to see the keys go under the middle cup, failed to see them disappear into the magician’s hand and thence into his pocket.
Spotlight Attention and Change Blindness
Natural selection is a brutally straightforward evolutionary concept. Variation exists within all populations of organisms. Some variations produce characteristics in individuals that promote survival in an environment. Others fail to promote survival. Call the former variations “favorable adaptations” and the latter “unfavorable adaptations.” Over time, more individuals with favorable adaptations survive to reproduce, whereas fewer with unfavorable adaptations survive to reproductive age. Eventually, the result in such a species is a population exhibiting only the favorable adaptations.
We human beings are equipped with brains that have acquired, through natural selection, certain characteristics that contribute to our survival—at least under most conditions. Among these characteristics is something we might call spotlight attention. The world bombards us with stimuli, potentially and quickly overwhelming us, leaving us vulnerable to harm from a plethora of sources—were it not for our unconscious ability to focus exclusively on (or “attend to,” as psychologists put it) those inputs that are most likely to affect us for good or bad. Without this narrow-beam spotlight focus, we are doomed. When we cross a busy street, we are attuned to traffic—not to the sound of a random bird or the hum of an errant bumblebee. For this reason, we stand a good chance of getting across the road unscathed. Spotlight attention works very well in “normal” situations, but when the status quo is disrupted—as it is when a magician performs—spotlight attention can create what psychologists call change blindness.
A classic example was videotaped in 2007 by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman. It shows the psychologist performing what he describes as the “amazing color-changing card trick.” Seated at a table, he introduces himself and Sarah, the woman sitting beside him. He spreads the cards out in front of Sarah, face down. The backs of the cards are blue. He instructs her to pick any card and push it toward the camera. Wiseman gathers up the remaining cards, narrating the action all the while. He announces that he is going to ask Sarah to show us the card she selected. She picks it up, turns it toward the camera, and announces that it is the three of diamonds. The magician puts the card back into the deck, which he now holds fanned out in his hand, cards facing toward the camera. He spreads the cards face up on the table and pulls out Sarah’s card, the three of diamonds. He turns it over and shows that it has a blue back.
“Not particularly surprising,” he says, “but what is more surprising is that all of the other cards have changed to red backs!” He flips them over to reveal this. “And that is the amazing color-changing card trick,” he concludes.
What Wiseman does not draw our attention to is the fact that his shirt, Sarah’s shirt, the tablecloth, and the backdrop behind them have all changed color, too, because Wiseman and his assistant changed them and the decks—without any camera breaks—when the angles allowed. We never noticed these far more dramatic color changes because we were focused—narrowly, like a spotlight—on the cards and the magician’s ongoing patter. “Change blindness” is a side effect of a favorable evolutionary adaptation, spotlight attention, and it can cause us to miss a huge transformation in the reality that, although right before our eyes, remains beyond our perception.
The Truth? Pigs Fly!
Focusing, as we normally do, on the status quo—the expected and the anticipated—we miss some truly amazing thing, like pigs flying. Throughout most of 2015 and 2016, the answer pundits and other experts reflexively gave to the question, “Will Donald Trump be elected president?” was “When pigs fly!”
As it turned out, the pundits, who focused exclusively on the expected and anticipated, were afflicted by change blindness. They did not see what many voters saw in Donald Trump, a candidate capable of bringing the change they deeply craved. Therefore, the pundits did not—because they could not—believe what many voters believed, that Trump should and would be president. If voters (assuming you are in the punditry business), consumers (if you are in the making, advertising, or selling business), or audience members (if you are in the magic business) believe pigs fly, it’s time to get out your pig-proof umbrella.
What’s the point of all this? Pundits, business strategists, and magicians must start from a simple and ineluctable understanding: The voter, the consumer, the audience is boss. We play by their rules at their party on their terms. As the brilliant magician Tommy Wonder once challenged, “Imagine what the audience thinks.” Like great magicians, great marketers know how to put themselves inside the simple, daily reality of their customer’s world to understand what is missing, to understand the opportunities, to understand what this customer may “need”: You get up, go to the bathroom, shake off whatever sleep you found, ponder, sit, shift this morning’s stupid urgencies away from the strategically important, hear your email beeping, jump onto your computer, check Facebook, hear about another scandal in Washington, D.C., and you realize you “need”….
This is what the great marketers understand—these perceptions,
what consumers need but don’t have, and how to get ahead by fulfilling those needs.
The first corporate client David Morey’s company served, Steve Jobs, had this in mind when he answered a hostile question from the audience at a 1997 Q&A. In the fullness of time, the question has ceased to be important, but the answer remains valuable—and always will. In developing a product, Jobs explained, “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.” Jobs went on to explain that in trying to come up with a vision for Apple, he and his team asked, “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? Not starting with ‘let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we gonna market that?’”10
This is even more “right” in what today is often called our “reset environment,” in which disruption is the norm, and where change is not only accelerating, but accelerating exponentially and unpredictably. It is an environment in which outsiders are the new insiders, winning power, and governing nations, and where companies such as Uber, Lyft, Facebook, Airbnb, Alibaba, and Bitcoin are creating industries unimagined just a few years ago. Beginning and anchoring business strategies—not to mention life strategies—with perceptions is today’s new reality.
Fortunately, magicians give us secret tools to do this. They challenge our sense of what is “real,” of how we define real. By challenging our assumptions, they prompt us to do as they do: figure out how their audience thinks, feels, and acts—and how this relates to what we want them to think, feel, and do. Somewhere in the dialectic between these two hows is our reality. The late eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant divided reality into what he called the Ding an sich (the thing in itself) and the Ding für uns (the thing for us, or the thing as it appears). These days, magicians, marketers, and political strategists have pretty much given up on finding the Ding an sich and have instead settled for the Ding für uns—because perceptions rule, and it is the magician’s, marketer’s, and strategist’s job to begin with, understand, and shape these perceptions.
Brylcreem was the key to the kingdom of civilized virility until it became greasy kid stuff. Bounty was just another paper towel—a dull commodity—until some ad man or ad woman pronounced it “The Quicker Picker-Upper.” Now it is the nation’s leading paper towel product. The phrase is a magic word, an incantation, a spell, endowed with its magical power through a combination of language and the context of “information” created by incessant advertising. The lilting “Quicker Picker-Upper” pricks our memory of TV sequences showing Bounty absorbing several times as much water as any competing
