There is a Scottish word I love: stravaiging. It means wandering aimlessly with intent. Not going anywhere specific, but not wasting time either. Moving without a destination. Letting the walk take you somewhere rather than deciding in advance where that is going to be. It is the opposite of efficiency, and it might be one of the most important things a busy leader could learn to do.
It is a Scottish word, and it carries a kind of permission with it. You are allowed to be somewhere without needing to justify why, without a goal, without a metric for whether you have done it well. You are just out. Just moving. Just alive in the world for a while. And there is something in that which is doing something very important: it is giving the mind the conditions it needs to think properly.
We have built a culture around leaders that treats unstructured time as suspicious. If you are not producing, you are wasting. If there is a gap in the calendar, fill it. If you are walking, you should be on a call. We have turned even rest into a performance. Active recovery. Optimised sleep. The human inability to simply exist without engineering it into an output is genuinely extraordinary when you look at it directly.
And yet the best thinking almost never happens in the meetings. It happens in between things. On the drive home. In the queue for coffee. Walking the dog without a podcast in your ears. These are the moments when the mind is not being pushed, not being directed, not being asked to perform. And in that looseness, something arrives. A clarity about a decision you have been grinding on for weeks. A sudden ease about a conversation you have been dreading. Not because you thought harder, but because you stopped thinking so deliberately.
This is not a romantic idea about nature or mindfulness. It is about understanding how the mind actually works. You are not a machine that produces better outputs when you run it harder. You are a system that has its own intelligence, and that intelligence requires breathing room. When you fill every moment with input, analysis, and direction, you are not being more productive. You are crowding out the very thing that makes your leadership valuable: genuine insight.
I had a client, a founder who had built a significant company from nothing. Could not stop working. Was burning through evenings, weekends, all of it. Not because there was truly that much to do, but because stopping felt dangerous. As if the moment he paused, something would slip. When we looked at it together, he could see it: the busyness had become a habit, a way of managing anxiety, not a genuine requirement of the business. The business was fine. His mind was exhausted.
We talked about stravaiging. Not as homework or a wellbeing exercise. Just as an idea. What would it mean to go somewhere without needing to arrive? He went for a walk the following weekend with no phone. Did not know where he was going. Came back an hour later and said he had had more clarity about a particular strategic decision in that hour than in three months of meetings about it. The idea had just appeared. He had not summoned it. He had simply left a space where it could arrive.
You cannot force insight. You can only create the conditions where it is more likely to come. And the conditions for insight are not a packed schedule, another framework, or a harder thinking session. They are quiet, movement, and the willingness to be somewhere without needing it to produce anything.
Stravaiging is not inefficiency. It is the most intelligent thing a leader can do when they have genuinely run out of road with deliberate thought. The answer you are looking for will not arrive because you analysed it more. It will arrive because you finally gave it room.
When did you last go somewhere with no destination and no purpose, and trusted that your mind would use the space well? What might happen if you tried that this week?
If the idea of a quieter, less pressured way of leading appeals to you, let’s talk. You can book a free 30-minute conversation here: