Hike To Creativity

We’re all obsessed with creative thinking. How can we get people to come up with new ideas, create new products, solve seemingly intractable problems, and even just be a bit better at getting basic tasks done well.

Neuroscientist David Strayer got thinking about just these issues when he realized that his brain seemed to work much better when he was hiking around the backcountry than when he was sitting for days on end in his lab. Being a scientist he did what scientists do: came up with an experiment to evaluate this situation. He used his favorite lab rats, university students. Half the group went off on a four day backcountry hike while the others just hung around and did whatever they normally did…which was not backcountry hiking.

Amazingly, when the students were then evaluated via a creative thinking and intuition test the hikers bettered the others by 50%. Merely getting out of the built environment and walking through the backcountry opened up the creative synapses tremendously.

I hestitate to suggest that you send all your employees off on four day backcountry hikes in the hopes they return with exceptionally new and creative ideas. That seems to stretch the research way too much. However, Strayer seems to have found that freeing the brain from the built world and letting it wander while getting some exercise via hiking along the wilderness trails will open up the mind to non-linear intuitive and creative ideas. So perhaps you ought to think about how to encourage such pursuits.

Personally, I have always found Strayer’s conclusion to be true and so spend quite a bit of time walking through the woods where I live. Mostly I take short walks of a hour or two. Still, these short walks always get my mind wandering to unusual places and coming up with thoughts I never had before. People laugh at me, but I always carry a little tablet that fits in my pocket so I can scatch out notes as ideas occur to me. A fair bit of my soon to be published book was thought through this way and I’ve come up with some interesting ideas for clients that have proven useful and profitable while staring at trees and pileated woodpeckers.

I’ve also noticed that although I mostly walk by myself when I’m with someone else the ideas seem to grow exponentially. The power of minds released from their strictures feeding off of and building on the ideas you can bounce around when only the trees and forest critters are witnesses.

Get some air more often. Encourage your people to get some too. That old saying you mention about needing to get some air as you bolt from the confines of the office into the outside world is the first thought on your way to a more creative day.