Walk to Work: Practicing Reality in an Age of Shortcuts  

What does it mean to think for yourself in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms, automation, and curated information? In this reflection, Julie Kurd, Lecturer of Marketing considers how small acts of observation – from a daily walk to work to conversations with students and customers, can strengthen our ability to think critically. Through the lens of Werner Herzog’s ideas about truth and reality, she explores why first-hand experience remains one of the most valuable tools for learning, leadership, and decision-making.  

How will you restore reality in a world we know to be deeply fake? For me, the answer begins with a daily walk to work. I walk the three miles from Harvard Square to BU Questrom. I witness the oars dip then hang in the air. I see joggers, bicyclers, commuters, and Canada geese with their goslings. I’m thinking a lot about Werner Herzog’s definitions of truths, half-truths and truth and a halfs¹. Herzog reflects on how we maintain our sense of orientation in a world built on shortcuts. He ponders our world of deep fakes. He says that wild claims spread 3x faster than true claims.  During these walks, I’ve come to think of critical thinking as a kind of “couch to 5k.” We move, in varying stages of commitment, away from the comfort of the couch and toward the discipline of the run. Once at speed, we focus on improving our 5k time. Then, a setback occurs and we’re back on the couch. Then we build again. Do we restore reality by making small ‘this, not that’ choices every day to improve our information sources, structure our thinking, understand the counter-argument and continue to learn? 

Why take the slower way? 

Who has time to go for a 55 minute walk every day. As I write it, it sounds like a ridiculous waste of time, even to me. The half-truth of it: I can cite the functional health benefits of a daily walk. Or rationally tell you the subway is typically just a dozen minutes less time and I don’t need 12 minutes. Or maybe I’m lying to myself and amonly walking for the social clout… some form of humble brag. If I’m managing my image by walking, according to Herzog, then maybe I’ve arrived somewhere I did not intend nor did I plan.² As a critical thinker, I must evaluate all possible motivations for my walk. And if I continue to revise my understanding of my walk, it’s because I’m trying to understand where my own truth resides. In critical thinking, we know that above average superforecasters update their forecasts more frequently because they have the courage to say, “I was wrong and I changed my mind.” As a leader in business, I used to ask “what if we’re wrong” which led to scenario planning and continuously seeking other points of view. In critical thinking, maybe inquiry and collaboration matters more than our reputations for already knowing. 

My own contradictions show up in small ways. I choose stickers for my silicone laptop cover, mainly because I am as much a shallow thinker as I am a deeper thinker. My laptop stickers include one that says: “Be bold. Be bright. Be You.” But maybe this victory of finding the answer or getting the grade isn’t the hard part. Maybe the hard part is continuing to chip away at problems for a very long time.  

Although I read every single day, I also override my own 30-minute time warnings on my social. As Kahneman describes, we may reward students for their gut or System 1³ thinking. We may reward them for building a coherent narrative from solid use of AI and drawing from sources that are immediately available. The data we trust has been shaped and edited to persuade us of a point of view. We all take shortcuts not because we are lazy, but because rigorous inquiry can feel like an admission that we don’t already know enough – that we don’t belong.  In case competitions and in some of the course work, students collect their own primary research through observation, interviews, and surveys. It’s remarkable.  

The “truth and a half” is this: the most expensive mistake in business-and often in life-is solving the wrong problem with complete confidence. As we learn from Garrette, Phelps & Sibony, we need to separate the problem definition from the solution⁴. If we rush to an answer, we skip the slower, harder work of asking what is actually broken. This is a scary place to be….this not knowing. Herzog describes Michelangelo’s pieta in St. Peters Cathedral and he’s right…it’s a truth and a half. Michelangelo carved a 15-year-old Mary holding a 32-year-old Christ. Ponder that. Michelangelo didn’t mean to deceive, but this isn’t the pure truth. Maybe, as Jane McGonigal wrote in her book by the same name, “Reality is Broken” and that we should gamify life⁵. McGonigal argues that we should gamify reality to make it more engaging. I was 100% on board with her perspective for years, up until I pondered Herzog. What if the problem isn’t that reality is boring? What if the problem is that we are not exercising our minds enough to choose original material? 

There is no starting line to this couch to 5k. There is no right way. There is only the next small decision, made a little more consciously than the last. You are not behind. You are exactly where you are meant to be and where practice begins. 

• Read: Herzog says it like this: “Read, read, read, read, read.” I agree. I’m not a purist about where you start, but visualize the couch and the 5k as the everyday choice you make. Read 15 more minutes each day and swap 5 minutes of scrolling social to scroll the Financial Times or WSJ. Minor changes accumulate. 

• Listen: Before you use all of the short-cuts to make your next clever recommendation, spend extra time trying to make the strongest possible claim against your own position. Listen to other voices. How? Search for counter-evidence and think about that point of view. Does it enrich your understanding? Will it bring you someplace more nuanced and authentic? If you can create a counter-argument, then you can more deeply understand the questions.  

• Discover: Walk to work. Observe, talk to and listen to the customer. Ask the question that sounds naïve. First principles inquiry means making direct contact with the thing itself and not just the report about the thing. We often don’t make the time to see something with our own eyes. We cut corners. We lose touch. The real world is more surprising than any report about it. 

Herzog walked into the Amazon. I walk into a classroom. Neither journey comes with certainty. Perhaps that willingness to encounter the world as it is, not as we assume it to be, is exactly the point.