The Magic of Magic: How Literal Magic Shaped My Communication Style
I remember it was a pleasant summer day in Bedfordshire, the English county where I first began my career in tech. There I was, standing before a group of maybe 4 or 5 college students, pack of Bicycle playing cards in hand, performing a classic "production" trick. A volunteer from the group of spectators would shuffle the deck of cards and pick one out, show it to their friends, shuffle it back into the deck and hand the deck back off to me. With a flourish, and some intervening "patter" about how I could "feel the temperature difference" in the card they'd chosen, I'd then pick out their card from the deck, despite it apparently being impossible for me to know which one they'd chosen. Not the most mind-blowing effect in my repertoire (you never lead with those), but a good solid warm-up in what was usually a 3-part routine. On any other day, I'd follow up with some mental magic (or mentalism as it's sometimes called in magic circles) and a high-impact "finisher"—something that would leave my audience walking away wondering aloud "How on earth did he do that?!"
This time, however, would be different.
A Perfect Storm
Pictured: one of my decks of cards (red Tally-Ho circle backs) on my green velvet close-up mat.
It wasn't my first time performing street magic, but I was already beginning to work up some anxiety about how this particular performance was going. As any street magician will tell you, rule number one before starting any close-up magic routine in a public space is to choose your audience carefully, and it was in this regard that I was beginning to suspect I'd already slipped up.
One of my spectators was, in performer's parlance, extremely "adversarial". He had already changed his mind after choosing a card for the first time, announcing that he thought I'd "cheated by peeking", grabbing the pack back from my hands and insisting on shuffling and choosing a different card. As he did so, he minutely inspected the backs of my cards in case they were "marked" and turned his back to me while he picked one out.
None of this was a problem for the trick, of course, but it's spectators like this that you really want to avoid as a performer if you can, for everyone's sake. You know you've chosen your audience well when they suspend disbelief for a moment, relax and allow themselves to be entertained. When your audience is on your side, everybody wins—you get to do what you're passionate about as a performer, and they get a moment of wonder as you seem to defy the laws of reality. On the flip side, highly adversarial spectators often have an identity tied to being the centre of attention and react negatively to the feeling of being "upstaged" when a performer enters the picture. In other words—they really want you to mess up.
As I took my deck of cards back from the spectator, I made up my mind that I was going to bail early and move on. As I did so, however, my nerves betrayed me, and a few cards slipped from my grasp and tumbled to the floor.
How on earth am I going to salvage this!?
This sort of thing happens often in street magic, where the audience dynamic, weather conditions, and your nerves on any particular day are all pretty unpredictable. For this reason, I always kept a canned line on standby to defuse the awkward blend of pity and derision from the audience that usually follows when I fumble my deck of cards and end up scrambling around on the floor picking them up— "Ugh, is it just gravity? Or does the earth suck?"
As a performer who has just fumbled, your job is to frame that fumble before someone else frames it for you. In this case, this little play on words takes a moment of genuine awkwardness and transforms it. Suddenly, I'm no longer a failing magician to be pitied, but another human, taking life as it comes, who sometimes enjoys a corny pun and, most importantly, hasn't yet given up on the performance. To an audience, this can be weirdly affirming and empathy-building—if I can make a mistake while doing a magic trick in front of strangers and bounce back from it without asking anyone's permission, maybe they can be kinder to themselves too next time they have an awkward moment in a public place.
By the time the giggling has subsided, I'm back on my feet with my complete deck of cards in hand. I turn straight to my adversarial spectator.
"You strike me as someone who knows their magic. I bet you have a few card tricks up your sleeve too, right?"
The spectator looks at me suspiciously, but nods. "My uncle showed me a few, and I watch The Masked Magician."
"Then I'm not going to waste your time with a trick you'll figure out straight away. Let's go big." I look at the adversarial spectator one more time. "And if you can see how this is done, do me a favour and keep it between just us magicians, eh? Let the audience wonder!"
"Watch closely."
They lean in.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not too closely though. Careful!"
Instinctively, they lean back, and as I do so, I execute a spring, squeezing the cards in my hand and releasing them into a fountain two or three feet in the air. As cards rain down, I reach out and pluck one from midair. I turn it around to face the spectator. It's his card.
"I dropped one or two, so might as well drop them all. Except this one of course."
The audience loved it, my adversarial spectator went away with a smile on his face boasting about how he totally knew how I did it but wouldn't tell, and the performance comes to a natural end as I wave goodbye to the spectators, pick my cards up from the pavement, and start sizing up my next audience.
So, what?
I sat down to write this article after chatting to a colleague about stakeholder management in cybersecurity. How do you develop the skills to convince people, manage their expectations, and earn their trust through sheer persuasiveness and clarity of communication rather than manipulation? There's mentorship, sure, and I've been lucky enough to have some amazing mentors throughout the years, but I recently realised that I started building the foundations of my stakeholder management skills during my time performing magic in my college years, and I'm going to start recommending the folks I mentor do the same.
Why? Let me break it down.
The Misdirection Parallel
During a magic performance, misdirection is vital. Your job as a performer is to direct the audience's attention where you want it to go, but not in any sort of way that draws suspicion. You might, for example, ask an audience member to choose a card, proffering a fan of cards with one hand, while performing some sleight of hand with the other while the rest of the audience is focused on the spectator's choice of card.
This isn't something you can force. You can't suddenly shout "Oh, look over there!" and point over the spectator's shoulders. You need to swim with the current—what is your audience naturally paying attention to right now, and where does attention need to be directed towards at this moment to maximise the power of the effect?
Misdirection isn't deception for the sake of it, but rather directing attention where it matters. I cannot emphasise enough what a make-or-break this is in meetings with executive stakeholders, particularly as the cybersecurity expert in the room. For example, give this a read through:
"Yes, we found 3 medium and 12 low-severity vulnerabilities while security testing the product, but the mediums are already queued up for remediation in this sprint cycle, and the 12 lows were fixed by a version update of some of our third-party code. Of the 2 high-severity findings, one was newly disclosed by an external security research firm, and we patched it straight away. One was a developer mistake that should really have been caught in review. We've brought this to the attention of the team, patched the issue and learned from the experience, but vulnerable code will always occasionally slip past human reviewers. Let's look at a shortlist of some automated solutions we can use to catch issues like this before they make it to production."
Notice that we could have framed this as:
"We found 17 vulnerabilities! We've fixed the worst of them, but it could totally happen again. We have to do something about this."
The only difference between these two versions of the same story is the skill with which attention is managed, and where it is directed.
Build Around the Effect
Magicians very often elect to design their effects backwards. What do you want your spectators to experience? Take this as your North star, then engineer the how. This keeps focus on what actually matters, on what defines our success, rather than distracted by implementation details.
Similarly, when managing business stakeholders as the cybersecurity expert in the room, lead with business outcome. When and if you get questions, begin to peel back the mechanics only as far as needed. Most people intuitively understand that over-explaining technical implementation details can alienate, bore and frustrate the room, but far less obvious (and more insidious) is how deeply it undermines the trust that's so essential to your role as a cybersecurity leader. Think of a car salesperson who invites you underneath the car to check out how shiny and new the rear axle is, explaining how it's definitely not crooked and how even if it was crooked, the fantastic suspension would more than compensate for it. Do you trust this person?
As a magician, do I open with "This is a completely normal deck of cards and I have nothing up my sleeves."? While it might be a stereotype, the answer in the real world is absolutely not.
I earned my PhD in cybersecurity, and spent my career in cybersecurity leadership so that others in the boardroom don't need to do these things. Why would I undermine that by leading with implementation details?
Confidence and Pace
Here's a strange question, but bear with me: If you're sitting alone, in the privacy of your own home, drinking a cup of coffee and reading a book, are you feeling, in that moment, confident?
This question sounds so strange to most people because confidence doesn't really come into it. When nothing can really go wrong, nobody has a confidence problem. When there are actual table stakes, that's when confidence enters the picture.
As a magician, my short-term table stakes are messing up and embarrassing myself in front of my spectators. If it becomes a long-term issue, I risk becoming "That guy that tries to do magic but always messes it up." I lose my authority, and even my magician title, in the eyes of my audience. I also have the luxury of a different audience (and a fresh start) almost every time I perform. Not so in business.
We're fighting a formidable opponent in these situations: our biology. The same mechanisms that prepared us so well for threats from the natural world actively work against us, whether during a street magic performance or in the boardroom. Raised heart rate, sweating, anxiety, brain activity through the roof, all factors that are more likely to tank your big pitch, incident response war room or crisis comms with the board than do anything to help it.
When you're charged up and anxious, you'll rush and stumble, when you rush and stumble, you lose people, when you lose people, you'll feel it in the room which will, in turn, make you even more charged up and anxious. Like swimming against a rip tide, pushing against this cycle is useless—you'll only tire yourself out and make things much worse. You need to swim parallel to the problem.
If you're uncontrollably shaking or sweating, if you were up way too late last night working, if there are technical issues, frame and own it straight away:
"Folks, I've just realised Office 365 hasn't synced the latest version of the deck to my laptop so it's missing the architecture diagram. We could reschedule, but I'm also happy to grab a whiteboard marker, sketch for now and send through the updated deck afterwards. Sorry about this, I should have caught it earlier."
Or…
"I had a double shot of espresso in my coffee this morning folks so if I seem a bit wired, it's because I am! Call me out if I'm rushing things."
Notice how we're parallel to the problem now, and thus able to get ahead of it. Go directly against the problem, and we fail before we even begin. For example, we could have tried to muddle through without the architecture diagram and hastily grabbed a marker when challenged on it (looking unprepared) or quivered and stumbled our way through the presentation with no explanation (inviting pity and concern). Instead, I come through as a human being that, while imperfect, is adaptable enough to pull through.
Handling Skepticism
While we're discussing stressors, there are few things more likely to spike anxiety levels like a resistant, distracted audience that may even assume they already know more than you, and therefore don't need to pay attention.
The temptation in situations like this is to demand respect, agreement, compliance and attention. "Hey sorry could everyone please listen?" When you've already lost your audience never, ever works to gain them back. All of these things must be earned and maintained throughout the interaction.
Let's call back to the performance we opened this article with. How did we deal with that adversarial spectator? How does this translate to dealing with stakeholders in a business context as a cybersecurity leader? Well…
We framed any fumbles before they did. We already talked about this. By owning our mistakes we can control their fallout. Denial is the ultimate surrender of control.
We offered them respect, understanding and affirmation. We express to them that they clearly know their stuff. Their credibility is not in question, and their concern/stance is reasonable. In doing this, we reassure them we're going to work with them, not against them.
We brought them on-side. We aren't adversaries, but contemporaries with the same goal. "Just us magicians" can just as easily be "just us technical leads" or "just us who work with the product team day-to-day".
We asked them to work with us, and allowed them to choose to do so (or not). We didn't make the adversarial spectator swear not to reveal the trick to their friends. We didn't even pause for them to answer. We trusted their actions to speak for themselves, and waited for things to pan out.
Wrapping up
If you're someone (or aspire to be someone) who spends much of their workday communicating with stakeholders in a business context, I heartily recommend picking up a deck of cards, learning a few magic tricks (YouTube is great for this) and occasionally turning amateur magician at parties, conferences, get-togethers or any other opportunity that might find its way to you. If you feel that shock of performer's nerves the first time you have a table full of people inspecting your every move as you shuffle your deck of cards and confidently announce that you can feel the temperature difference in the card they picked, good. Embrace it, manage it, direct it.
When you're in your next big presentation and you feel that same thing hit you, you'll know what to do.
Author's note: I write all my articles myself, from scratch (even the em-dashes!). I use AI for proofreading, summarisation of the article for social links etc. but never for the piece itself. This is because I enjoy writing very much and want my personality to come through unobstructed in my work.