What is a Walk-and-Talk Meeting?

Walk-and-Talk Meeting – a conversation in the course of a walk

A Walk-and-Talk Meeting is a meeting that is held while walking, away from a meeting room, office, or desk. A Walk-and-Talk Meeting can easily be held in pairs or in small groups of five participants. Larger groups usually have several conversations while walking, which sometimes leads to participants gathering at a time. While this encourages general interaction, it also ensures that the Walk-and-Talk Meeting becomes an open-air conversation.

Advantages of the Walk-and-Talk Meeting

The meeting in motion

• promotes an improved physical and mental well-being of the participants.
• offers mental stimulation, which often leads to new ideas.
• strengthens the team and helps to form a group identity.
• is not perceived as a waste of time regardless of the results.
• levels hierarchies and status differences and promotes exchange at eye level.

Of course, there are some aspects to Walk-and-Talk Meetings that are not explicitly considered in traditional meetings: the time of year, temperature, weather, agenda, documentation of results, access to information needed, physical limitations of participants, openness of participants to Walk-and-Talk Meetings, route chosen, walking speed, etc.

Conclusion: A Walk-and-Talk Meeting is not meant to be a permanent substitute for all meetings and the more participants there are, the more challenging it becomes. For smaller groups, however, it can offer a successful alternation that promotes team exchange and is fun at the same time.

Impulse to discuss:

If a walk and talk meeting is about talking while walking, could a phone call while walking also be called a walk and talk?

Notes:

Walk and Talk as a method was probably first mentioned by the US-American psychologist Dr. Kate Hays in 1999 in her book Working it Out: Using Exercise in Psychotherapy.

In 2014, the Journal of Experimental Psychology published a study on the effectiveness of walk & talk compared to “conventional” meetings in a seated position. Many criteria were tested, such as creativity, diversity of ideas, precision of ideas, etc. The results showed a significantly higher output of the walking version.

An interesting publication addresses the difference between cognitive performance and mental state when walking or sitting outdoors.

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