Teller, the silent half of the duo of magicians, Penn and Teller, is not always silent: he’s given interviews and written articles on the theory, practice and psychology of magic.

Any insight into how people perceive and believe can be helpful to technology architects, but I think that one principle shared in this article is of particular use: make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick is worth.

The idea is that every trick has a public side (what the audience sees) and a secret side (how the effect is achieved), and that most people will assume that an apparently simple effect (the magician identifies the right card) is achieved by a similarly simple cause, and, if they cannot figure out that cause, will be mystified and entertained.

I have claimed in the past that technology architects have superpowers, particularly x-ray vision and, even more importantly, the ability to figure out how things work. But if you are lucky enough to work with a technology architect, you should make the most of another one of their special abilities: time travel.

You have probably already realised that architects can travel to the future. After all, they spend a lot of their time talking about the fantastic advantages that new technology will bring us, and how great our lives will be one we have built their vision. They also spend a lot of their time giving us dire predictions of how things will be if we make the wrong choices in the present. They may even talk about future state architectures (although this is not a phrase I am a fan of - I will explain more in an upcoming article but will just say for now that attempting to define a single fixed ‘state’ for anything which changes as rapidly as technology architecture feels like a mistake).