Structural_Gestalt_Yin-Yang - The Monday Morning Memo

Structural and Gestalt
are two ways of thinking.

Structural thinking is rational, logical, sequential, deductive reasoning. Gestalt thinking is intuitive, aspirational, global, big picture. Structural and Gestalt thinking are not typically considered to be functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, but if you are familiar with hemispherical specialization, there is certainly a similar symmetry.

STRUCTURAL: details first – planned piece by piece, then built brick by brick, line upon line. Research. Development. Planning. Execution.

GESTALT: details last – built through the process of reverse engineering of a fully formed concept that came into existence in the mind as a completed whole. The nature of the component pieces that will have to be created will be determined by the nature of the completed whole.

“The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. But the opposite of a profound truth is usually another profound truth”
– Niels Bohr, winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics

“The only hard choice in life is the choice between two good things.”
– Indy Beagle, Emperor of the Rabbit Hole behind the Monday Morning Memo.

“Every good thing is in a state of tension with an equally good but opposite thing.”
– Roy H. Williams

EXAMPLES INCLUDE:
Justice/Mercy
Responsibility/Freedom
Security/Opportunity
Honesty/Loyalty

“

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.”

“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

“This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.

“

- Terry Pratchett, from "Men at Arms," (book 15 in the Discworld series,) explaining why it is so expensive to be poor. Sent to us by Jeffrey Eisenberg.