Walking meetings: when to take the conversation outside

What the Stanford experiments showed

Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz ran four experiments comparing people sitting and walking, indoors and outdoors. Participants then answered creativity tasks.

Three findings are useful for anyone planning a meeting.

• Walking helped idea generation. On a task asking for alternative uses of everyday objects, walking increased the scores of 81% of participants.
• It barely helped finding one answer. On a task with a single correct solution, only 23% improved. Walking widens the search; it does not sharpen the choice.
• The effect lingered. People who sat down after walking still showed a residual creative boost. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest-quality analogies, and the effects of being outdoors and of walking could be separated.

These were short laboratory tasks, mostly with students, so the results tell you about the kind of thinking walking favours, not about business outcomes.

What has never been tested

It is tempting to claim that walking meetings produce better decisions or higher productivity. Nobody has shown this. A Cochrane review by Shrestha and colleagues, looking at ways to reduce sitting at work, searched specifically for studies of standing or walking meetings and found none.

That gap matters for how you use them. The honest case rests on two separate pieces of evidence: walking favours generating ideas, and moving more is good for health. The meeting format itself is a sensible combination of both, not a proven intervention. For what exercise does to focus and judgement more broadly, see exercise and decision-making.

Which meetings to walk

Match the format to the type of thinking the meeting needs.

• Good fits: brainstorming a new product or market, a one-to-one with a direct report, a mentoring conversation, preparing the outline of a speech, a difficult conversation where side by side feels easier than face to face.
• Poor fits: anything that needs a screen or a document, detailed financial review, negotiation where you need to read faces, confidential topics in a public place, groups larger than three.

For one-to-ones, the format has a further, untested advantage: walking side by side removes the desk between you, and some people find it easier to raise a concern that way than across a table. Keep that in mind for appraisal follow-ups or a conversation about workload, and choose a quiet route where nobody can overhear.

A practical rule: walk to open up options, then sit down to decide. Oppezzo's finding that the creative boost lingers after sitting supports doing exactly that, with the last ten minutes at a table to note what was agreed.

How to run one well

1. Say so in the invitation. Mention comfortable shoes and the planned route, so nobody arrives in new leather soles.
2. Plan a loop of known length, ending where you started. Twenty to thirty minutes suits most topics.
3. Keep the group to two or three. Beyond that, someone always walks behind and drops out of the conversation.
4. Set the pace for talking. The NHS describes a brisk walk as about 3 miles an hour, a pace at which you can talk but not sing. That is the right speed: fast enough to count as exercise, slow enough to think.
5. Capture decisions. Record a voice note at the end, or stop at a bench to write the three actions down.

Walking meetings in the Dubai heat

In the hot months, a midday walk outside in Dubai is not a good idea. Hold walking meetings early in the morning or after sunset, in shaded areas, or indoors: hotel corridors, covered malls and office atriums give long enough loops. Carry water, and shorten the walk on humid days. The warning signs of heat illness, and how to adapt any exercise to the climate, are in training in the heat in Dubai.

Anyone with a joint, heart or lung condition should walk at a comfortable pace and ask a doctor if walking brings on symptoms such as chest pain or unusual breathlessness.

What the walk adds to your day

Steps add up quickly. A pooled analysis of 15 cohorts by Paluch and colleagues, covering 47,471 adults, found that more daily steps were associated with progressively lower mortality, levelling off at about 6,000 to 8,000 steps for people aged 60 and over, and 8,000 to 10,000 for younger adults. In that analysis, the quarter taking the most steps (a median of 10,901 a day) had an adjusted hazard ratio for death of 0.47 compared with the quarter taking the fewest (a median of 3,553). The data are observational, and the authors note that the popular 10,000-step target has little evidence behind it. For the details and the history of that number, see daily steps.

Pace counts as well. A review by Tudor-Locke and colleagues found that about 100 steps a minute is a reasonable marker of moderate-intensity walking in adults. The WHO counts activity of any duration towards the weekly target of 150 to 300 minutes, so a brisk 30-minute walking meeting contributes directly. For how those minutes fit into a week, see how much exercise per week.

The calculator above converts a step count into distance and time. It estimates stride length from height, a rough approximation: for a better figure, count your steps over a known distance, such as a running track.

Beyond the meeting

A walking meeting is one way to break a long run of sitting, and a pleasant one. It does not replace training, and it will not fix a day of ten seated hours alone. Combine it with the short breaks described in posture in long meetings and with two strength sessions a week.

If you want help building movement into a full diary, a Club coach can plan the week with you: start with your Club space.