In my professional life as a strategy consultant, I am trained to think in phases. Discovery, then design, then implementation, then evaluation. You move through the phases sequentially. Each one builds on the previous one. When you reach the end, the project is complete. Move on to the next one.
I brought this same thinking to building my stage show, and it failed me almost immediately.
My plan was straightforward. Phase one: plan the show. Choose the routines, design the structure, write the scripts. Phase two: rehearse. Drill the material until it was performance-ready. Phase three: perform. Take it live. Phase four: fix whatever needed fixing. Then maintain.
The problem with this plan was not that it was wrong, exactly. Each of those activities is necessary. The problem was that it was linear. And building a show, I learned, is not a linear process.
The framework that finally made sense of what I was experiencing came from John Graham’s Stage By Stage. He calls it the Three Ps: Planning, Performing, and Perfecting. The insight that changed everything for me was not the framework itself but his insistence that these three activities are not sequential steps. They are simultaneous, ongoing, and permanent. You never finish any of them because all three are always happening at the same time.
Planning Never Ends
When I talk about planning a show, most people think I mean the initial design phase. Choosing which routines to include. Deciding the order. Writing the opening script. Mapping out the audience participation moments. Selecting music.
All of that is planning, and all of it happens before your first performance. But planning does not stop when the first performance happens. It continues, informed by everything you learn from performing and perfecting, and it never reaches a final state.
Here is what planning looks like six months into performing a show. You have a routine in the middle of your act that consistently gets a moderate response but never gets a strong one. You have tried adjusting the scripting. You have tried different audience interaction approaches. The piece works, but it does not shine. Planning, at this point, means asking whether this routine belongs in this position, or whether swapping it with another routine would change the energy flow of the show. It means considering whether a different opening line for that routine might reframe the audience’s expectations. It means thinking about whether the routine before it is leaving the audience in the wrong emotional register.
Planning also means developing new material. Not because your show is broken, but because you have identified a gap that you did not know existed until you performed the show dozens of times. Maybe you realized that your show has three audience participation pieces in a row and the pacing suffers. Maybe you noticed that you do not have a single silent, music-driven piece, and the audience needs a break from processing your words. Maybe you discovered that your closing is good but not great, and you have been thinking about what kind of piece would end the show at the level you want.
This kind of planning is fundamentally different from the initial design phase. It is planning informed by performance data. It is planning that responds to real audience reactions rather than theoretical assumptions. And it is planning that never stops, because the show is never in a state where no improvement is possible.
Graham puts it simply: begin from where you are. You already have everything you need to start. But starting is not the same as finishing, because there is no finishing. There is only the next iteration of the plan.
Performing Is Not Just Execution
Before I started performing regularly, I thought of performance as execution. You have a plan. You rehearse the plan. You execute the plan in front of an audience. The performance is the implementation of something that was designed elsewhere.
This is wrong. Performance is not just execution. It is a source of information that is unavailable from any other activity.
When I perform my show, I am not simply running a program. I am in a live environment where variables I could never have anticipated interact with my prepared material. The audience is different every night. The room is different. The energy at the start is different. The volunteer I select responds in ways I could not have predicted. The joke that killed last week lands soft tonight, and the throwaway line I barely noticed gets the biggest laugh of the evening.
All of this is information. And all of it feeds back into planning and perfecting.
The performing phase of the Three Ps is also where you discover things about yourself that you cannot discover in any other way. You discover your natural rhythms. You learn where your energy rises and falls over the course of forty-five minutes. You find out whether you are the kind of performer who peaks early and sustains, or the kind who builds slowly. You learn how you respond to unexpected moments — whether you freeze, adapt, or instinctively turn them into comedy.
Graham writes that the audience will introduce you to yourself. Their reactions and comments will let you know what works best about you and your personality. This is one of those statements that sounds like motivational fluff until you experience it. The first time an audience member tells you after a show that they loved a moment you thought was inconsequential — a throwaway gesture, a spontaneous comment, a look on your face that you were not even aware of — you understand what he means. The audience is a mirror that shows you aspects of your performing self that are invisible from the inside.
Perfecting Is a Cycle, Not a Destination
The word “perfecting” is misleading because it implies a destination. You perfect something, and then it is perfect, and then you are done. In practice, perfecting is the most open-ended of the three Ps. It is the ongoing process of making the show better, one small change at a time, with no endpoint.
When I first started performing my stage show, I was making major structural changes after every few performances. Swapping routine order. Cutting pieces entirely. Adding new ones. Rewriting opening and closing scripts. The changes were large because the problems were large.
As the show matured, the changes got smaller. A word change in a transitional sentence. An adjustment in the timing of a reveal. A modification in how I position a volunteer so the audience can see their reaction more clearly. The shift to a slightly different piece of music at a specific moment. These are tiny adjustments, but they compound. Over dozens of performances, the accumulation of small refinements transforms the show in ways that are invisible in the moment but dramatic over time.
Graham describes a routine that he has performed twenty-five thousand times that is still being refined. A routine that initially ran seven minutes now runs twenty to twenty-five minutes after twenty years of development. Not because he added more magic to it, but because the comedy, the audience interaction, the timing, the jokes, the bits — all the elements that make a routine a living thing — developed and expanded through continuous perfecting.
I am nowhere near twenty-five thousand performances. But I can see the trajectory. My opening routine has changed more times than I can count. Not in its core structure — the effect is the same — but in every element of its presentation. The script has been rewritten half a dozen times. The physical staging has been adjusted. The music cue has been changed. The callback that ties it to my closing was added after I noticed a thematic connection during a performance that I had not planned for.
Each change is small. The cumulative effect is enormous.
The Cycle in Practice
Let me describe what the Three Ps look like in practice, in a single week of my performing life.
Monday. I perform my show at a corporate event in Vienna. During the show, I notice that a particular transition — the moment between my second and third routines — consistently creates a small energy dip. The audience does not disengage, but the momentum sags slightly before I regain it. After the show, I make a note on my phone.
Tuesday. On a train to Salzburg for a consulting engagement, I think about the transition problem. This is planning. I consider three options: cutting the transition and connecting the routines more directly, adding a comedic bit during the transition to maintain energy, or swapping the order of the second and third routines to create a different energy flow. I write brief notes on each option.
Wednesday. Nothing related to the show happens. I am deep in client work. But somewhere in the background of my mind, the transition problem is marinating. When I am walking to dinner, a line pops into my head that might work as a bridge between the two routines. I type it into my phone. This is the subconscious planning that Graham describes — thinking about your show before, during, and after, even when you are not actively working on it.
Thursday. I rehearse the new transition line in my hotel room in Salzburg. I try it three different ways, with different emphases and different physical positions. This is a tiny act of perfecting, informed by the planning I did earlier in the week.
Friday. I perform the show again at a private function. I try the new transition line. It works better than the old one, but the timing is not right yet — I am delivering it too quickly, not giving the audience time to settle into the new energy. I make a note.
Saturday. I adjust the timing and rehearse again. I also notice that the new transition has created a small problem downstream — the third routine now starts at a higher energy level than before, which means the build within that routine needs to be recalibrated. This is the interconnected nature of the Three Ps. A change in one element ripples through others.
This cycle never ends. And that, I have come to realize, is not a bug. It is the feature.
Why the Linear Model Fails
The reason my initial linear approach failed is that it assumed the show could be designed fully before being performed, and fixed fully after being performed. Both assumptions are wrong.
You cannot design a show fully before performing it because you do not have the information you need. The audience’s response, the room’s energy, the thousand small variables that only exist in live performance — all of this is design-relevant data that is unavailable until you are on stage. Planning without performing is designing in the dark.
And you cannot fix a show after performing it because fixing one thing changes other things. A show is not a machine with independent components that can be serviced individually. It is an ecosystem where every element affects every other element. Fixing the transition creates a new issue with pacing. Fixing the pacing changes the energy profile. Changing the energy profile affects the audience’s readiness for the closing. You are never done because the system is always in motion.
The Three Ps model accounts for this. By treating planning, performing, and perfecting as simultaneous and ongoing activities, it acknowledges the reality that show development is iterative, not linear. You plan while you perform. You perform while you perfect. You perfect while you plan the next iteration. The three activities are always running in parallel, each one feeding the others.
The Consultant’s Parallel
There is a parallel here to the work I do as a strategy consultant, though it took me a while to see it. The best strategy work is not linear either. Discovery, design, and implementation do not happen in neat phases. They overlap. Implementation generates new insights that feed back into design. Design constraints emerge during discovery. The process is iterative, and the clients who understand this produce better results than the clients who insist on a rigid phase-gate approach.
Building a show is the same. The performers who produce the best work are the ones who embrace the simultaneity of the Three Ps. They are always planning, always performing, always perfecting, and they understand that the three activities are not competing for their attention but collaborating in the development of something that is, as Graham writes, “a living, breathing thing.”
The show is never done. The Three Ps never stop. And the performers who accept this — who find energy in the ongoing process rather than frustration in the absence of a finish line — are the ones who build shows that get better year after year, performance after performance, until what started as a collection of routines becomes something that feels inevitable and whole.
Start all three at once. Plan what you can. Perform what you have. Perfect what you learn. And repeat.