Strands of Genius: Playing the Audience, The Abilene Paradox, The Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis

Guest curated by Krishan Jagota

Oct 08, 2020

:: A BIT MORE ABOUT GUEST CURATOR, KRISHAN JAGOTA ::

LOCATION: India
PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT: Sideways

Rosie and Faris, came to become my acquaintances through my colleague at Sideways, Satish Krishnamurthy. Their session at Sideways was one of its kind, where they taught us hacks of behaving smartly with clients, through more anecdotes of their world experiences. Over the weekdays, I head the product design department at Sideways, which is a multi disciplinary problem solving outfit that just finished 5 years of its existence. Over the weekends, I perform magic/improv at bars, co-working spaces or streets, and curate art events in music, poetry, story telling and standup comedy. For 3 years, I've been teaching my left hand (non dominant for me) to draw, and in the process teaching my mind to be more intuitive. My love for creative people and newness led me to start a passion project called Fluid, where a community of artists creates meaning together through events, content, meetups and more. Apart from anything artistic, I love sharing things I picked up, and teach design and management students, a course on Design, Magic and Story telling.

Editor’s Note: Krishan is one of the people we always try to see when we’re in Mumbai. We love the conversations, his quick wit, and most recently, the conversations stemming around product design and games. (We are Frien-DA’d though, so we can’t be revealing any more about the game he is inventing, which we got to play at the office!) And it’s been an absolute pleasure to follow his creative endeavors online, especially during the pandemic. Thanks so much for being here, Krishan!

:: THE LINKS ::

“PLAYING THE AUDIENCE” - BOBBY MCFERRIN

The intuitive ability of the crowd, when guided right, is harmonic, real, and synchronised to nature. The bigger insight here is, when you know how crowds work, it's easy to go on stage, be yourself, and get everyone to pay attention while having fun, and remember you forever. (TED)

THE ABILENE PARADOX

Since I got to know about this cool paradox and its impact on our business processes, I got more personal and communicative with my team, to ensure that what our team needs and wants, is true to each individual, and genuinely true to the common goal. The Abilene Paradox also teaches me as an individual to be more responsible for my silence, my voice, to be aware of the power of sharing a perspective with an intent to clarify with team members, the purpose of what we do as teams. (Medium)

THE COGNITIVE TRADEOFF HYPOTHESIS

The monkeys are better in immediate memory of the spatial vision, than humans. Here's a Japanese experiment that tried to find out why! (YouTube)

Looking for more from Krishan Jagota? Those enrolled in The School of Stolen Genius will receive a deep dive from him in their inbox shortly! You can access all our expert interviews for SOSG here.

:: AND NOW… SOME FAST FAVORITES ::

:: Game :: Diicii - A new age Dice I designed :)

:: City :: Barcelona

:: Book :: Sapiens

:: Podcast :: Not a podcast person, yet

:: Album :: Sounds of Isha

:: PUNE DESIGN FESTIVAL 2020 :

Here I am speaking at the Pune Design Festival 2020.

Krishan Jagota

contact@krishanjagota.com
linkedin | instagram

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)

Strands of Genius