Walking Meetings: The Research and the Practice

The Oppezzo and Schwartz Stanford studies in 2014 showed something specific: walking improves divergent thinking — the kind of cognition where you're generating ideas or finding novel solutions — by roughly 60% on creativity benchmarks. The effect persisted briefly after sitting back down.

Convergent thinking — narrowing options, making decisions, solving a problem with a known correct answer — didn't benefit. In some setups, walking actually impaired it slightly. The activation pattern matters: walking lights up the right kind of brain network for ideation, but it competes with the kind of focused executive control that decision-making needs.

Walking is for the meeting that needs ideas, not the meeting that needs decisions.

So walking meetings should be matched to the right task. Brainstorms, kickoff conversations, "what could this look like" sessions — perfect. Decisions, contract reviews, financial planning, anything requiring careful detail handling — bad fit.

Route matters more than people realize. Indoor treadmill walks captured most of the effect in Stanford's controlled setup, suggesting the locomotion itself drives it. Outdoor walks add nature exposure and likely amplify the effect — but only if the route is low-cognitive-load. Walking somewhere with constant traffic decisions or social navigation cancels the benefit.

Practical setup: a defined loop you've walked many times, ideally 25–45 minutes, ideally outdoors, ideally with one other person. Phones away or on speaker if it's a call. The destination doesn't matter; the walking itself is the intervention.

For Salt Lake Valley walkers: the Dimple Dell Trail in Sandy, Liberty Park in SLC, the Jordan River Parkway are all underused for this purpose.