What a show. The man is simply amazing, magic or psychology, it doesn’t really matter, the end result is both stunning and completely mystifying.
Some of the show was obvious trickery like the levitating spirit table), but in my opinion that didn’t detract at all, in fact, I think that it adds to the overall entertainment value.
At work the next day, many discussions were had about the techniques DB may have used to achieve some of the effects. Take the £10 serial number trick, a punter is chosen at random by DB throwing a frisbee into the audience. This person is then asked if they can ring a friend, and if so DB wagers £10 that he can get the person on the phone to give him a series of numbers that he’s written on a large whiteboard. DB asks the person to repeat some seemingly random questions about mundane objects to their friend. Then on Derrens prompt, the person asks their friend for a series of numbers, which then don’t appear to match the ones Derren had written down on the whiteboard. When the trick doesn’t seem to have worked Derren owns up to the friend on the phone that he’s on the speaker phone on stage, and tells him the trick was a resounding success!
The rest of the audience is still under the impression that the trick failed miserably as the assistant is dismissed back to their seat. However, just as they’re approaching the edge of the stage DB fetches them back and asks them to take out the £10 they won in the bet. When they open up the £10 , the serial numbers on the £10 match the numbers the person on the phone gave! What a reveal!.
After a good discussion and a few emails, we started getting mails through with pointers to forums giving spoilers. I don’t really see the point in reading the spoilers, since if you really, really want to figure it out, the fun would be in the chase not the end result! Plus, I’d much rather leave the mystery intact! If there were no mystery left, life would be a truly dull, empty, experience! (maybe this why JJ Abrams Mystery box is so appealing..)
The fun isn’t in finding out how he did it, the fun is in the communication and shared experience of discovery that it takes to achieve understanding. Plus, we get to sit around drinking coffee whilst we look all intellectual 😉
This brings me onto the agile manifesto 1st principle of
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Its the quality of the vibrant discussions we have about software that makes the software something more than the sum of its parts. If there are no interactions, no discussions, no passionate arm waving arguments (especially with the users) then the end result is the same dull,empty, left lack experience we’d have without mystery. Sure, process and tools help, but the resulting software becomes great inspite of process and tools, not thanks to them. More often they add very little and detract much.
I’m a huge proponent of the arm waving over the process or tools, and I firmly believe that our users will have a much richer experience because of this. Maybe we should try to embody a more passionate approach to our software, rather than the usual rigid-by-the-book approach which rarely succeeds in bringing great applications into the hands most important people in the industry. The users.