Talk walk is a useful exercise for exploring a topic and/or sorting through a quantity of information or ideas developed earlier. It’s about creating a breathing space to practice listening and benefit from an outside perspective on one’s mode of reacting and interacting.
Being in motion makes speech flow more easily and mitigates hierarchical differences while having a positive influence on morale and creativity.
As facilitator, invite the participants to form pairs who will walk together. State the guiding question of the session before starting the 30-minute “talk walk”.
For the first ten minutes, one of the pair reflects out loud on the set question.
The other person listens attentively without initiating a discussion: they only intervene to support the reflection of the person speaking, to help them take their reflection further and deeper. This means asking questions, paraphrasing but not:
offering advice,
suggesting possible solutions,
talking about themselves.
For the next 10 minutes, the roles are reversed. The person who was speaking listens and it is the turn of the one who listened to respond to the set question.
For the remaining 10 minutes, the pair share how they experienced the exercise and fall into natural conversation.
When everyone comes together again, each pair can then share its impressions on how the walk went and what they got out of it.
The talk walk can also simply be an alternative to a traditional meeting: taking a walk far away from screens promotes quality communication.
Meetings that lend themselves the best to a walk are ones where creative thoughts and ideas are shared, as well as individual interviews (annual, recruitment, feedback etc.)
If the participants don’t divide evenly into pairs, you can form a few groups of three or step out of your role as facilitator for a moment to pair up with the solo participant.
At the end of the walk, you can also forego the plenary session so the exercise remains a time for connecting to the topic without feeding anything back in to the group. You should still encourage the participants to make a note for themselves of the points they want to take away from what was said during the walk.