Cognitive Design

Magic is a pure example of cognitive design.  It requires insight into how minds work and it uses that insight to meet a deeply felt psychological need.  So I am always on the lookout for good examples of how to use magic in innovation, organizational change, leadership and other business contexts. I call this serious magic or the use of magic for non-entertainment purposes.

One interesting thing about magic-  it  is an illusion we can use to break down other illusions or open the mind to possibilities. This is illustrated superbly in video by  Ferdinando Buscema  on Magician Leadership.  In the video he argues many interesting points including how exposure to fine arts makes us better leaders and how Keats’s notion of negative capability is essential for embracing uncertainty and engaging in possibility thinking versus reflective or analytic thinking.   The suggestion is that mastering negative capability is important for innovation, leadership and managing organizational change.

But that’s not the best stuff, at least from the standpoint of using illusion to bust an illusion. He also explores the notion of synchronicity which at its core challenges our notions of past, present and future as well as cause and effect.   Synchronicity appears when causally unrelated events that are related by meaning happen together.  You think about a friend you have not seen for years and they knock on your door or you are reading an interesting article about  a rare butterfly only to look up and see one hovering outside your window. The more compelling the coincidence of acausal events is the more synchronicity you have. We can quickly dismiss such events as a fluke or open our minds to the uncertainty, deeper patterns and possibilities they represent.

Ferdinando does a magic demonstration to illustrate synchronicity in the video. Even though you know it is an illusion your mind is forced to consider the possible (perhaps only momentarily) because you cannot see the cause-and-effect mechanism at work.  Could meaning rather than cause-and-effect connect events? Can past, present and future be blurred into a single moment?  One magic trick won’t convince you but it  can create a moment of negative capacity where you at least feel uncertain.  A strong cognitive effect with a serious purpose.

I am interested to hear from change agents, educators or others that have used magic experience design to produce non-entertainment outcomes.  How have you used serious magic?