Demand the impossible

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”

Albert Einstein

hex has created tailor-made performances for many settings, from the exclusive salon gathering in the upstairs of a London gastropub to the stage of the National Palace of Culture in Sofia. From the conference rooms of Manchester’s cool and frosted Urbis to London’s dignified and commodious Conway Hall. From the minuscule magic bars of Tokyo to the vertiginous top floor of Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers.

hex has entertained a wide range of audiences including the attendees of over 50 scientific, academic, and corporate business conferences. Whether performing for 900 people from the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall or for small networking events at Manchester’s Cornerhouse Cinema the result is an atmosphere of contagious amazement, shared wonder, and infectious excitement.

hex performances combine the ancient arts of conjuring and illusion with a manipulation of the mind based on cutting edge science and psychology. The mixture is devastating, surreal, baffling and enormous fun.

“Very intelligent, very entertaining, and very strange.”

Peter – The Loop Seminar.

Be Realistic – Design the Impossible

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.”

Neil Armstrong

Theatrical conjuring is one of the oldest forms of interaction and experience design with its secret techniques for communication, deception, psychological control, and the manipulation of story.

By considering the principles behind the creation of a mystery and the techniques of illusion design we can highlight the importance of suspense, surprise, deceit, the hidden, and the unknown in the creation of compelling experiences.

In these hands-on workshops you will learn core principles of theatrical conjuring and explore how they have been applied to art, design, architecture, media, games, and technology.

Designing Mystery has been successful in the UK, Finland, Spain and Peru with designers, writers, technologists, artists, architects, performers, and entrepreneurs.

The workshops are very flexible and have been run in many formats, from 5-day expert training with small teams to 10 minute BrainInGear sessions to energise large conference audiences.

“This workshop was full of techniques that I could immediately apply to my work as a film editor.”

Paiivi – YLE TV

“Building To Withstand The Wolves”

“If you want creative workers, let them play.”

John Cleese

Cold Modelling is designed to help businesses improve communication, enhance performance, and build robust, flexible strategy that isn’t derailed by the unexpected.

Cold Modelling techniques have been used by large and small organisations, in both the public and private sectors, including media organisations, educational establishments, industry development bodies, technology research networks, design practices, retail and hospitality businesses, and scientific institutions.

Cold Modelling is not a template that gets parachuted in from above. It is based on original research into how real human feelings and behaviours create an organisation’s culture and how effective strategy must be built on an understanding of each unique culture.

A number of metaphorical modelling tools, including LEGO Serious Play, are used gain the necessary, detailed and accurate insight into each organisation before strategy planning begins.

In addition, hex has an innovative way of introducing a solid realism about audiences and markets so that Scenario Planning, which is all too often an exercise in daydreaming, can be both useful and practical.

Cold Reading Analysis protects the organisation from hidden traps and convincing, but dangerously misleading, fabrications.

The result is a flexible approach that reveals the reality of how organisations work and helps them plan for both fair weather and foul storms.

“We used Stuart’s process to help us through a big change. It pushed us to ask questions we’d been avoiding because we didn’t know how to ask them. Incredibly helpful in many ways.”

Alex – NESTA

How to get the big hats

“How do you turn a group of bored individuals into an excited, paying audience? The secrets are there in the streets.”

Jim Cellini – King of the Street Performers

Commerce originated on the street, in the marketplace and the bazaar. Bustling, hectic, fluid. Wheeling, dealing, grifting and hustling. Seemingly chaotic but with its own complex language of barking and bartering, of call and response.

hex has spent over 20 years studying the techniques of street performers, barkers, pitchmen, and buskers. By exploring the psychology behind the grind shows, jam auctions, stunts, and pitches we discover the oldest and most powerful language of branding, marketing, selling, monetizing,

The Internet has been called a digital bazaar, a networked market where the voices of the buyers and sellers can once again be heard. It is the new digital street and the market is a sea of conversations once more.

The Streetwise Seminars have taken the most powerful techniques of the street and adapted them to the networked marketplace and the 21st Century pitch.

Learn how to plant a crowd, mark the line, control the edge, pace the payoff, weave the pleasers, drop the claps, bark the hat lines and stop the copper.

Streetwise Seminars are modular and can be delivered in a range of formats including a half-day seminar, a 1-hour intensive session, or as a number of 5 minute Getting the Hat pitches, each of which demonstrate a different technique and its application to business.

“Its doubly amazing. First he does amazing magic and then we learn something amazing we can use.”

Eddie – Pan-European iTV Advertising Conference

Own The Stage

Fear of public speaking is the number one phobia in the world and 75% of people suffer from speech anxiety.

Most introductory pitching and presentation training focusses on the basics of content, structure, timing, communication skills and visual aids. Essential skills, but practicing and presenting a nicely scripted speech can only take you so far.

Life isn’t so nicely scripted.

Interruptions, challenging questions, idiotic questions, brain freezes can all derail your script and cause you to lose the plot.

Pitch Perfect training is based on the combination of two unique but complementary approaches to pitching and presentation:

Improvisation and Interaction: By learning some of the techniques of performers who use improvisation you will cease to worry about interruptions and use them to your advantage. You will learn how to build powerful moments of interaction into your presentation by letting the audience do the work.

Pitching as Process: By integrating pitching into your everyday work your ideas develop more quickly and you never need to rehearse for an important pitch. The training covers a range of advanced techniques for flexible structuring, practice pitching, speed pitching and disaster planning.

Pitch Perfect sessions are very flexible and have been run in many formats including 1-day sessions with several companies working together, 3-hour intensive sessions with small teams, and short 13th Floor Elevator Pitch sessions to energise large conference audiences.

“The training was fantastic. We combined hardcore processes from the venture capital, technology and media worlds with the skills of magicians, hypnotists and street performers. It was easy to learn and great fun to practice.”

Ansia – BBC

Building Better Learning

“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”

Brian Sutton-Smith

Metaphorical Modelling involves students and teachers building complex physical models of their ideas, experiences, skills, problems, and contexts.

These models are then used in metaphorical storymaking and storytelling to articulate and solve issues with learning, planning, presenting, writing, ideation, group working, and communication.

hex has been researching the use of Metaphorical Modelling in education since 2005, working with 12 different HE institutions to date and with hundreds of students and tutors across a wide range of subject areas including Art, Design, Architecture, Science, Fashion, Sociology, Education, Media Studies, Drama, and Business.

Metaphorical Modelling has also been used with internal and external research networks and with various forums set-up to deal with specific challenges such as supporting international students, student retention and increasing student numbers.

The hands-on Metaphorical Modelling workshops give a practical grounding in its use in education. Participants learn techniques they can apply directly to their teaching and management practice using a variety of easily available, inexpensive materials.

“I compared my second model to the one I’d made months before and I could see I was in control of how it was growing. It’s like having a garden where I can plant what I wanted and then see it grow.”

Dave – Final Year Student, BA Digital Media

“Every tutor knows that it can take months to really get to know a students needs, especially with increasing student numbers. With this technique we get a deep understanding of every student in a matter of hours.”

Liz – Senior Lecturer, University of Huddersfield

(There is a chapter on one aspect of the hex Metaphorical Modelling research in this book.)

The Dark Arts of Persuasion

Cold Reading is a set of techniques developed over centuries by mind readers, fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to gain swift knowledge of a person’s character, beliefs and preoccupations. They can be used to quickly understand someone’s needs and build genuine rapport or to mislead and deceive.

In recent years the techniques have been refined by psychologists and are used in interrogation, seduction, politics, psychometrics and business. The techniques are being taught to police departments, salespeople, pick-up artists, HR departments and managers as tools for persuasion, recruitment, mentoring, coaching and people management.

hex has originated research into the effects of Cold Reading in business working with a number of European and US Universities to conduct studies with over 500 organisations from start-ups to multinationals, from NGOs to financial institutions. The results are startling, deeply worrying, and grimly amusing.

How can you know if someone is using Cold Reading to influence you? How can your organisation know if they are being sold a pup? This seminar will show you how to spot the traps of Cold Reading and to avoid the pitfalls of Cold Consultancy, Cold Analysis, and Cold Management.

“Stuart managed to engage and entrance everyone into questioning everything they’ve ever heard from every salesperson they’ve ever met. He’s a brilliant entertainer, and a fantastic educator.”

“Mouth-watering and jaw-dropping”

“We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink.”

Epicurus

The Food+Awe evenings have been hosted by hex since 2009 and have occurred at fine restaurants in London, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield.

They began as informal dinners where everyone shares something they find genuinely awesome. This can be anything at all. Objects, pieces of writing, memories, incredible facts, party pieces, a photo of your mother with Muhammad Ali, a small piece of Mars. Anything that has really knocked you for six.

With the addition of a host and a Performance of The Amazing, The Marvellous or The Just Plain Awesome they have become a superb addition to training, networking and conference events.

The evenings have been used as a way of introducing a theme, setting a challenge, or simply as a delicious and fun way of ending an event.

Food+Awe can be impressively luxurious or relaxing and informal depending on the style of event, the focus of the occasion, and the needs of the guests.

When people share their pieces of awe they are sharing something genuinely special.

“Amazing entertainment, scrummy food, yummy wine, and I got to tell everyone about my awesome thing. So cool.”

Rebecca – Freelance Designer, Manchester.

“Fog lights for the future”

This striking phrase was used by one of the people I’ve been coaching recently, a media producer who knows that she has both talent and ambition but who felt “tied to a railway line” by her success while constantly “hacking back the weeds” in the “makeover garden” of her life.

The fog lights describe how coaching was helping her to navigate clearly and safely into a future that she had previously viewed with some concern.

When we speak of our ambitions, our careers, our hopes and plans, we are speaking of some of the most important things in our lives and the language we use is rich with vivid images and illuminating metaphors.

By paying attention to this personal language we can build clear and realistic models of both the life we have and the life we want to have. Only then can we make effective plans to take us safely from one to the other.

This approach to mentoring and coaching avoids the use of impersonal processes and cheesy acronyms. Instead, we begin by quickly discovering the language you use yourself when you think about your life. From then on, all the aims, plans and actions are expressed in your own words so they are more personal, more true, more meaningful, more detailed and more effective.

“It was very playful and fun to do so it seemed really easy and then I realised I’d been working really hard without knowing it and discovering lots of previously hidden things about my career plans. It really helped me construct the path that got me to where I am. I still use Stuart’s approach today and encourage my staff to do so.”

Graham – Senior Manager, Canal+

de-fuzz your brain-box

“Memory is the mother of all wisdom.”

Aeschylus

Sticky Brain Seminars combine techniques from two previously separate areas to create a practical system of memory coaching based on the traditional secrets of performing mnemonists but reinforced by current scientific research.

The Victorian theater was fond of entertainers who could demonstrate amazing mental capabilities. Known variously as mnemonists, mentalists, memory-men, and human calculators, these astonishing acts are rare nowadays. But their techniques can still be discovered if you know where to look.

By applying current research from psychology and neuroscience these skills can be refined, improved and adapted for use in everyday situations.

If you’re studying for a qualification, practicing for a presentation or just want to stop forgetting to buy the milk, Sticky Brain Coaching can help.

And if you want to be able to memorize a shuffled deck of cards, learn all the words in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, or remember the names of everyone at the party you can do that too.

Sticky Brain Coaching has also helped with CFS/ME recovery by focusing on the cognitive symptoms commonly known as fibrofog. Intentional memory practice, when properly graded and paced, can help sufferers cope with the absent-mindedness and cognitive issues caused by the illness.

“Powerful but fun. And that’s part of the secret.”

Ben – Liverpool John Moores University