The owner of a small architecture practice has noticed a pattern. Her best ideas rarely arrive at her desk. They turn up on the walk from the car park to the office, while taking the dog round the block, or pacing the corridor during a phone call. At her desk, staring at the same drawing, she often feels stuck. Ten minutes on her feet, and something shifts.
She assumed it was a personal quirk. Many people feel the same, and history is full of famous thinkers who swore by walking. But it’s one thing to feel that walking helps, and another to know whether it really does, and for which kind of thinking.
Researchers at Stanford University decided to find out. Their answer is encouraging, with one important twist that changes how a busy business owner might use it.
One Like insight: Some ideas arrive more easily on your feet than in your chair.
What happened when they walked
In 2014, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education published four experiments involving 176 participants, mostly university students. They compared people’s performance on creativity tests while sitting and while walking, indoors on a treadmill facing a blank wall and outdoors around the campus.
One widely used test asks people to think of as many new uses as possible for an everyday object, such as a button or a tyre. In one of the experiments, creative output increased by an average of 60% when people were walking compared with sitting. The large majority of participants did better on their feet, and the benefit lingered for a short while after they sat back down. Walking indoors on a treadmill worked about as well as walking outside, suggesting that the movement itself, rather than the change of scenery, was doing much of the work.
There are sensible caveats. The participants were mostly students, the sessions were short, and some creativity researchers question whether lab tests like thinking of new uses for a button really capture the kind of creativity that matters at work. But the effect appeared consistently across the experiments, and it matches what many people already notice about their own thinking.
Walking for ideas, sitting for decisions
The twist came from a second type of test. Alongside tasks that ask people to generate many possibilities, the researchers used one that requires finding a single correct answer: spotting the word that links three others, such as “cottage”, “Swiss” and “cake” (the answer is “cheese”). Psychologists call the first kind of thinking divergent and the second convergent.
Walking helped the divergent kind, generating lots of possibilities. It didn’t help the convergent kind, finding the one right answer. If anything, people did slightly worse on those tasks while walking.
That distinction is useful for business owners. A walk is a good tool when you need options: new product ideas, fresh angles on a stuck marketing campaign, different ways to approach a difficult client. It’s less suited to work that needs careful focus: checking the numbers in a quote, reviewing a contract, deciding between two final options. As we explored in Better Ideas Start Alone, generating ideas and choosing between them are different stages that benefit from different conditions.
[Infographic placement] When to walk, when to sit. Two columns. Walk (generating options): new product ideas, campaign angles, ways round a problem, names and slogans. Sit (narrowing to an answer): checking figures, choosing between final options, reviewing contracts, editing. Caption: Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014): walking increased creative output by around 60% on idea-generation tasks, but didn’t help tasks with one correct answer.
Building walks into the working week
The practical changes are small. When you’re stuck on a problem that needs fresh options, take it for a ten- or fifteen-minute walk, ideally without your phone in your hand. Keep a way to capture ideas, such as a voice note or a notebook, because the benefit seems to fade fairly soon after you sit down. Consider holding some one-to-one conversations as walking meetings, particularly early-stage discussions where the goal is to explore rather than decide.
Then, when it’s time to choose, narrow down or check the details, go back to the desk. Matching the setting to the type of thinking may help more than trying to force every kind of work into the same chair.
A few questions can help:
- Where and when do our best ideas usually arrive?
- Which upcoming problems need more options rather than a single answer?
- Could any of our meetings work better as walks?
- How will we capture ideas that come to us away from the desk?
Which brings us back to the architect and her productive walk from the car park. Her experience wasn’t a quirk. It lines up with what the Stanford researchers found. She might simply make it deliberate: a short walk before each design review to generate options, and a quiet desk session afterwards to decide which ones are worth drawing.
Sources
- Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40(4), 2014. Summarised by Stanford Graduate School of Education, 24 April 2014.
