“To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.”
– Charles Horton Cooley
It is a well-known psychological fact that changing the stimuli alters the thought patterns. It could be as simple as putting on hard rock to stimulate a more aggressive attitude in a team or as complex as an offsite planning meeting facilitated by external experts trying to change the energy with a Zen garden.
Distance provides perspective. Walking away from the office lets you look at the issues from a distance and see things you can’t when up to your eyeballs in paperwork. Removing deadlines and the quotidian pressures frees creativity to germinate new ideas that can pop up like flowers once the blanket of snow and the icy environment are removed.
Jimmy Buffett sang “changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes” and although you don’t necessarily need a beach and some Vitamin Sea, it can’t hurt to swing in a hammock and think, even if it is virtually.
Go away and you can see a new way.