Creating Magic Circles

The job of a great facilitator is to create “magic circles”: experiences or situations that simplify the current reality in ways that enable us to better understand and learn from it.

In the theory of game design, there is a concept called the “magic circle”.

It’s the boundary between the world of normal life and the world of the game. Inside the magic circle (in the words of game designer Jesse Shell) “we have very different thoughts, feeling, and values than when we are “out of” the game. The magic circle can be a powerful meaning-making machine. People have literally given their lives for it. And the secret to understanding why it’s so powerful, according to Shell, is to understand first how our brains make meaning.

Our brains do a tremendous amount of work to boil down the complexity of reality into simpler mental models that can be easily stored, considered, and manipulated. And this is not just the case for visual objects. It is also the case for human relationships, risk and reward evaluation, and decision making. Our minds look at a complex situation and try to boil it down to a simple set of rules and relationships that we can manipulate internally.

We turn the dizzying day-to-day of reality and into something smaller, something we can play with and make sense of. Crazily enough, this kind of complexity boiling often works.

These micro-realities have so effectively distilled the essential elements of reality for a particular problem that manipulations of this internal world, and conclusions drawn from it, are valid and meaningful in the real world. We have little idea of how this really works — but it does work very, very well.

In a nutshell, Schell says the magic circle is our brain’s internal problem solving system. We’re always turning reality into more simple games that we can understand and play with.

If you’re looking to create change in your team, magic circles are essential.

One key to getting unstuck as a team and turning chaos into inflection points is to create a magic circle around the moment you are in; to demonstrate the truth of the moment in ways that feel valid, captivating, and deeply meaningful.

Keep Learning

• Homo Ludens: The Play Element of Culture by Johan Huizinga, Dutch Historian and Cultural Theorist who first coined the magic circle
• The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell