The trick we didn’t notice

A magician once said that magic is “making the hard look easy, and making the easy look pretty.” Of course, this conjuring of appearance depends on a trick. And part of the pleasure of watching a magic show lies in trying to spot it. There is a quiet paradox here: we want to see the trick because solving the puzzle is satisfying, yet we also don’t want to see it, because we want to be impressed. After all, no one attends a magic show where the tricks are obvious.

I had reason to think about this at work. Isn’t much of what we do exactly that—making the hard look easy, making the easy look pretty? In this sense, work is not so different from performing magic. But there is an important difference: in work and in life, the onlookers are rarely trying to spot the trick.

Recently, I ran a series of lunchtime talks at work on a fairly specialised topic. It was great fun, and I think I did them reasonably well. When I later told friends and colleagues that the five talks drew more than 750 attendances, they were surprised—as one would expect. What surprised me, however, was that no one asked the obvious question: How? How did so many people attend voluntarily?

I confess I was a little disappointed. I felt like a magician eager to reveal the trick—but no one asked. Had they done so, I would have told them that I wrote a script to retrieve around 800 staff titles and team names, and then sent tailored invitations automatically. I used this approach for two of the sessions, and each time received hundreds of personal replies. It took an entire afternoon to respond to them all, but it made a significant difference to attendance.

Many of the people I spoke to are intelligent and experienced, which made their lack of curiosity all the more puzzling.

And then I realised I was no different.

One of the best staff I ever worked with later moved to another team. After a single presentation to a new director, she was invited—without interview—to join his team. To be sure, it was unusual—but I thought little of it. She was exceptional; of course she was noticed.

Only later did it occur to me that this was not an ordinary decision. The team she joined was unusually healthy for our context: leadership was engaged, the culture was strong, and people were thoughtful. At some point, she mentioned that the team regularly set aside time simply to talk—about the world, about local issues, with no agenda other than thinking together. That was the moment it clicked.

“Anyone who hires someone without an interview, based on a single presentation, cannot be an ordinary director,” I said to her. “How did I not see this?”

Maybe there was a trick I hadn’t noticed.

There is never something from nothing. A surprise should not leave us seated; it should provoke the question why? And yet, so often, we leave the question unasked, the surprise unexplored. “One loving heart sets another on fire.” But when we encounter those rare individuals whose heart draws us close with their warmth, we rarely ask: where does the flame come from?

What’s surprising is not that surprising things happen. What’s surprising is that we encounter them, express admiration, and inquire no further. It is as though we live in a world full of magic tricks, and it never occurs to us to ask, What’s the trick here?

I was humbled to realise that I had failed to recognise something out of the ordinary. Identifying cause and effect should be our bread and butter. Yet here was an effect whose cause I had overlooked. In some cases, that failure is merely embarrassing. In others, it may carry greater consequences.

I suspect that the ability to notice when something doesn’t add up—when a magic trick is being performed, when there is something worth following through—is itself a skill. And not a simple one. It seems to require a combination of wonder, intellect, and, above all, attention.

This is a skill leaders especially need. How often do new leaders enter an organisation and never ask, Why is this place working at all? And how often does that omission end in loss?

Leaders are focused on chasing effects. Yet often, leadership failure is not the inability to produce effects, but the inability to recognise their causes.

When we walk into a magic show, we know it is a magic show. Perhaps it is precisely that awareness that prompts us to look for the trick.

If so, then maybe living in the world is like walking into a magic show—having forgotten, somehow, that we are already in one.