I Went for a Walk in Bucharest and a Meeting Broke Out: In Praise of The Long Meandering Walk and Talk.

One in the afternoon last Tuesday in Bucharest, Romania, and I am standing on a path in a park holding a gelato next to a man I had met one hour earlier, and I am slightly embarrassed about how well this is going.

It was to be an hour on the calendar, in a room in an office. It became two hours and change, in a park, with gelato.

That’s three times now. Three separate conversations while I am here that were booked as sixty minutes in a room and ended up as something else entirely — through parks, past buildings one of us knew the history of, stopped on a bench watching a city do its afternoon, talking about a business problem with the specific looseness of people who have stopped performing their preparedness. I keep wanting to call these accidents. They’re not. Three is a pattern, and the pattern is telling me something I had backwards.

The thirty-minute meeting is now a markdown file

Start with the part that should be uncontroversial by now. The standing thirty-minute meeting — status, alignment, sync, catch-up, whatever your organization has named the ritual — no longer has a defensible reason to exist. Not because meetings are bad. Because a machine does that specific job better than a room full of people does.

Every one of those meetings had the same underlying function: move information from where it is to where it needs to be, and confirm that everyone heard it. That is a retrieval-and-distribution problem. It is now solved. Write the file, pass it through the channel, let the agent summarize it, let people read it at the speed they read rather than the speed you talk. You get a record. Nobody has to be anywhere at ten. You get the four people who didn’t need to be there back.

Most of us have known this for a while and kept booking the meetings anyway, because the meeting was never really about the information. It was about proximity¹ — a weekly proof that the project still had humans attached to it. Fine. But we’ve been paying for proximity in thirty-minute installments that provide almost none of it, and the bill has gotten absurd.

So the efficiency crowd wins the argument and kills the meeting. Good. Then they make the mistake: they take the reclaimed hours and declare victory. Fewer meetings becomes the whole strategy. Calendar minimalism as an operating philosophy.

What they’ve actually done is delete the transaction and protect nothing in its place.²

Nobody sits at the head of a sidewalk

Here is what I noticed on the third walk, having failed to notice it on the first two.

We were shoulder to shoulder. Not across a table. That single change does more work than any facilitation technique I’ve ever been taught. Across a table, there is a head of it, and everyone knows where it is even when nobody is sitting there. Side by side, there’s no geometry to occupy. You can’t present to a person walking next to you.³ You can only talk to them.

The pace mattered too. We walked slightly slower than leisurely, and the conversation matched it. I don’t think that’s coincidence — I think the body sets a tempo and the talk falls into step with it. Nothing arrived at pitch speed. Nothing had to be resolved before the next calendar block, because because we had walked right past that 20 minutes ago, only pausing long enough to tell our AI COS to reschedule.

And then the small physical vocabulary that a conference room quietly forbids: turning your whole body to look at someone when they say the interesting thing. Stopping. Pointing at a building. Sitting down on a bench for twenty minutes because the bench was there. Laughing more than I have ever laughed inside a boardroom. Not jokes. The other kind of laughter, the kind that shows up when two people recognize the same absurdity at the same moment and neither of them has to explain it.

That laughter is data. It’s the sound of a working relationship forming in real time, and you cannot schedule it into a thirty-minute meeting.

Meandering is not wandering

The word I keep using for these conversations is meandering, which makes people nervous, because it sounds like an excuse for having no agenda.

It meandered in a direction. That’s the distinction, and it’s the whole craft of it.

The walk had a purpose we both understood and never once stated out loud. What it didn’t have was a sequence. We went sideways into architecture and came back with something about how the business presents itself. We went sideways into a plaza’s history and came back with something about what the company is actually asking people to believe. The detours weren’t interruptions of the work. They were the work taking a longer route to somewhere it couldn’t have gone directly.

Compare that to the thing we’ve optimized for: bam, straight to dessert. Twenty-five minutes, decision, out. That’s not efficiency. That’s eating standing up over the sink.

Two hours in a park was a full-course meal. Including — and I’m going to insist on this — the gelato. The break is not a charming detail. It’s structural. Something happens when you stop, buy ice cream like a couple of adults playing hooky, and stand there for eight minutes not talking about the problem. The frame breaks. Whatever performance you were both still running quietly ends during those eight minutes, and the conversation that resumes afterward is measurably more honest than the one that paused.

Plus, it hard to posture when you have dessert dripping down your hand.

On the way back to the metro, the conversation changed gear without either of us calling for it. Two hours of going wide — architecture, a plaza, whatever was in front of us — compressed into the last fifteen minutes. Answers. Decisions. Who does what by when. Design thinking builds that funnel on purpose and gives it a name. We got it for free, because the park ran out.

Except the treadmill worked too

Now the part that complicates my own case.⁴

In 2014, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz at Stanford ran four experiments on walking and creative thinking, and the results are more specific than the headline version everyone repeats. Walking raised creative output substantially — an average of around sixty percent on divergent thinking, generating possibilities. On convergent thinking, the focused kind where you close in on the single right answer, it barely moved. Twenty-three percent of participants improved.

The other finding is the one that undercuts my romanticism. Walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall produced comparable gains to walking outdoors. The movement did the work. Not the trees. Not the plaza. Not the architecture I was so pleased with.

So the honest version of my claim is narrower than the one I wanted to make. Walking is for the generative half of thinking. It’s where you find out which problem you’re actually solving. But a walk that’s ending is a different instrument entirely. Those last fifteen minutes to the metro did what the conference room is supposed to do, and did it better, because the deadline arrived on its own instead of being announced at the top. Nobody had to sit down.

And the park isn’t doing what I assumed it was doing. If the treadmill gets you the cognitive benefit, then what Bucharest added wasn’t creativity — it was permission. The park lowered the threshold of formality. It gave us benches and gelato and the license to take two hours without either of us feeling we were stealing them. The environment isn’t the engine. It’s the excuse, and the excuse turns out to be the scarce resource.⁵

One more complication I won’t pretend away. Two hours on foot is not universally available. It assumes a body that cooperates, a September in Eastern Europe rather than an afternoon in Singapore where the same walk is a medical event. I’m writing this at 62 with knees that still hold up and no one waiting on me. That’s a set of privileges, not a methodology. The transferable part is duration and geometry — side by side, unhurried, with a break in the middle. A long lunch does it. A kitchen table does it. The park is just the version that was gifted me on this trip.

What the hour is for now

At some point everyone is asking how to have fewer meetings. It’s the wrong question, and it’s wrong in a way that gets more wrong every quarter, because the machines are going to keep taking the transactional hours whether we plan for it or not.⁶

The better question: what is left that requires two humans in the same air, and how much time does that thing actually need?

The answer, from a sample size of three, is that it needs more than you think and less often than you fear. It needs somewhere to walk. It needs nobody at the head of the table, because there is no table. It needs permission to go sideways and the confidence that sideways leads somewhere. And it needs a break for ice cream at one in the afternoon, which is the least serious-sounding piece of advice I have ever given a client and the one I’d defend hardest.

Less meetings will always be the rule. But if you must — go long, go outside, and for god’s sake break for gelato.

Nothing was scheduled that Tuesday except an hour in a room.but what I ended up with was so much more valuable. A long list of new insights, a guided tour of the history and architecture of Bucharest, and of course, the gelato.