Walking Meetings: A Stanford Study Found a 60% Creativity Boost

Somewhere in your week sits a meeting that is, functionally, a phone call with extra steps — except without the steps. One-on-ones, catch-ups, brainstorms, audio-only calls where no one shares a screen. These are walking meetings waiting to happen.

The Stanford experiment

In 2014, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz at Stanford published a series of four experiments (176 participants total) in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. The finding was striking: creative output — measured by divergent-thinking tasks — increased by an average of roughly 60 percent when participants walked compared to when they sat. The boost held whether they walked outside or on an indoor treadmill, and it partially persisted even after sitting back down.

Walking didn't improve convergent thinking (narrowing to a single correct answer), which makes the practical application clear: walk for the brainstorms, the open-ended discussions, the "what should we do about" conversations. Keep the spreadsheet analysis and the detailed design reviews at the desk.

What walking does to a conversation

Beyond the step math — a thirty-minute walking call banks a few thousand steps that otherwise wouldn't exist — the format changes the conversation itself. Side-by-side beats face-to-face for candor; difficult topics and honest feedback often flow easier without constant eye contact across a table. Walking meetings also have a natural end: the loop finishes, and so does the meeting, which is itself a contribution to organizational sanity.

Which meetings qualify

The honest filter: no shared documents, no screen sharing, two to three people maximum, nothing requiring careful real-time note-taking. One-on-ones are the flagship use case. Anything involving spreadsheets stays at the desk.

Making it work in practice

• Propose it once and it normalizes. Most colleagues are delighted — walking is rarely the hard sell.
• Solo remote calls are the easy entry: earbuds, a familiar loop, mic quality verified once. Test wind before your first client call.
• Match pace to the slower walker. This is Zone 1 diplomacy, not interval training.
• Default route with decent pavement and tolerable noise. Wind is the real enemy of call audio.
• Bad weather converts to a standing call by the window rather than canceling the movement entirely.

The quiet payoff

Two or three converted meetings per week compounds into meaningful weekly movement without claiming a single new minute from the calendar. The meeting was happening anyway. You were just sitting through it — and the Stanford data says the ideas were probably worse for it.