Many pathsPlain wordsThe Gretyl Paths are all of Gretyl’s offers and products. lead through the forest.
Some lead a little way to you.

Team and organisational development

Teams don’t develop in the conference room alone. Many proven formats gain a new quality outdoors.

• Design Thinking Understand the problem → gather perspectives → ideas → prototype → feedback Observation tasks, user perspectives while walking, idea stations, testing prototypes along the way.
• Agile methods / Scrum Sprint Planning · Daily as walk & talk · Sprint Review · Retrospective The retrospective as a path with stations: “What went well?” – “What slowed us down?” – “What will we change?” – and then on together to the next iteration.
• Liberating Structures 1-2-4-All · TRIZ · Impromptu Networking · Troika Consulting · What I Need From You Many of these formats work wonderfully while walking, at waypoints or in changing small groups.
• World Café / Open Space / BarCamp elements Several topic spots in the forest – the groups move between the stations.
• Team Canvas / Team Charter The team walks through questions together: What connects us? What do we need? What do we want to achieve?
• Stakeholder Mapping / System Mapping People, systems or influencing factors are positioned in space – the landscape becomes the visualisation.

Project work

Projects are paths: you set off, reach forks in the road, sometimes lose your way – and at best, arrive together.

Project kick-off

Questions along the way:

• Where do we want to go?
• Why are we setting off at all?
• What should be different at the end?
• What could hold us up?
• What do we need along the way?
• Do I trust my fellow travellers?

• Project review The team looks back: what have we actually achieved? Outdoors, the project’s path so far can even be laid out in space.
• Project post-mortem Not just “What went wrong?”, but: “Where on our path did we take the wrong turning?” This leads to a retrospective, timeline and lessons learned.
• Pre-mortem We imagine the project has failed. Why? Each person first walks a stretch of path alone and collects possible stumbling stones – an established decision-making method, right in the middle of the Gretyl world.

IT architecture

A field of methods in its own right – and a speciality of Gretyl: experience from IT and architecture meets the path.

• Architecture Kick-off
• Architecture Vision
• Architecture Decision Records (ADR)
• Architecture Review
• Solution Design
• Threat Modeling
• Domain / Context Mapping
• Event Storming
• Impact Mapping
• Architecture Trade-off Analysis
• Technical Debt Review
• Post-Implementation Review

What happens if we do this not at the whiteboard, but in the forest?

When in doubt, this produces an IT architecture based on consensus and the good ideas of everyone involved.

(And isn’t that the better option compared with the traditional approach, where whoever shouts loudest wins?)

Creativity & problem solving

An area of its own alongside design thinking – because there isn’t always time for a dedicated design thinking project.

(And interwoven approaches beat isolated ivory towers. These methods help with that – without starting from zero.)

• Brainstorming
• Brainwriting
• SCAMPER
• Six Thinking Hats
• Mind Mapping
• Crazy 8s
• Morphological box
• Analogies / change of perspective
• Worst Idea
• Reverse Brainstorming
• “How might we …?”
• Five Whys
• First Principles Thinking

Decisions

Decisions are ideally suited to spatial methods.

• Decision Matrix
• Weighted Scoring
• SWOT
• Cost-Benefit
• Impact / Effort Matrix
• Eisenhower Matrix
• RICE
• MoSCoW
• Dot Voting
• Consent instead of consensus
• Pre-Mortem
• Six Thinking Hats
• Second-Order Thinking
• Reversibility / Two-Way Door
• 10/10/10 method
• “What would you advise your best friend?”

Meetings & collaboration

Not every meeting has to go into the forest. But every meeting can learn from what works outdoors.

• Walking Meeting
• Stand-up
• Check-in / Check-out
• 1-2-4-All
• Silent Start
• Think-Pair-Share
• Timeboxing
• Parking Lot
• Fist-to-Five
• Dot Voting
• Temperature Check
• Lightning Decision Jam
• Consent Decision
• Meeting Retro
• Kill the Meeting – do we even need this meeting?

Plus small nudges that work straight away:

• Stand instead of sit. (Astonishingly intuitive on a tour through the forest.)
• Think for two minutes first, then speak.
• Individual opinions first, then group discussion.
• No presentation without a concrete question. (That’s easier to live by outdoors too.)
• Every discussion ends with a decision or a next step.

Small methods. Big impact.

Personal reflection & development

An area of its own – deliberately not lumped together with the business methods. This is about paths that lead to yourself.

Self-reflection

• The Work (Byron Katie)
• Beliefs according to Robert Betz – pragmatically
• Journaling
• Values work
• Wheel of Life
• Ikigai
• Lifelines
• Change of perspective
• Gratitude
• Future Self
• Best Possible Self
• WOOP
• Implementation Intentions
• Personal stock-taking

About Robert Betz: we deliberately take only the pragmatic part – recognising and questioning your own beliefs, perceiving feelings instead of pushing them away, taking responsibility for your own attitude. Anything that goes beyond that into the spiritual, we leave behind on the path. Faith is a personal matter for each individual – we don’t proselytise.

Impulses from ACT

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers food for thought that fits a path astonishingly well:

• Values
• Acceptance
• Defusion – distance from your own thoughts
• Self as context
• Committed action

GROW – a coaching classic, made for a walk

Important: Gretyl doesn’t turn this into therapy. A path can do you good – but it is no substitute for medical or psychotherapeutic support.

Reflection, learning & transfer

A workshop isn’t over when you’re back at the car park. What matters is what arrives in everyday life.

• After Action Review
• Lessons Learned
• Retrospective
• Reflection-in-Action
• Reflection-on-Action
• Transfer questions
• Journaling
• Peer Coaching
• Learning Review
• Personal Action Plan
• Commitment
• “One thing I will do differently”

The Gretyl chain

For example:

Gretyl’s way: methods with both feet on the ground

None of these methods is new. What’s new is how we use them: not as a compulsory programme in the conference room, but as a tool on the path.

• Chosen to fit: every path comes with the methods that suit the occasion, the group and the terrain.
• Deliberately rebuilt: what works at the flipchart is adapted for outdoors – stations instead of slides, waypoints instead of sticky notes.
• As provisions or as a companion: Gretyl gives you methods and questions to take with you in advance – or walks alongside you.
• Captured: insights become artefacts – card, note, audio, document – so that they outlast the path.

Whether privately on your own or as a team trying to rescue a project: the method follows the path – not the other way round.

The star on Gretyl’s paths is never the path, never the method and never the coach. It’s always you – and in a team, it’s all of you.

Self-efficacy: what remains

That’s exactly what it’s about for us: self-efficacy – the belief that you can make a difference through your own efforts. The psychologist Albert Bandura showed that it grows most strongly through your own experiences of success. Not by listening, but by doing.

A path makes this experience tangible: you managed the climb yourself. You made the decision at the crossroads yourself. The insight along the way is your own. That’s why we don’t hand out ready-made answers, but methods and questions that help you reach the goal yourself – or as a team.

And you take this feeling with you: back to your team, your project, your life.

Working professionally. Outdoors. With both feet on the forest floor.

Facilitator – process guide

A facilitator doesn’t primarily deliver the solution, but designs a process in which a group arrives at insights and decisions itself.

Typical tasks

• Structuring the process
• Asking questions
• Making perspectives visible
• Enabling discussions
• Preparing decisions
• Observing group dynamics
• Securing results

Designer of the path

Workshop designers or learning experience designers don’t necessarily run the workshop themselves – they design the experience.

Decisions include:

• Where does the path begin?
• Where is there a task?
• Where is a break needed?
• When do participants work alone?
• When in pairs?
• When as a group?
• Where is a decision made?
• Where is there reflection?
• What happens at the end?

This corresponds to concepts from learning experience design (LXD) and experiential learning. At Gretyl, this means: the companion builds a learning and experience path.

Coach

A coach tends to work with individuals or small groups – and doesn’t say what’s right, but helps you through questions to recognise for yourself what’s right for you.

Typical foundations

• GROW
• Solution-focused coaching
• Systemic coaching
• Motivational interviewing

Sparring partner

Less a formal method – but a role that makes the difference. A sparring partner brings their own experience and expertise.

This means Gretyl offers two kinds of guidance:

• Facilitation: we help you arrive at a solution yourselves.
• Sparring: we bring in our experience and think it through with you.

Subject matter expert

One step further into the subject: this is where expertise and method come together.

• IT architecture
• Agile coaching
• Organisational development
• Project management
• UX design
• Leadership development

Over more than 25 years of business IT, Gretyl has passed through many stations across industries. That’s why we speak a little of the vocabulary of the various sectors. But that doesn’t make us experts on any topic you like: with us, you won’t debate paragraph 17 of Six Sigma – but how you use Six Sigma to really improve the quality of your products.

Process consultant

Process consulting works on the process – not necessarily on the subject-matter content.

The typical sequence

Moderation & mediation

Two different roles that should be deliberately kept apart. Both are an important basis on almost all Gretyl paths.

There is a strong methodological basis for this:

• Mediation
• Harvard negotiation method
• Nonviolent communication
• Systemic conflict work

Important: conflict conversations as an accompanied walk can be a valuable option. We only offer them with suitably experienced people.

Path guide

A role all of Gretyl’s own: the guide isn’t necessarily an expert on the topic. The guide knows the path.

The guide takes care of:

• Orientation
• Safety
• Rhythm
• Transitions
• Suitable places
• Attention

The guide doesn’t lead you through content. The guide leads you through a process.

Challenger

An outside person can deliberately take on the role of the disruptor – not destructively, but constructively.

• “What if the exact opposite were true?”
• “Which assumption are we taking for granted right now?”
• “What would we decide if we were starting from zero today?”

Methodological relatives:

• Devil's Advocate
• Red Team
• Six Thinking Hats
• Pre-Mortem
• Critical Friend

Observer

An underrated role: the companion doesn’t intervene at first – they observe.

• Who speaks?
• Who stays silent?
• Who decides?
• Where do conflicts arise?
• When does the energy change?
• Which patterns repeat themselves?

Then comes feedback. For teams, this can be enormously valuable.

Found, for example, in:

• Team coaching
• Organisational development
• Action learning
• Supervision

Action learning facilitator

In action learning, a group works on a real problem – and at the same time learns about its own thinking and acting.

The companion helps above all through questions. That fits a Gretyl path almost perfectly:

That is exactly what sets Gretyl apart from a seminar in which a fictitious case study is worked through.

How much guidance does a path need?

We don’t offer these roles as twelve different products. They form a spectrum – from the entirely self-guided path to intensive personal guidance.

1. SelfThe path is prepared. You walk it yourselves.Designer of the path
2. GuidedQuestions, tasks and stations guide you through the process.Path guide
3. FacilitatedA Gretyl facilitator walks with you – observes, asks and steps in where needed.Facilitator · coach
4. SparringA subject or method specialist walks with you. Expertise flows in as well.Sparring · expertise
5. ConsultingA process is changed together. Gretyl works with you on a concrete problem – analyses, designs and accompanies the change.Process consulting · organisational development

Whether a mini walk or a giant workshop, whether out on your own or in a large team: guidance is always needed. Sometimes subtly, from the outside – and sometimes very directly, with Gretyl walking ahead of you, beside you or driving you on from behind.

Professionally, this is based on:

• Facilitation
• Experiential learning
• Action learning
• Coaching
• Learning experience design
• Organisational development
• Consulting

Gretyl designs paths for change – with as much guidance as the path needs.

Movement & creativity

Walking can particularly foster divergent thinking – that is, help new ideas, perspectives and approaches to solutions emerge.

The famous study by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz (Stanford, 2014) is titled “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking”. Four experiments showed that walking markedly increases divergent creativity – that is, generating many different ideas. The effect occurred both while walking and for a short time afterwards.

The key findings:

• Walking leads to more new ideas.
• The effect is not simply “exercise keeps you fit”.
• Walking on a treadmill showed the effect too.
• The creative boost partly continued after walking.
• For convergent thinking – finding the one right answer – the benefit was considerably smaller or absent altogether.

This suggests a neat methodological distinction:

Applied consistently and lived out, this insight can be found in Oppezzo’s TEDx talk “Want to be more creative? Go for a walk”.

Anyone who has watched it and still stays seated has only themselves to blame.

Embodied cognition

Thinking doesn’t take place exclusively in the head. Body, movement and perception are involved in cognitive processes.

The idea of embodied cognition assumes – put simply – that thinking doesn’t take place exclusively “in the head”. Body, movement, perception and surroundings are involved in cognitive processes.

For a Gretyl workshop, this means: a problem isn’t just discussed, it is experienced differently while walking. For example:

This is not an esoteric method. It is a physical, spatial intervention that connects an abstract question with perception and action.

To be honest: research on embodied cognition is extensive. But some popular claims – such as that a particular posture automatically produces a particular mental state – are far less solidly supported than, for example, the creativity effect of walking.

Nature & attention

Natural environments can support the recovery of directed attention and have a positive effect on certain cognitive functions.

Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory (ART) states – put simply – that natural environments can support the recovery of directed attention.

A systematic review evaluated 31 studies on this. It found some support for the theory, especially for certain measures of attention. At the same time, the authors explicitly point out small samples and inconsistent results.

Even more interesting is a recent meta-analysis from 2025 with 80 studies and 273 individual outcome measures: compared with non-natural comparison environments, time in nature showed small overall benefits for cognitive recovery. Reliable effects were found above all for working memory and attentional control.

Movement & mental well-being

Physical activity is associated with positive effects on mood, stress and mental well-being.

There are now systematic reviews of nature-based walking interventions and of physical activity in natural versus urban environments.

A systematic review of nature-based walking interventions reports positive effects on various aspects of mental health. But it also points to varying study quality and very different interventions. A meta-analysis of experimental studies on exercise in natural versus urban environments likewise finds indications of psychological benefits of exercising in nature.

This results in a triangle – and Gretyl offers all three sides of it:

It is exactly this combination that forms a sound methodological foundation.

Movement & cognitive performance

Regular physical activity can have a positive effect on general cognition, memory and executive functions.

Movement affects not only the body, but also cognitive processes. Research shows positive associations particularly with attention, memory and executive functions – the very abilities we need to process information, change perspectives, solve problems and steer our thinking.

What’s particularly interesting for workshops: movement can create a different cognitive state from prolonged sitting and focused work. It can therefore be a useful complement to phases of listening, reflecting and deciding together.

Nature + movement

Combining walking and nature shows positive effects on mood, well-being, stress, anxiety and rumination; compared with urban walking, there are indications of additional benefits.

Movement and nature don’t act independently of each other. Research suggests that physical activity in natural environments can have additional positive effects on mood, stress, well-being and mental recovery. Especially when walking, the natural environment can be more than a backdrop: it offers changing stimuli, room for perception and distance from the usual working environment.

For workshops, this creates a special learning space: the body is moving, the mind gains distance and the surroundings become part of the experience. Early research on nature-based walking interventions shows positive effects here, although the evidence is still heterogeneous.

Walking & social interaction

Conversations on the move change the setting of a conversation and can offer an alternative to the classic sitting, face-to-face situation. However, the evidence for concrete conversational benefits is still considerably weaker than that for creativity or cognition.

A conversation while walking is fundamentally different from a conversation at a table. You don’t sit facing each other the whole time, but move side by side through the same surroundings. The shared path and the changing surroundings create a different social setting from a classic meeting.

Initial studies of so-called walking meetings show positive indications for well-being, engagement and certain aspects of collaboration. The stronger claim that walking generally leads to better or deeper conversations, on the other hand, is not yet sufficiently supported.

For workshops, what’s most interesting is therefore the change of perspective in the social setting: less conference room, more shared path.

Entirely unscientifically: after many a meeting that got out of hand, what the participants are mostly left with is a headache and back pain. Even if no goal is reached on a Gretyl path for once – everyone who walked it keeps the memory of the shared path.

Our conclusion: movement as a learning space

Gretyl combines these findings into its own workshop approach: movement becomes a learning space.

From these findings, Gretyl has developed its own approach: we don’t simply move the workshop outdoors. We make the path itself part of the workshop.

Gretyl creates a space for movement in which walking, nature, perception, conversation, challenge, silence and reflection are connected.

Each phase gets its own space:

• Walking can set thoughts in motion.
• A path can change perspectives.
• A crossroads can make a decision tangible.
• A pause creates distance.
• A stretch of path walked together can let conversations arise differently.

In this way, movement doesn’t interrupt learning – it becomes the medium of learning.

Gretyl creates spaces in which people don’t just talk about change – but set off.