Movement doesn’t always look like movement
I went to see musician Noah Kahan perform with a notebook in my hand. Occupational hazard, I guess.
Concerts are some of my favorite places to study what moves people. You put thousands of strangers in a room, one person (and their band) takes the stage, and somehow everyone is supposed to feel something together.
Except, for a while, I wasn’t sure that was happening.
The audience around us was surprisingly… chill. People were singing, but nobody seemed to be losing their collective mind. There weren’t dancers or pyrotechnics or huge theatrical moments. Even Kahan himself is pretty understated onstage.
I looked around and thought, are people moved by this?
Which is funny, because the next morning I woke up wanting to go back. I wasn't even thinking about one particular song. I was thinking about how the whole night had felt. It was just beautiful. And I wanted to be back in that feeling.
I’ve spent years studying what moves groups of people, and apparently I was still making a pretty basic mistake: I was looking for movement on the outside.
We tend to look for a response. People clap, laugh, raise their hands, jump up and down, give us a standing ovation. Those are the things we can see.
But response and residue aren’t the same thing. Response is what happens in the room. Residue is what’s still there the next morning.
And once I started thinking about the show that way, I kept coming back to all these small choices Kahan makes that I had been scribbling down throughout the night.
Making a big room feel smaller
There were thousands of us there, but there are things about the show that make you pay attention to this night.
If you’re a fan, you know to watch for who will “arrest” him during “Dial Drunk.” There’s a phone call that changes from show to show and usually has something to do with the city he’s in. There’s a surprise song. These are small things, but they create this little sense of: What are we going to get? What will happen at our show?
It’s not personalization in the sense that Noah Kahan is somehow creating an individual concert for 40,000 people. It’s that there are enough things that could only happen here that the night doesn’t feel entirely interchangeable with the one before it or the one after it.
I noticed him doing something similar physically. During some of the quieter songs, he came farther forward into the crowd. The songs didn’t get bigger to fill the space. He got closer to us.
Maybe that’s what I hadn’t expected. We tend to assume that if you want to move more people, you need to make everything bigger or add more. This show kept getting smaller.
FROM MY NOTEBOOK
A few things I wrote down…
This show, not any show. Surprise songs, local references, changing rituals.
Come closer. During quieter songs, he physically reduces the distance between himself and the audience.
Name the feeling. At one point he jokes that his job is to make us miserable.
Lots of ways in. Friends, family, home, regret, growing up, leaving, going back.
Same song, different person. Thousands of us can sing the same words without thinking about the same thing.
Think about the last feeling. He ends with people dancing.
Who names the emotion?
At one early point, Kahan joked that his job was to make us miserable. Maybe it was just a joke. But I wrote it down because there was something interesting about hearing the person onstage tell thousands of people, essentially, Yes, we’re going there. There aren’t that many places where someone gives you permission to sit in sadness or loneliness or regret for a while without immediately trying to resolve it.
And his songs give you lots of ways in. Maybe one makes you think about your best friend. Another about your family or your hometown, leaving your hometown, wanting to go back, or some earlier version of yourself.
Not every song has to be your song. There just have to be enough doors that eventually you find one you can walk through.
Then this strange thing happens: thousands of people are singing exactly the same words and almost certainly thinking about completely different things. I could see people around me working on something as he sang. I imagine someone is thinking about home. Someone is remembering a friend. Someone is attaching a song that millions of people know to a person only they know.
We’re having the experience together, but some part of it belongs only to us.
I think that’s part of why the specificity in his music works. Specificity doesn’t necessarily make something less universal. Sometimes it gives us enough to grab onto so we can find our own way in. Something can be collective and personal at once.
What I couldn’t see
By the end of the night, the energy did get bigger. Kahan’s final song sent everyone out dancing and jumping, and I noticed that choice too. After a couple of hours spent going inward, we didn’t leave there.
But I keep coming back to my initial reaction to the crowd because I think I had assumed that if people were being moved, I should be able to see it.
When we imagine moving a room, we tend to picture the huge ovation, the roar, the lights, the fireworks, everyone jumping at once. And sometimes movement does look like that. But sometimes a room can be almost still while thousands of people are moving somewhere internally.
You can get a huge response that disappears the second people walk out the door. And apparently, you can sit in a relatively quiet crowd, wonder whether much is happening at all, and wake up the next morning still wanting to be inside what you felt there.
That's a problem for those of us who spend our lives trying to move other people, because the things we can see are so much easier to measure.
Most of us aren’t trying to move 40,000 people at a concert. We’re leading meetings, teaching classes, launching ideas, communicating change, giving talks, bringing people together. When they’re over, we naturally look for evidence that they worked. Did people participate? Did they seem energized? Did they clap? Did they tell us they liked it? All useful information. But we can confuse the visibility of a response with the depth of an effect.
I’m increasingly interested in a harder question: What is still with them tomorrow?
Response is what happens in the room. Residue is what remains after the room is gone. The next morning, I wanted to go back. That’s probably the best evidence I have.
Lindsey Caplan is a screenwriter turned organizational psychologist who helps HR and business leaders design group moments that drive engagement and move people to act