My desk is where I write, analyse, answer emails, plan my diary and get the practical work of the day finished. Yet some of my best thinking arrives only once I have left it, almost always while I am walking.
There is something about movement, the space and about simply being away from the place where a problem is usually created and lives, that changes how I see it. I rarely notice this happening consciously, but I do notice the thoughts that arrive as a result.
Research increasingly supports this instinct. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis, drawing on 23 studies and more than 1,000 participants, found that walking has a large positive effect on divergent thinking which is the capacity to generate different ideas, possibilities and solutions.
I often come across research, theories or frameworks that put language to something I have observed throughout my years working with clients, and this is one of the clearest examples recently.
Question Or Answer
What looks like an answer problem is very often a question problem, and here is what I mean by that.
At the desk, the questions tend to sound like this: how do I fix this, should I employ someone, should I sell, how do I get my team to perform, how do I grow the business. And so we search harder and think harder, certain that another spreadsheet, another round of analysis or one more conversation will finally reveal the answer.
Yet if the question itself is wrong, thinking harder from the same position that created the problem rarely produces the right answer.
Think of a river meeting a boulder. It curves around the obstacle, finds the lower ground, and reaches the sea by an entirely different route, without ever forcing its way through. A question given the same freedom, permitted to curve, to approach from another angle, tends to find its own way forward far more easily than the one pushed hard against the same rock, from the same familiar direction, over and over again.
Move away from the desk and the physiology shifts before the thinking does. The eyes take in a wider landscape, the body moves rather than sits, attention that had narrowed onto one point begins to loosen, and thoughts that were circling the same familiar route start making different connections. First, settle the state. Then strategy becomes available, and walking, for me, is one of the simplest and most reliable ways of doing exactly that.
Psychologists have long described this as an incubation effect in problem solving. Stepping away from a problem loosens the mental set we become stuck inside and allows different possibilities to emerge.
And sometimes the breakthrough arrives as a different question altogether, one that had been sitting quietly underneath the question you thought you were asking.
“How do I work harder?” becomes “Why does the business require so much of me?”
“How do I motivate them?” becomes “What is happening here that is draining motivation?”
“Should I sell?” becomes “What do I actually want the next part of my life to look like?”
That is a very different quality of thinking, and it is also why I have spent years walking and talking with clients rather than sitting opposite them across a desk. The desk is usually where we manage symptoms, whereas getting outside, moving, talking and noticing what surfaces gives us a much better chance of finding the source underneath them.
Find The Real Problem. Fix The Real Problem.
So the next time something important has you wrestling at the desk, take the question outside for a walk and give yourself permission to ask a better question rather than search harder for an answer to the one you have already got wrong.
Underneath the walking is something that matters more. Protecting enough peace in your day to think clearly, staying close enough to your purpose to recognise which question actually matters, and trusting that the profit you are chasing so hard at your desk is often waiting quietly outside it, inside the version of the question you have not yet asked. A business built to produce its best thinking only when its owner is chained to the desk is a business built to depend entirely on that owner, and every hour spent finding the real question instead of forcing an old answer is an hour spent building something that can eventually work as hard for you as you have worked for it.
If any of this is stirring something for you, a confidential virtual coffee is always available. No script, no sales pitch, just space to talk it through.
Get in touch and let’s have a confidential conversation that costs nothing, but might change everything. 30 minutes for a virtual coffee.
Love, Gail.
Research Referenced
Thabane, A., Arora, V., Boilard, J., Sutoski, A., Parpia, S., Calic, G. et al. (2026). The impact of walking on creative thinking: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 21(5), e0347878. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0347878.
Sio, U. N. & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94-120. DOI: 10.1037/a0014212.