Energy curve

The shape of a program expressed as a line rather than a list: how charged the room feels from doors to close. A good curve opens warm, builds to one or two real peaks, dips on purpose so the peaks have something to rise from, and ends on the feeling you want people carrying out the door. The practical test is whether anything in the middle of your schedule feels like the thing before it. Three same-shaped segments in a row is where a room quietly checks out, no matter how good each one is on its own.

Source: Course-coined label. The underlying discipline is not ours. The TEDx Organizer Guide’s program chapter prescribes exactly this shape in three instructions (“start strong,” “mix it up,” “end with emotion”), plus performances used as palate cleansers and real breaks between sessions. Practitioner Seth Ferguson names the failure mode from the other direction in “Make Better Events,” describing what happens when it is “the same same same too much in a row” and the audience’s brain switches off. No published source draws it as a curve. The picture is ours, the evidence underneath it is theirs.

First used in: 2.5 · Program design: the show people remember.