Designing for Magic: Leadership Through Experience
Most leadership programs teach people how to plan. How to decide. How to manage.
Very few teach people how to design for magic.
And yet magic might be the most underutilized force in leadership today.
In a world of hyper-efficiency, always-on demands, and algorithmic thinking, we forget that what truly changes people isn’t logic—it’s experience. It’s awe. It’s emotion. It’s the power of meaningful moments.
At SPX BASECAMP, we believe leadership isn’t just about outcomes—it’s about experiences worth remembering.
Joseph Campbell reminds us that all transformation starts with a threshold moment—when the hero hears the call, crosses into the unknown, and chooses to grow. Great leaders don’t just organize people. They guide them through these moments. They invite their teams into a story.
No one understood this quite like Caveat Magister, the philosopher and storyteller behind Burning Man’s culture team. In his words, “Magic is not something you can manufacture. Butou can create the conditions where it’s likely to emerge.”
This is one of the most powerful ideas I’ve ever come across about leadership.
Magic—real, human, visceral magic—is co-created, not commanded. And leadership is less about control, and more about creating the stage, the ritual, the signal that tells people: “Something extraordinary is possible here.”
It could be the way you open a meeting. The kind of invitation you extend. The space you leave for meaning-making. The moment when you pause long enough for someone else to see themselves differently.
These aren’t soft skills. They’re deep skills. They’re what Caveat calls “authentic signal-sending.” And when done well, they transform a room, a culture, a company. As James Glattfelder explores in his work on complexity, emergence happens when small inputs interact in ways that create larger outcomes. Meaningful experiences are emergent systems—they can’t be forced, but they can be invited.
This is what we mean by Designing Magic.
So no, leadership isn’t just what happens in the boardroom.
It’s what happens in the spaces in between—
Where surprise, connection, and wonder live.
Where people feel something shift.
And where the impossible suddenly starts to feel doable.