Education in an amusing way: Regale your team with "intellectual partying"

The future of the world will largely depend on the successful use of insufficiently known and used mental potential and ability of man, and on stimulating his creativity, says Kasim Tatic, Ph.D., the Head of the Department of Microeconomics at the Faculty of Economics of Sarajevo University, and an expert of the Association for development, creativity and environment - AMAXIMUS.

Bosnian association called AMAXIMUS – Association for development, creativity and environment, was founded in September 2012. It currently gathers twenty experts from different fields: economics and management, psychology and pedagogy, computer science and the arts. As the name of the association suggests, the main reason for the establishment of this association is the fact that importance of personal development is neglected or insufficiently identified. 
The aim of the Association is to actively promote to attendants, and develop all four types of intelligence (rational / intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual) and contribute to the development and acquisition of the five basic skills: learning, thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and communicating. Special emphasis is still on improving the ways in which participants think, introducing and using specific tools for acquiring operational skills of thinking.

Revolutionary KRCKO

In the interview with eKapija.ba prof. Tatic pointed out that after 30 years working at the faculty, he noticed one fact to which he attributed great importance.
"Since I have always been attracted with issues related to human potentials, I noticed that students use a very small part of their capacity, and they are often not even aware of the totality of mental resources they possess," explains Tatic the idea of the creation of the Association of Amaximus.
Actually, it all started in September 2010. when he, at the Faculty of Economics, founded a creative center for the creative person, called KRCKO, which suffered the fate of many creative things.

"KRCKO was too revolutionary and progressive and bothered some people, therefore, they abolished it. After we grieved a little, I passed the idea to young people and helped them to set up and to create something that we have called AMAXIMUS“, says Tatic, adding that the main reason for the establishment lies in the fact that the vast majority of people in a very small extent use their intellectual potential, which significantly reduces their effectiveness and success in personal and professional life.

Scientific studies confirm the fact that the level of utilization of the mental potential of an average man is about 5%. In doing so, the right side of a brain is almost completely undeveloped and unused, compared to relatively much more developed and much more used the left side of the brain.

In fact, creativity, imagination, sensitivity, sustainability, all of this is predominantly in the right side of the brain, while the left side is analytical and rational, which deals with all the linear and predictable stuff. One of the best ways to develop the right side of the brain, which is much less developed than the left, is active engagement in music. In that way, he says, it is possible to develop a very important component of our psychological apparatus, which is intuition.
So the power of music is not thinking rationally, but intuitively. Through the music, you can develop your intuition, which you need in making business decisions", underlines our collocutor.

Networking of „Party People“

The music, i.e. guitar is an important part of a multimedia performance "Intellectual partying" as a creative way to overcome existing boundaries between entertainment and acquiring useful knowledge. The professor made a guitar an instructive instrument and he gave his multimedia performance the title "Intellectual partying", which aims to link learning and entertainment, to break the stereotypes that learning can't be fun, interesting and provocative.
The concept of "'partying" is such that it always has a particular topic (eg. Creativity: skill or a gift; Change: danger or opportunity; how to live in accordance with (one's own) nature, Importance and skills of setting good questions) in which the present managers or "party people" („derneklije“ in Bosnian) can hear interesting, useful and in a positive way provocative scientific information.

Like a mercury encyclopedia, during a two-hour lecture, Professor Tatic presents stories of successful ordinary people who became remarkable, upon achieving their goal, and encourages the present ones to realize that for achieving any goal, there is a special recipe, and that recipe includes appropriate desire, will and action.

While many others have started to copy this concept, Professor points out that they are always a step ahead or "up to date" using the most recent literature that people often did not even know exist, including recordings of the counterparts in the leading educational institutions in the world, and indispensable humor, which links the serious topics in a proper way. The humor is exactly something that they want the „intellectual partying“ to be recognizable for.

"In addition a special quality is the way we connect knowledge from various fields, and at the end, everything is very smooth and potentially very useful in day to day operations of the company. The best proof is the reaction of one of the participants in a lecture at the Central Bank, where we talked about the "leadership by questioning" - leadership by setting good questions. So, I was approached by Mr. Suad Ećo from the company Inside by Eco, which produces furniture, and said he was delighted with the lecture, and that he would like to be a sponsor of the next intellectual party, which we did in November last year", says the Professor, adding that the organizers can invite their employees or business partners, to come to the party, and for about two hours listen to presentations that are very important for business and management. In addition to BH Telecom, which from the very beginning recognizes the importance of the work of association AMAXIMUS and supports its activities, among others, there are companies ITD and Dist, which are the sponsors of the next intellectual party.
As a potential benefit for companies that sponsor the intellectual partying, he states an inevitable mutual networking of present managers, which is very important, especially when you find a hundred managers in such a relaxed and yet intellectual stimulation atmosphere, during and after the party. He reveals that the importance of networking gave him an idea that he soon plans to realize. Specifically, he plans to make an event where around 1,000 decision makers would be invited, people who mean something in this country, and the topic would be creativity in general and specifically creativity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Invest in creativity

When asked how much the managers recognized the importance of investing in the intellectual potential of workers, he estimates, that according to the previous comments, their interest is satisfactory.

People who had attended so far the "Partying" („Dernek“ in Bosnian) have recognized that they had heard a potentially beneficial and usable information, and the best comment that I got was that one of the managers after the performance immediately applied some of the things he had heard. One of them was "question storming," which, unlike the classic and not always effective brainstorming session where people seek solutions to the problem, is based on the fact that the manager assembles a team of people and says, we have a problem - ask questions about the problem. By setting the correct questions, it is much easier to find the desired solutions.

"Therefore, people are much more relaxed when they ask questions, instead of giving answers. And when you have a problem, you should not only think about how to resolve it, but more about what do you want to be a solution for the problem and to visualize and imagine it. It is wrong to believe that a successful leader or manager needs to know all the answers and solutions to all kinds of the problems. In a time when growing number of available information expires at tremendous speed, a good leader must know whom to ask the question, what to ask, how to listen to what others are saying, and at the end, how to practically use it", this expert explains, emphasizing that the only solution is to invest in the development and encouragement of creativity of individuals and teams - because if everyone is motivated to find a solution, everyone will get better.

Source: Akta