WHY WALKING WORKS

Stephen Mugford

Thinking, talking, and walking are inextricably linked through history. It is only a
recent idea that we meet around tables, seated in chairs.
http://www.feetfirst.org/walk-and-maps/walking-meetings

1 BACKGROUND
Recently, sparked by a variety of inputs1—I have been using ‘walking and talking’ as a
regular part of various change management / personal development workshops, as well as
spruiking the idea to colleagues and friends. Based on this experience and the views of
others, I have no doubt that this simple technique is an important addition to enhancing
communication—useful both to people like me organising various workshop sessions and to
managers and others for themselves.
As mentioned in the acknowledgements, late last year my wife Pamela Kinnear, started
using ‘walk and talk’ as a method for infromal performance management conversations with
her senior reports. Her view—and the reaction of colleagues—has been overwhelmingly
that such conversations are easier, more engaged and more robust than similar
conversations sitting in an office.
In this post I want to describe a couple of ways I have used this method and then try to offer
a proper explanation (beyond common sense) of why I think it works.
 Example 1: I have developed a reflection technique that includes important elements of
self disclosure and colleague feedback as to increase self-awareness. As I explain below,
adapting this to a walking mode has enhanced its efficacy.
Briefly, the idea is that each person in a workshop makes notes on a story they will tell
about a period of conflict in interpersonal relations in the workplace. The idea is to cover
off on events, motivations, feelings etc. I divide the groups into groups of 3. In each
group a person tells their story to two colleagues who listen and, apart from
clarifications, don’t say a great deal. In the original model, when the story is finished, the
teller turns her back and listens to the two colleagues discuss and analyse what they
heard, what they infer, etc. At the end of the analysis the teller turns back, thanks her
colleagues and the second person takes his turn. This process—which is an adaptation of
Dave Snowden’s ‘ritual dissent’ method’—is powerful and effective.

1
Acknowledgements: I’m grateful to Phil Langdon and colleagues working at the Australian Institute of Police
Management who first got me thinking about walking with accounts of the reflective sessions they run in leadership
development courses for senior managers. David Gurteen kindly sent me a post which I draw on below . I’m also indebted
to my wife, Dr, Pamela Kinnear, who never tires of sharing sociological discussions on these topics and who has
incorporated ‘walking meetings’ into her senior management role, especially for performance management purposes. And
thanks also to a number of officers of the RAN and RAAF who have cooperated with me by undertaking walking discussions
in various courses I run for Navy and Air Force on developing emotional intelligence.
 Now (weather permitting) I send the groups walking, achieving the ‘back turning’ simply
by the teller taking a couple of steps ahead and continuing the walk, able to hear the
other two talk behind their back. The feedback I am receiving is again very positive. In
particular, in one group I occasionally need to include the local group coordinator
(SQNLDR Richard Wolf) to make the numbers work properly. Richard has participated in
both the conventional sitting and talking and the newer walking and talking method and
has no doubt to the extra value the latter brings.
 Example 2: In a recent 2 day residential workshop in Sydney for 16 senior managers
from across Australia and NZ, the purpose of which was to solve a commercial crisis in
their joint enterprise, both mornings started with a ‘walking peloton’ (see photo). Each
day groups of 8 set off to walk along the beautiful harbour side walk in a peloton model
that rotated their pairings every 5 or 6 minutes.
The peloton idea I owe to Pamela
Kinnear who asked how one could
combine walking and talking with
‘speed dating’—another technique
which is easily adapted to workshops.
After some discussion, and drawing on
her cycling experience, she suggested a
peloton method: at regular intervals
people swap positions in the parallel
columns, hence talking in turn with
many different partners.
Despite some prototype hiccups (a simple peloton runs into a repetition of partners before
it exhausts all logically possible pairs) this was a remarkable success. It implicitly modelled
what we were looking for--an innovative method in search of their innovative idea—and
succeeded in building rapport, cooperation and methods for solving the joint problems.
No doubt, most people who have read thus far are not hugely surprised by this idea. Most
of us have experienced good conversations while strolling or hiking with friends and
colleagues. My question is exactly WHY this works because the better we understand the
process the more we can hone the method and tweak it to various uses.

2 EXPLANATIONS
There has been a deal of interest in recent times about walking and its link to the workplace
(etc.) and a variety of different goals have been suggested as to why we should walk more.
Noting that the idea has a reputable pedigree that stretches back to (e.g.) Greeks like
Aristotle who walked and talked with their students, a variety of explanations has been
offered as to why it might work and what it might achieve.
First up, we need to see that one powerful force supporting this idea is bio-physical. An
influential TED talk by Nilhofer Merchant makes this point succinctly. See
http://www.ted.com/talks/nilofer_merchant_got_a_meeting_take_a_walk?language=en
If as Merchant pithily puts it “Sitting is the new smoking” because of its negative effects on
health, getting out to walk is desirable because it allows meetings to occur free of the curse
of sitting. This view tends to ignore, however, the possibility that there is something about
the process of walking which not only improves health but also improves the talk itself. The
suggestion is that talking in this way is better—more frank, more relaxed, more creative and
so on. This is argued at the Feet First site and other places. For the impact on creativity
(individual and joint) see: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/walking-vs-sitting-
042414.html

Therefore, walking is good for us and we can have good conversations doing it. Thus, the
purely physical exercise dimension may be helpful (oxygen levels in the brain, the beautiful
outdoors etc., etc.) but clearly it is not a necessary condition.
The commonest explanation offered ad hoc seems to be that there is something about not
being eyeball to eyeball and walking side by side that enhances rapport and thus is
important.
So, I’ve; been puzzling over what exactly is at work here and now I’ll offer an explanation.

3 EXPLANATION PART 1
David Gurteen in his newsletter and a personal communication drew my attention to several
important sources. The one I find most important is this piece by Daniel Goleman, a succinct
summary of some key themes in his recent book Focus:
Researchers at Harvard have identified the three ingredients that can give a
conversation, a presentation, even a negotiation, a personal touch. The three signs:
 First, there’s full mutual attention. That sounds simple, but has become increasingly
rare in this age of constant digital distraction. We are all plugged in to devices that
pull our attention away from the person we’re with, and impose some other agenda
on the moment. There was an article in the Harvard Business Review on the “human
moment,” admonishing us to put down our smartphones, turn away from digital
monitors, and pay full attention to our colleagues and friends.
 Second, there’s physical synchrony. This seems to happen naturally once two people
pay continuous attention. If you watched a video of two people with rapport talking,
and turned off the sound to just observe how their bodies move, it would look as
though they had been choreographed. This is not imitation, but rather a physical
responsiveness: as one body moves this way, the other moves that way – at the right
time and in a harmonious fashion. It’s a nonverbal conversation affirming simpatico.
 The third sign: it feels good. Rapport’s emotional signs are pleasant emotions. Such
rapport often occurs during routines people perform together at work, like joking
baristas in a bustling coffee joint. Being in an upbeat mood, researchers find,
indicates a brain state where you can work at your very best: energized, creative,
ready for any challenge – in flow. The most obvious signal of good feeling: laughter.
www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141016181050-117825785-the-chemistry-of-connection

It will be immediately obvious that walking together may facilitate these three aspects.
Attention to each other is easier when walking (although I strongly advise my walkers not to
take mobile phones to ensure this); synchrony in this case arises more from walking at the
same pace than from observing and mimicking (intentionally or not) the other person’s body
posture, etc.; while rapport seems enhanced in walking more than in a sitting conversation.
So one could stop the explanation at this point and say that walking facilitates attention,
synchrony and rapport, that is why is ‘works’ and, since it confers a health benefit too, let’s
stop there and just encourage it.

4 EXPLANATION PART 2
That, however, has not been a satisfying stop point for me. So, I have been puzzling away to
see if I can say more. I think that a couple of things from cognitive science would help. Let
me point to two. First, the work of Simon Garrod and colleagues:
“…humans are designed for dialogue rather than monologue… Conversations
succeed, not because of complex reasoning, but rather because of alignment at
seemingly disparate linguistic levels. … the majority of routine social behaviour
reflects the operation of … a ‘perception–behaviour expressway’ … we are ‘wired’ in
such a way that there are direct links between perception and action across a wide
range of social situations.
Simon Garrod and Martin J. Pickering (2004) ‘Why is conversation so easy?’, TRENDS in
Cognitive Sciences, Vol.8 No.1 January

This is a general point but, I think, an extremely important one. As I have argued elsewhere
in this blog and in my SlideShare presentation on group size and dialogue,
(http://www.slideshare.net/stephenkmugford/group-size-dialog-and-high-quality-participation )
conversation in the full sense does not occur in large groups. Moreover, commonly favoured
methods of ‘communication’ such as the ubiquitous PPT slide deck with talking head
singularly fail to be very effective. Let me then slip a thought in here: why do we think that a
conversation in an office, facing one another over a table, is an optimum way to
communicate? This is not to say this cannot work but it is to point to a caution.
Whatever else, it is clear that walking along in twos and threes is likely to generate dialogue
in the Garrod sense. Without wanting to fall too much into an ‘evolutionary’ argument (too
many of which seem to me to be Just So stories) it is not hard to suggest that much of
human history centred on hunter-gathering and that context walking and talking together
would be a dominant mode for which we have evolved considerable capacity.
Second, this expressway has a neural basis. In a study that is rapidly becoming a citation
classic, popping up in footnotes in a myriad of sources, Stephens and his colleagues write:
“…[a] speaker’s [brain] activity [pattern] is … coupled with the listener’s activity
[pattern]. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover,
though on average the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a
delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We
connected the extent of neural coupling to a … measure of story comprehension and
find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the
understanding.” [emphasis added.]
Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication Greg J. Stephens et al
(2010) Proc. of the National Academy of Sciences of the US. vol. 107, no. 32 p. 14425
I re-examined this study recently. A key element, which I had not fully appreciated at first, is
this: the research was based on recorded speech. That is, the listener was not present with
the talker and instead listened to recording of the speaker.
How does this matter?
There is a great deal of work around at present on rapport and ‘entrainment’. For example,
in Focus Goleman explains a good deal of the mechanisms that build varied kinds of rapport.
Cognitive rapport—‘do I get your story?—is different from emotional rapport—‘do I feel
your pain?’—and a kind of empathic concern is different again.
In a specialised study of US Supreme Court hearing, Benus and colleagues (Benus, et al (in
press) Knowledge Based Systems. “Entrainment, Dominance and Alliance in Supreme Court
Hearings”) study the largely unconscious processes that indicate that Justices and counsel
are becoming entrained in their thinking and reasoning—as indicated by speech patterns
and markers.
So, my speculation with respect to walking is simply this: when people walk and talk they
privilege the sound channel—the talk and metalinguistic clues—over the visual cues. In face
to face contexts, visual cues come more to the fore and while this may or may not promote
entrainment in the bodily sense (I mimic your gestures and posture and vice versa) perhaps
it does NOT promote understanding. In Goleman’s terms, it may be that cognitive rapport in
particular is enhanced by listening. Walking together seems peculiarly suited to this. As we
walk, we scan the environment—pathway, trip hazards, traffic, etc.—in a relatively routine
and unconscious way—largely freeing our conscious processes for talking and listening.
Moreover, there is a distinct possibility that the presence of visual cues may have a negative
effect not only in distracting from speech but also in blocking or diverting the speech
patterns.
The myriad of books on how to have fierce, crucial, difficult or life changing conversations
attest to the fact that such conversations are not easy. Yet in this literature there is little if
any attention given to the precise communicative context and the way that non-verbal cues
may shape the conversation for better or worse. Reflection, however, reminds us that
making and breaking eye contact, noticing facial expressions and so on may all encourage or
discourage certain lines of talk. Being side by side as we walk (or in the special case walking
ahead) removes this and in so doing seems to offer more gain than loss.
The best-selling author Liane Moriarty puts this nicely in her recent novel Big Little Lies.
Describing conversation between protagonists Jane and Celeste she writes:
Recently, they’d both begun to tentatively open up.It was interesting how you could
say things when you were walking that you might not otherwise have said with the
pressure of eye contact across a table.
I suggest that this explains how it is that the walk leads to much more open, much more
engaged and much ‘deeper’ conversations than we are likely to get sitting round on chairs in
an office. (We might also note that the psychotherapeutic tradition with the patient on a
couch while the therapist attempts the ‘talking cure’ is not so far removed from the idea
here.)
Combine this major benefit with side benefits of exercise and an escape from distractions
and I think we can see why this old, tried and trusted technique might be brought back into
focus, and purposively deployed, as a major tool for improved communications.

5 POST SCRIPT: TALKING IN THE CAR

Several people have described a very similar effect of good conversations when driving with
a family member, friend or colleague in the car. The commonest example I have come
across centres on parents reporting a good conversation with a teenager while driving,
something they found both rewarding and unusual. Some added that the known time
duration seemed to aid this—the knowledge that it would not “go on and on” encouraging
the teenager to open up.
Absent the health benefits of walking, almost everything I have said above applies to a car
trip.
Finally, this argument would not be complete without noting that the final bits of the puzzle
were located and clicked into the picture in a side by side conversation with my wife (Dr
Pamela Kinnear) as we drove from Canberra to the coast. It lacked the healthy exercise
component but in every other way fit the argument above—freed from any time
constraints, sharing the view out of the windows and able to think aloud and let ideas go
where they would was simply exhilarating.