Talking the Walk

I do some of my best consulting on long walks. Me and my client keeping pace through trails of logic and paths of random connections.

Most of the time, we don't even look at each other. We just talk into the air. Letting ideas and issues float around each other. Listening to what blows back. The world holding us close enough. The road keeping us on track.

Sometimes there are long silences. Sometimes we interrupt each other to exchange greetings with the world. But always we are side-by-side. Looking out together at what is meeting us.

Often, we play a kind of Follow the Leader game. One of us usually takes the lead on the way there, the other on the way back. When we return to where we started, we are clearer, closer, a little exhausted, a lot fulfilled.

We are not only client and consultant, we are companions. Fellow travelers, who, for the duration of the journey, are facing the world together. Giving it and each other our combined and undivided attention. Giving the intention and the accident of each moment our interpersonal best.

And most of this time, see, we are not even actually looking at each other!

Compare and contrast: the office meeting. Where we are not side-by-side, but face-to-face. Facing the other, and the world, each from a different direction. Each set against a different background, each fixed in a position of separateness, each seeing only what the other doesn't.

We get work done. Oh, yes we do. Agreements get made. Understandings established. But it's not the same. We are not as clearly on the same side. We can't see quite as clearly or as far.

In fact, when we want to get something clear, what we usually do is look away, off to the side or up in the air. And when we want to get something communicated, we draw on something--a piece of paper, a whiteboard, drawing our attention away from each other's eyes and towards the shared vision.

Interesting that there are times when we can communicate more successfully, more completely, only when we don't look at each other.

It gives me great hope for the future of things like groupware and the Internet.

Here on the Internet, we don't really spend much time looking at each other. We can send each other pictures. We can even hook in our desktop videos. But the important thing is that we can actually meet here, in a manner of virtual speaking, and can stand, as it were, side-to-side, creating actual understandings together.

Granted, it's not the same as taking a walk on the beach. For example, you don't get that bracing ocean spray. But then again, our words stay with us longer. Forever if we want.

And there's something about things like e-mail and Notes and the World Wide Web and chat rooms and bulletin boards and even the telephone that are each separately and even moreso together uniquely conducive to just this sort of Walking Talk-type collaboration.

Which is why this conceptual walk you and I are taking, and this particular conversation we are just about having, may be leading us someplace beyond where we started from.

Can we stop here for a while? I have to visit the non-virtual you-know.