Deep Time Walk
The group walks 4.6 km, where each metre stands for a million years of Earth's history. A facilitator or the app tells the story along the way: the planet forming, the first cells, mass extinctions, and humans arriving only in the last 20 centimetres. The walk ends with a conversation about what that scale means for the choices the group faces.
Use on a long-horizon strategy or sustainability offsite when the group keeps thinking in quarters and needs a felt sense of how recent and how fast our impact is.
Solves: Teams talk about 'the long term' while planning three years ahead, and climate facts stay numbers on a slide.
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Step 1: Choose a route of about 4.6 km, or a loop, and mark key moments in Earth's history along it (prep).
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Step 2: Brief the group: the scale, the pace, and that the walk is a story, not a lecture (5 min).
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Step 3: Walk, stopping at stations where the facilitator or app tells what happened at that point (2-3 hours).
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Step 4: Slow down for the last metres and measure out the span of human history with a tape or your fingers (10 min).
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Step 5: Sit together and ask: what does this change in how we see our work and our timelines? (20-30 min)
- Check the route for accessibility and toilets; a 4.6 km walk is easy for many but not for everyone.
- A shorter version scales the story down (for example 460 m), but the closing conversation still matters.
- Facilitator training is available through the Deep Time Walk community if you want to run it often.
- Deep Time Cards: 58 illustrated cards for running a short indoor version.