Innovate Better—Gestalt Will Show You How, *by Dr. ollie Malone & Alan Brenner

If you want to make quantitative as well as qualitative changes in your work as a leader, level up on your skills in innovation. Innovation is more important than ever to business success. The modern business environment is defined by rapid technological change, shifting consumer behaviors, and intense global competition.

Why Noticing What’s Missing Is Essential to Innovation

Noticing what’s missing is essential to innovation. Recognizing gaps—whether in knowledge, systems, or processes—serves as a catalyst for innovation and growth, as these gaps highlight areas where new insights, improvements, and connections can emerge. In business, the failure to notice what is absent—termed “absence-neglect”(Powell 2017)—can lead to catastrophic oversights, such as missed market shifts or internal weaknesses, while attentiveness to absence can reveal opportunities for bold, transformative strategies.

How Gestalt Practices Enhance the Ability to Notice What’s Missing

Gestalt practices offer a powerful framework for training entrepreneurs to notice what’s missing. Gestalt psychology emphasizes the importance of perception, holistic thinking, and the ability to restructure problems to achieve sudden leaps of understanding—often described as the “Aha!” moment. This approach is not limited to visual perception but extends to cognitive and organizational processes, teaching individuals to see beyond the obvious and recognize patterns, gaps, and underlying dynamics.

Gestalt-based training can help you develop skills such as:

• Holistic Perception: Gestalt principles encourage seeing the system or situation as a whole, rather than as a collection of isolated parts. This perspective makes it easier to spot what is absent, incomplete, or out of balance within the system.

• Levels of system: Often opportunity for innovation is supported or impeded by circumstances prevailing at different levels of system - individual, group, department, division, or the organization as whole. Gestalt training teaches you to attend to all levels of system.

• Experimentation and Curiosity: Gestalt fosters a culture of experimentation and curiosity, challenging you to test new ideas and challenge existing assumptions. This approach is essential for uncovering hidden gaps and generating innovative solutions.

• Awareness and Presence: Gestalt coaching and facilitation emphasize being present in the moment and aware of both internal and external environments. This heightened awareness enables you to notice subtle cues, unspoken needs, and emerging opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked.

• Cycle of Experience: Training in the Gestalt Cycle of Experience helps innovators notice what’s missing by heightening their awareness of each stage in the process—from sensation and awareness to action and completion. This practice enables individuals to detect interruptions, gaps, or unfinished business within the cycle, making it easier to identify unmet needs or overlooked opportunities that can spark innovation.

• Restructuring and Insight: The Gestalt approach to problem-solving involves restructuring your initial representation of a problem, leading to sudden insights. This process is closely linked to innovation, as it allows you to break free from conventional thinking and discover novel solutions.

The Bottom Line

Training in Gestalt practices equips you with the perceptual and cognitive tools needed to notice what’s missing. By focusing on the present, experimenting with new possibilities, and cultivating a holistic view of their environment, you can identify gaps that others may neglect. This ability is crucial for innovation,as it allows them to address unmet needs, anticipate market shifts, and develop strategies that are both responsive and transformative.

Gestalt’s emphasis on awareness and experimentation aligns with the need for continuous adaptation in today’s fast-paced business world. Leaders like you, who are trained in Gestalt practices, are more likely to foster collaborative, creative, and resilient organizations that can thrive amid uncertainty and change and generate higher levels of job satisfaction and employee well-being in the process.

About the authors: 

*Dr. Ollie Malone is President and Principal Consultant of Olive Tree Associates, a Texas-based consulting firm that he founded in 1993 (after graduating from the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland). He is also a member of the faculty of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland and its Gestalt Institute Leader Development (GILD) program.   His clients have included Walmart, Shell, Boeing, Arizona State University, the University of South Carolina, and State Farm Insurance. He holds a doctorate in Adult Development and Learning, a second doctorate in Transformational Leadership, a master’s degree in business administration, a second master’s in hearing and speech, and a bachelor’s degree in communication.

*Alan Brenner, a former senior executive with Blackberry and Sun Microsystems, is currently the Interim Executive Director of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland(GIC) and a member of GIC’s Board of Directors. . His professional background includes extensive work and leadership in technical organizations in creating climates where innovation thrives and where financial results satisfy shareholders. He is a graduate of several programs in the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland and is currently active in the Gestalt Institute Leadership Development (GILD) program.