I'm Tim Woodring. I write and operate at the intersection of strategy, foresight, and the messy work of building things that last. My doctoral work at Colorado State University was advised by Tom Chermack, who runs the Organizational Learning, Performance and Change PhD program and is the most direct living academic descendant of Pierre Wack's scenario planning lineage at Royal Dutch Shell.
Most strategy authors are pure academics, pure consultants, or pure operators. I've tried to occupy a fourth lane — what I think of as the scholar-builder position. Academic credentialing on the work, but the work itself is grounded in the operating businesses I actually run. Real estate development. Property management. A landscaping company. A short-term rental brand. A creative services firm where I'm Chief Solutions Officer. Each of those businesses is a laboratory for the writing. The strategy in my books is the strategy I operate by.
I'm writing two books. Predictive Planning defines an AI-native discipline for executive foresight — the next generation of the Wack-Schwartz-Chermack tradition. Unto is a quieter book about meaning and stewardship, built around the philosophical weight of one preposition. The Predictive Planning Institute is the publishing and certification arm of the first book's discipline, with classmates from my PhD program serving as fellows.
I'm married to Olivia. I'm a Christian, which informs my view of purpose without being the topic of most of what I write. I live in Denver. The work is for my family, my collaborators, and the leadership teams who have to make consequential decisions inside of organizations that have outgrown the planning systems they were given.
