Stuart Maconie

When you have a walking meeting, nobody ends up on mute.

Ramblers President and CW columnist Stuart has a newfound love of the walking meeting – and he’s following in auspicious footsteps.

BACK IN THE mists of time (2009) I wrote a column about a meeting I’d recently had. If this sounds boring or irrelevant, let me quickly tell you (before you head for the features) that I was excited about it because it was a walking meeting.

I’d had it with a TV producer mate in the Goyt Valley in Derbyshire, and reading it again, I see that when I said the meeting was “an unqualified success”, I was a little hasty; the project never happened. But I was an instant convert to the ambulatory assembly. The on-foot forum. The walking meeting.

Fast forward to 2020: the year meetings got weird. Prevented from the usual business with flip charts and croissants and Dave from Purchase Ledger tapping on his pad with his bloody pencil, we were forced to do things differently.

For most of us, this meant Zoom, Teams, or one of the many variants thereof. Thus we grew used to looking into the sheds and bedrooms of our colleagues, glimpsing the lives we had once only heard about at the water cooler. Who on Earth was in that that picture above Jane’s breadbin? It looked like General Franco. And who knew she was so keen on Sven Hassell? New catchphrases blossomed such as “Alan, you’re on mute” and “We can only see the top of your head, Derek”.

So quite a few of my meetings went al fresco and en plein air again, wrapped and muffled and conducted on the hoof. In The West Wing, they used to do this so often, pacing down corridors at speed as the protagonists barked ‘let’s walk and talk’ that it became one of the show’s most send-uppable features. But believe me, it works. Or believe Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in 1889: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” (We might add that getting into a bath or sitting under an apple tree are quite useful too, but walking is top of the charts.)

It sounds from the testimony of many of his exemployees that Steve Jobs’ personal skills left much to be desired. But his habit of holding meetings while pounding the pavements (sorry, ‘sidewalks’) of Palo Alto, California, is not one of them. I think it’s a great idea. I’ve recently had quite a few productive chats about shows while circling the britches and branches of the Bridgewater Canal in Manchester. Mark Zuckerberg is a fan of the walking meeting too.

Perhaps in the wake of Jobs or Zuckerberg, or because of the pandemic, walking meetings are popular across the business world right now, as endless articles in Forbes and Harvard Business Review would seem to bear out. Studies seem to indicate that creativity, happiness and productivity soar on a walk. Maybe it’s because the hierarchical clutter of desks and offices are removed, meaning people feel more equal and valued.

In the arts, people have long understood the value of putting one foot in front of the other. Beethoven and Peter Maxwell Davies would compose on the move, the former on long jaunts around Vienna, the latter on the windswept moors of Orkney, whose eerie echoes and rustles got into his music. Beethoven also engineered a walking meeting with the poet Goethe: a stroll around Teplice on the Czech-German border. Sadly, they didn’t fall into step, taking an instant dislike to each other.

Charles Dickens thought through his plots on mammoth 30-mile walks around London’s streets and parks or the Kent countryside. Charles Darwin was so convinced of the value of walking as an aid to strategic thought that he had a kind of asphalt track installed in his garden and would circumnavigate it whilst muttering and making notes.

Some may say that, just as Mark Twain felt about golf, that a walking meeting is a ‘good walk spoiled’. But I disagree. It’s healthy. It’s free. It’s productive. And you will never have to tell Alan to unmute himself again.