion through a connected experience.
The first is a through-line. A through-line is the thread that connects everything in the show to a single larger idea. It does not have to be explicit. It does not have to be announced. But it has to exist, and the audience has to feel it, even if they cannot name it.
In my consulting work, the through-line is usually the central argument of the presentation. Every slide, every data point, every anecdote serves that argument. Nothing is included that does not advance the thesis. This is basic presentation design. But somehow, when I started performing magic, I forgot everything I knew about presentation design and just strung effects together because they were all things I could do.
The through-line for my restructured show became a question: what is possible when you pay close attention? That question — never stated so bluntly, but woven through every transition and every setup — gave the audience a reason to connect the pieces. Each effect was not just a demonstration of a new skill. It was another exploration of the same question from a different angle.
The second element is callbacks. A callback is when you reference something from earlier in the show during a later moment. In comedy, callbacks are one of the most powerful tools for creating the feeling that a set is a unified experience rather than a collection of jokes. The same principle applies to any performance.
I started planting small details in early effects that would become relevant in later ones. A word. A gesture. An object that appeared incidental in piece two but turned out to be central to piece four. When the audience recognized the connection — when they had that moment of “Wait, that is from earlier” — their experience of the show shifted. They were no longer watching isolated moments. They were tracking a narrative, and the callbacks rewarded their attention.
The third element is escalation. Not just getting bigger or more impressive — which I explored in earlier posts about sequencing — but escalating the relationship between the performer and the audience. In the first piece, I am a stranger demonstrating something interesting. By the third piece, we have a history. We have shared references. We have inside jokes. By the fifth piece, we are in this together — the audience is invested not just in what I am doing but in us as a temporary community experiencing something together.
This escalation of relationship is what transforms a list into a journey. A list treats every audience interaction as a first meeting. A journey remembers where we have been and builds on the shared experience.
The fourth element is transitions. This is the most mechanical of the four, but it might be the most important, because bad transitions are what break the journey feeling most immediately.
A list transition sounds like this: “Thank you. For my next piece, I need a volunteer.” Reset. Restart. New context. Zero continuity.
A journey transition sounds like this: “You know, that moment — when the card appeared in your pocket — reminds me of something that happened the first time I tried this. And it connects to what we are about to do next, because…” The end of one piece flows into the beginning of the next. The seam is invisible. The audience is carried forward without ever being set down and picked up again.
The Consulting Parallel
I should have seen this sooner, because I had been designing journeys in my consulting work for years without calling them that.
A good strategy presentation does not present findings as a bullet list. It tells the story of a problem. Here is where we are. Here is how we got here. Here is what we discovered when we looked deeper. Here is what it means. Here is what we do about it. And here is what the future looks like if we do it right.
Every consulting framework I have ever used is, at its core, a journey framework. McKinsey’s situation-complication-resolution. The problem-solution-impact arc. The before-and-after transformation story. These are all structures designed to take an audience from one place to another, creating a sense of forward motion and inevitable conclusion.
When I realized that magic performance and business presentations share the same fundamental architecture, something clicked. I was not learning a new skill. I was applying a skill I already had in a new context. The skill was narrative design. The context was live entertainment instead of boardroom strategy.
This realization — that the journey principle is universal — is one of the most valuable insights I have gained from studying performance craft. It applies to presentations, to conversations, to written communication, to teaching, to selling, to leading. Any time you need to take someone from where they are to where you want them to be, you are designing a journey. And the principles are the same: through-line, callbacks, escalation, and seamless transitions.
How I Restructured My Set
Let me walk you through what I actually did, because the theory is only useful if it translates into practice.
I laid out all my pieces on the hotel room desk — index cards, one per effect. Each card had the effect name, the approximate length, the emotional register (comedy, wonder, drama), and the audience interaction type (hands-off, one volunteer, full audience participation).
Then I asked myself: what connects these? What is the story of this set? Not the story within each piece, but the story of all of them together. What is the journey?
The answer did not come immediately. I shuffled the cards for two nights in Innsbruck, trying different arrangements, looking for the thread. And eventually I found it — not by inventing a theme and imposing it, but by noticing a theme that already existed in the material. Every piece in my set, I realized, was about the gap between what you expect and what actually happens. Expectations being set up and then subverted. Reality turning out to be different from assumptions.
Once I saw that thread, the restructuring became almost obvious. The opening piece introduces the idea of assumptions. The second piece deepens it. The third piece adds a personal dimension. The fourth piece turns it on its head. The closer resolves it — the ultimate subversion of expectation, the biggest gap between what the audience assumes and what actually happens.
I wrote transitions that made the connections explicit without being heavy-handed. I added callbacks — a phrase from piece one that reappears in piece four, an object that transforms meaning between the second and fifth effects. I designed the escalation so that each piece builds on the relationship established in the previous one.
The result was not a different show in terms of material. It was a radically different show in terms of experience. The Graz performance proved it, and every performance since has confirmed it.
The Journey Test
I now apply a simple test to every set I design. I call it the journey test, and it has only one question: if the audience described this show to a friend, would they describe a sequence of things that happened, or would they describe an experience that took them somewhere?
“He did this card thing, and then he did this mind-reading thing, and then he did this thing with an envelope” — that is a list.
“He started by asking us what we expected, and then he kept surprising us with how wrong we were, and by the end something happened that I still cannot explain” — that is a journey.
The difference is not in the effects. The difference is in the architecture around the effects. The through-line. The callbacks. The escalation. The transitions. The invisible structure that transforms a collection of impressive moments into a single, unified, forward-moving experience.
I wish I had understood this earlier. I wish I had not spent months performing lists when I had everything I needed to perform journeys. The irony is that my consulting career had taught me all of this already. I just had not recognized the translation.
But maybe that is its own kind of journey — the long, circuitous path from knowing something in one context to understanding it in another. The through-line was always there. I just had to find it.