I am, at my core, a consultant. Whatever else I’ve become in the process of building a second identity around magic and performance, the analytical habits formed by fifteen years of strategy work don’t disappear when I step onto a stage. They adapt.
One of the most genuinely useful tools I’ve transferred from the consulting world into the performance world is the simplest possible one: drawing the graph before you do the work.
In strategic planning, you map the desired outcome and work backward to understand what intermediate states need to exist for that outcome to be reachable. You make the shape of the thing visible before you commit to building it, so you can see the gaps and flat zones and missing connectors before they become problems in execution.
I started doing this for shows and keynotes a few years ago, and it’s changed how I design them more significantly than almost any other practice change I’ve made.
The Graph Is Embarrassingly Simple
You need a piece of paper and a pen. Or a whiteboard, or a notes app, or anything that can hold a drawn graph.
X-axis: time. This can be abstract (beginning, middle, end) or specific (minutes 0-10, 10-25, 25-40 for a forty-minute show). The more specific, the more useful.
Y-axis: emotional intensity. Not information density. Not content volume. Emotional intensity — how much the audience is feeling, moment by moment. A scale of one to ten works; anything that registers relative intensity works.
For each major moment in your planned show or presentation, estimate the intensity it should produce and mark a point on the graph. Connect the points. Now look at the shape.
The shape is your arc. And the shape will tell you things that the content outline cannot.
What the Graph Reveals
I drew the graph for a keynote I’d been performing for about six months and thought was in good shape. The graph showed three things I hadn’t seen.
First: the emotional intensity plateaued for about twelve minutes in the middle of the show. Not a dip — a flat. Every moment in that stretch was producing roughly the same intensity as the ones immediately before and after it. I’d been moving through material I found genuinely interesting, and the material was fine, but the arc wasn’t climbing. I was sustaining rather than building, which meant the audience wasn’t getting what they needed to stay fully engaged. The flat zones are invisible in a content outline because everything looks equally valid. On a graph, flatness is immediately obvious.
Second: I had two near-simultaneous peaks very close together. Two high-intensity moments without a dip between them meant the second peak didn’t have the contrast it needed to feel like a peak. If you don’t descend before you climb, the next ascent can’t feel like a genuine rise. The graph showed me that I’d accidentally stacked my two strongest moments too close together, which meant they were competing rather than building.
Third: the closing was strong but arrived too quickly from the final build. There wasn’t enough time between the climax and the close for the emotional intensity to begin naturally settling before I redirected it into the closing frame. I was rushing the resolution.
Three structural problems, none of which appeared in the content outline, all of which were immediately legible in the graph.
The Desired Shape
What the emotional arc of a well-designed show or keynote should look like, in broad terms:
It starts higher than zero — the opening creates immediate engagement, not a gradual warm-up. It rises with periodic dips that don’t fall below the opening level — each dip is shallower than the previous one, and each subsequent rise goes higher. The climax is genuinely the highest point of the entire arc — if the graph shows anything higher anywhere else in the show, the climax isn’t actually the climax. The closing descends from the climax but doesn’t collapse — it holds enough elevation that the final impression is of a resolved high state rather than an exhausted one.
This shape is familiar from narrative because it is narrative. The dramatic arc — inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution — is a description of emotional intensity over time. The graph makes the narrative logic visible.
Shows that feel structurally right almost always have this shape. Shows that feel slightly off usually have a graph that deviates from it in one of the ways I described above: flat zones, stacked peaks, a climax that isn’t actually the highest point, a close that collapses.
Drawing the Graph for a Magic Show
For a forty-five-minute magic show, I draw the graph segment by segment.
Each effect or sequence gets a portion of the timeline and an estimated intensity range: where it starts emotionally and where it ends. Transitions between effects appear on the graph too — most transitions are dips, and the graph makes visible how long and how deep each dip runs.
The thing I look for first: what is the highest-intensity point in the whole show? Is it where I intended the climax to be? Sometimes the graph reveals that what I thought was the climax is actually being outscored by an earlier piece — which means either the earlier piece needs to be redesigned or the intended climax needs to be strengthened.
The thing I look for second: are there any stretches of more than five or six minutes at the same intensity level? These are flat zones. They feel comfortable during construction and drag during performance.
The thing I look for third: what is the intensity at the opening, and what is it at the close? If the close is lower than the opening — if the graph shows a downward overall trend — the audience will leave feeling slightly deflated. If the close matches or slightly exceeds the opening, the overall impression is of an experience that delivered on its early promise.
When the Plan Meets the Room
The graph is a planning tool, not a performance script. Shows respond to audiences, and the real arc of any given performance will deviate from the planned arc in ways you can’t fully anticipate.
What the graph does is give you a target shape. When you can feel, in performance, that the energy is staying flat when it should be climbing, you know from your pre-show planning what the target was and can make adjustments — push harder, add an interaction, vary the pace, find the moment that gets things moving again.
Without the target, you’re just feeling that something’s off and not knowing what the desired state looks like. With the target, you know where you should be, which gives you something to navigate toward.
The Fifteen Minutes That Change Everything
Drawing the arc takes about fifteen minutes for a show I know well. It takes longer for new material, because I have to think more carefully about what each moment is actually going to produce emotionally — not what I’d like it to produce, but what it’s designed to produce.
That fifteen minutes of visual planning has consistently saved me from structural problems that would otherwise have shown up in performance, where they’re visible to the audience and much more expensive to fix.
Draw the graph. Look at the shape. If the shape isn’t what you’d want — if it’s flat in the middle, or the climax isn’t the peak, or the opening is too low — fix the architecture before you get in the room.
The audience will feel the shape even if they never see the graph.