Walking Meetings: How Moving Conversations Support Creativity, Focus and Connection
A simple change of setting can give ideas more movement, add useful activity to the working day and create a different quality of conversation.
In a Stanford study of walking and creative thinking, 81% of participants produced more creative responses during walking than during seated testing on a divergent-thinking task. The effect appeared during both indoor treadmill walking and outdoor walking.
Some conversations seem to improve the moment everybody leaves the meeting room. Walking changes several ingredients at once. The body begins moving, visual surroundings become more varied and conversation becomes less anchored to a screen or table. Experimental research has found that walking can increase creative idea generation, and small workplace studies show that walking meetings can add meaningful physical activity to otherwise sedentary working days.
Moving alongside another person also creates a distinctive social experience. Walking partners frequently synchronise their steps without consciously trying, and research has linked this movement synchrony, alongside conversational turn-taking, with more positive interpersonal impressions. A walking meeting works best as a particular kind of meeting: exploratory, conversational and light enough on administration for attention to remain with the person beside you.
Top Tips for Effective Walking Meetings
- Choose conversations that benefit from ideas. Brainstorming, project exploration, coaching and one-to-one catch-ups are natural candidates.
- Keep the group small. Pairs are especially easy to manage while moving.
- Agree the purpose before you start. One clear subject gives the walk direction without needing an agenda on screen.
- Use a familiar route. Easy navigation leaves more attention available for conversation.
- Walk at conversational pace. The meeting should feel comfortable enough for complete sentences.
- Capture decisions at the end. A two-minute note or voice memo can preserve actions and ideas.
- Use green space when available. Nature-walk research suggests potential benefits for attention and positive affect.
- Keep the format inclusive. Mobility, weather, confidentiality and personal preference all belong in the decision about where and how to meet.
Creativity Likes a Body in Motion
Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz conducted four experiments examining the relationship between walking and creative thought.
Participants completed tasks designed to measure divergent thinking, the ability to generate multiple possible ideas from a single starting point. Walking increased creative output during the activity and created a residual lift that could continue briefly after participants sat down. The researchers also found similar effects from walking indoors and outdoors, pointing towards movement itself as a significant part of the mechanism.
This gives walking meetings a natural place in the early stages of thinking. A conversation about possibilities, new approaches or an emerging project fits the cognitive territory studied particularly well. Movement also changes the sensory environment. The visual scene develops continuously, the body settles into a repetitive motor pattern and the conversation can unfold without the fixed geometry of a conference table.
Take the Next Idea for a Walk →
Walking Changes the Social Geometry
A seated meeting usually positions people around furniture, screens and documents. Walking places two people alongside one another, facing the same direction and moving through a shared environment. Research into paired walking shows that people frequently synchronise their steps spontaneously. One study found synchronisation in almost half of walking trials among pairs who did not normally walk together.
Another study examined walking synchrony and conversation simultaneously. Step synchrony, conversational turn-taking and the amount of overlapping speech each independently predicted participants’ positive impressions of one another.
The broader interpersonal-synchrony literature links coordinated movement with rapport, cooperation and social bonding. This helps explain the distinctive feel of a good walking conversation. Movement creates a shared pace, the environment supplies occasional natural pauses and eye contact becomes something that occurs periodically within the conversation.
For developmental conversations, mentoring, relationship-building and exploratory one-to-ones, that format can feel remarkably natural.
A Meeting Can Also Become Part of Your Activity
Walking meetings have an obvious physical benefit: people who would have spent the period sitting are moving.
A pilot study at the University of Miami introduced weekly walking meetings among sedentary white-collar workers. Seventeen participants wore activity monitors, and average work-related moderate-to-vigorous activity increased from 107 minutes in the baseline week to 117 minutes by the third week. Participants generally found the structured format feasible and acceptable.
Workplace implementation depends heavily on context. A larger Danish study identified practical considerations including weather, privacy, computer use, note-taking and group size.
Those findings help define the format well. Walking meetings fit naturally around conversations requiring people, ideas and attention. Tasks built around spreadsheets, shared documents and detailed records need the environment designed for those tools.
Turn One Sitting Hour Into Useful Movement →
The Route Can Add Something Too
Taking the conversation outside can introduce another layer. In a 2024 randomised controlled trial involving 92 adults, a 40-minute nature walk produced stronger improvements in positive affect than an urban walk and was associated with neural changes consistent with lower demands on executive attention.
Earlier experimental research has also found improvements in directed attention following interaction with natural environments. A park, riverside path or tree-lined route can therefore make a useful setting when access and circumstances allow. The purpose remains the conversation, and the environment can contribute to its quality through movement, visual distance and a lower concentration of work-related cues.
Try One Conversation Differently
Choose one meeting next week that involves two people and one clear subject.
Agree a 20- or 30-minute route in advance. Leave the laptop behind. Spend the first few minutes establishing what you want to explore and allow the conversation to develop as you walk.
Near the end, slow down somewhere convenient and identify the useful ideas, decisions and next actions. Capture them immediately afterwards.
Then notice the quality of the conversation itself.
Did ideas arrive easily? Did you listen differently? Did the movement change your energy? Did the meeting feel shorter, richer or simply more enjoyable?
A walking meeting needs no complicated methodology. Its value comes from combining two familiar human activities that already work remarkably well together. We walk and we talk. Occasionally, putting the two together can take the conversation somewhere new.
Find the Meetings That Could Move Better →