Walk it out: we’ve always solved our problems on the go

It was a safe alternative during COVID-19 but will you let your staff walk and talk at the same time?

The walk and talk has become a feature of business communication. Can we keep doing it? Picture: iStock

Walking meetings have been a trend in business for years: Steve Jobs, Barack Obama and Richard Branson have all famously used them. Traditionally they’ve been an alternative to regular one-on-one gatherings but it may be that in 2020 their time has come.

As a researcher into the psychological benefits of walking, I applaud the rise of the “meeting on the go” during COVID-19. We have been talking and walking for four million years and certainly since the rise of group, long-range hunting techniques more than
2.5 million years ago we’ve been discussing organisation and strategy while on the move. I describe human beings as bipedal problem solvers. When we walk, we think and communicate in particular ways that are extremely conducive to productive meetings.

For a meeting to be successful it’s important for all parties to understand the position of the other participants. We may be the only species whose members can project themselves into the mind of another. This is empathy and when we walk we become more empathetic. Everyone can feel this. When you’ve been for a good walk you feel more connected. It happens because by putting one foot in front of the other we activate the right supramarginal gyrus — the part of the brain involved in proprioception, or our ability to understand where we are in space. Without it we would bump into objects and have no ability to navigate.

But the supramarginal gyrus is also the part of the brain activated when we empathise with others. Walking increases our empathy and, in the context of walking, meetings can enable more heartfelt and dynamic discussions.

A 2014 study by Stanford University proved that while walking and for some time after, people are more creative (as measured using standardised creativity tests).

So, what’s going on? The biggest contributor to this amplified thinking could have been the participants’ attainment of a flow state. Flow — also known as the zone or transient hypofrontality — is a state of mind where we lose our sense of self.

For creative thinking this is essential because humans tend to approach problem solving in the same way over and over again. This patterning becomes part of our individual personalities, so to break out of those repeated patterns we need to remove our sense of self.

Walking does this by decreasing activity in the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain most associated with our feeling of individuality, and allows us to view challenges from a non-self-based perspective.

When two or three people are walking and talking together the interaction between the parties is completely different from the interaction if they meet in an enclosed office space. In a walking meeting everyone moves in the same direction, facing forward and not looking at each other eye-to-eye. This makes it easier for everyone to drop the masks of their working personalities.

Clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Stan Rodski has said: “If I were to summarise all of my learning over 40-odd years, I’d say that most people’s stress starts with the complaint: I don’t have enough time.”

Walking reduces stress by changing our relationship with time in three ways:

● It increases the flow in the brain of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine serotonin and anandamine, which help create a more open and spacious mindset.

● It lowers our brain wave frequency from the beta region to the high theta range. The theta wave between 5Hz to 10Hz is the frequency we enter when we are meditating. Again, this encourages an expansive mindset.

● After 30 to 40 minutes of walking the activity of our prefrontal cortex starts to slow down and we drop into the flow state. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the world leader in flow research, noted through more than 8000 interviews with highly successful people that the vast majority observed that when they entered flow they lost their sense of self — but also their sense of time.

If participants feel less stressed during a meeting there is a much better chance of a good outcome.

In business meetings everyone would like to feel they have some control over the direction of the conversation. Usually it’s only the leader who can claim this, but by walking, everyone involved can feel some level of control. This is because for four million years, as the ancestors of nomads, the way we traditionally gained control was by going for a walk. Walking was how we gathered food and water and gained the intimate knowledge of our environment that let us manage it for our own benefit. Even now, by going for a walk, we trigger those same deep-seeded feelings.

By putting one foot in front of the other we become active, we are not passively waiting for things to happen to us. Walking meetings create a different and potentially positive group dynamic for business discussions. I believe they will become an integral tool for the management world.

Jono Lineen is a senior curator, National Museum of Australia, and author of Perfect Motion: How Walking Makes Us Wiser (Penguin Random House, 2019).