We are the world’s best negotiators.
I am not talking about my colleagues at Conlego. I mean the entire human race. Of course, that ability comes from our multi-folded, fleshy supercomputer of a brain. As Jeremy DeSilva explained in his book First Steps (2021), the brain developed in part because of our ability to walk upright. Not only did upright walking develop our enhanced brains, but it still plays a critical role in our creativity. Specifically, the creativity that leads to successful negotiation results.
We have a rule at Conlego. Well, we have 5. Our last rule is that negotiators should always “Persuade, not argue.” Just as a tired runner’s form breaks down with fatigue, negotiations can devolve from intellectual bouts of persuasion into oversimplified slaps of argument when parties tire. It is at those very moments that we coach our clients to pause the negotiation. Get some fresh air. Go for a walk. Tap into their evolutionarily designed creative machine.
Walking to stimulate creativity is not novel; it is pervasive throughout history.
William Wordsworth supposedly walked 180,000 miles, whereupon he discovered the dancing daffodils. Surely, Jean-Jacques Rousseau uncovered the “state of nature” on foot, for he once stated, “When I stay in one place I can hardly think at all; my body has to be on the move to set my mind going.” Walks through the New England woods inspired Emerson’s and Thoreau’s writing, in particular Thoreau’s essay Walking (1862). Muir, Swift, Kant, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Dickens, Wolf: all creative and intellectual powerhouses, all habitual walkers.
Scientific experiments underscore how walking leads to creativity.
This is not purely anecdotal. Stanford University psychologist Marily Oppezzo set out to design an experiment to prove what the creatives of the past understood to be true. Oppezzo’s experiment asked a group of Stanford students to list as many unique uses as possible for common objects; a Frisbee, for example, could be a plate, a bird bath, or a small shovel. The more novel the idea, the higher the score. Before the test, half the students sat for an hour. The other half walked on a treadmill. Unsurprisingly, the walking group saw a 60% increase in creativity.
Such results can be seen at the neurological level as well. Michelle Voss, Psychology Professor at the University of Iowa, studied the effects of walking on brain connectivity. Of the group of sixty-five volunteers, ranging from fifty-five to eighty, half took forty-minute walks three times a day. The other half sat on the couch. The couch potatoes only participated in light stretching as a control. After a year, a run through the MRI machine showed that the stretching only volunteers had minimal changes. Meanwhile, the walkers showed significantly improved connectivity in regions of the brain linked to creative thinking.
Walking is not only good for your long-term health, but it also leads you towards short-term creative negotiation outcomes.
Don’t let your persuasive form breakdown. Ask to take a break when you start to feel your negotiations turn to arguments. Go for a walk. Let your 50-million-year-old brain function as it should. Then come back to the table, restate each party’s interests, and get negotiating. Creatively, of course!
Further Reading
- DeSilva, Jeremy. First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human, 2021.
- Thoreau, Henry David. Walking, 1862.
